Consumer Citizenship in the Interwar Era: Gender, Race, and the State in Global-Historical Perspective

On a recent broadcast of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that things were much better in Iraq than most Americans believe. According to Brooks, servicemen and women on the ground offer a view that contradicts the pessimistic reports of the major news media. "They see the stores," Brooks claimed, "they see the shopping" that testified to the success of U.S. policy. The viability of such propositions in contemporary Iraq is debatable. More important for the purposes of this article, however, is Brooks's equation of shopping and stability and all it implies—normality, progress, and modernity. This commonsense assumption speaks to the larger concerns that animate contemporary studies of consumer society. How did it happen that the "right" to consume became the hallmark of a stable, modern state—an entitlement demanded by citizens and guaranteed by governments? How can we explain the great appeal and spread of ideas about consumer citizenship across the globe? Why, in historian Gary Cross's oft-quoted statement, was "consumerism … the 'ism' that won," beating alternative visions of political economy, national community, and active citizenship?¹ The importance of these questions is made crystal clear by the vast disparities in wealth and income generated by what I will call the neoliberal model of consumption, typified by the exchange of political rights for consumer entitlements and the relentless commercialization of central aspects of society, including the household economy, health care systems, education, public space and culture, politics, and international relations.² Bluntly put, neoliberal commodification creates pleasures but also poverty, and, as ever, social inequality is raced and gendered, with women and people of color inexorably "winning" the race to the bottom.

It should come as no surprise that most Americans assume that the right to consume is the basis of a liberal, democratic society, that despite some inequities this is the social system that delivers the most happiness to the most people, or that "Western," neoliberal consumer culture spreads democracy wherever it goes. Such ideas have circulated through Western and, particularly, U.S. philosophies of liberalism since the Atlantic revolutions. Sociologist Don Slater, whose Consumer Culture and Modernity remains the best overview of the general theories of Western consumer culture, connects the notion of consumer sovereignty at the heart of the neoliberal model to Enlightenment values of individualism, rationality, and freedom. The classical liberal tradition was reworked by the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, who turned their backs on material asceticism and transformed ideologies of consumer sovereignty in ways that, as Slater puts it, "connected material gain, technical progress and individual freedom through the motivation of the pursuit of self-interest." The "right" to purchase goods according to choice in a "free market" became the sine qua non of the neoliberal option.³ Stereotyped ideas about race and gender were virtually hard-wired into this and other consumption models, as we will see below. But history itself seems to justify the neoliberal model. Familiar narratives conclude that the "right to choose," material abundance, and free markets paved the correct path to modernity. The...