Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (review)

Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire is a bravura performance. Based on prodigious research in archival and published sources on both sides of the Atlantic, the book is beautifully written, with epic sweep and the eye of a novelist—or perhaps better a filmmaker—for the significant detail that simultaneously limns a character and advances the story line. Fascinating empirical discoveries await the reader in every chapter, from Thomas Mann as a Rotarian at the beginning to the Eurocommunist origins of the Slow Food movement at the end. But Irresistible Empire is no mere cabinet of archival curiosities or album of microhistorical vignettes. Animated by a bold thesis about the triumph of American mass consumer culture, with its stratified, status-conscious worlds of goods, over European bourgeois civilization, this book offers nothing less than a grand macro-synthesis of twentieth-century Western history, integrating cultural, economic, and diplomatic themes on a transatlantic scale.

In light of this abundance of riches, it may seem churlish to probe beneath the shimmering surface of de Grazia’s book by raising questions of evidence and interpretation, the scholarly equivalent (to shift metaphors) of looking a gift horse in the mouth. With this particular horse, however, we do need to examine it carefully before jumping in the saddle and riding it away. Here we can focus first on problems of method and then on problems of message, though the two are clearly closely intertwined.

A first major methodological problem, which will be obvious to any attentive reader, is that the vast body of empirical material in Irresistible Empire is marshaled to illustrate rather than demonstrate the validity of its overarching thesis. This is partly because of the book’s kaleidoscopic shifts in geographical and thematic focus, together with its declared Foucauldian strategy of cutting across societies on a series of diagonals. But it also reflects de Grazia’s strategy of constructing her narrative argument through the artful juxtaposition of historical voices, whose selection and representativeness are never explicitly discussed or defended. The book features hundreds of talking heads, but readers are apt to suspect that behind them stands a single ventriloquist, whose voice can be periodically detected in tell-tale adverbial cues such as “presciently.” Even in the case of Edward A. Filene, the closest the book comes to a central protagonist, we cannot readily tell how much weight to attach to his views. De Grazia herself notes that the reason Filene was able to spend so much time proselytizing Europeans about the benefits of mass distribution and standardized retailing was that he had been forced out of active management of the family department store business by his partners (including his own brother).

A second and closely related problem is the nature of the author’s sources, which, as in much cultural and consumption history, are overwhelmingly drawn from prescriptive, hortatory, publicity, and predictive discourses and images. Such sources inevitably reveal more about the aims and assumptions of the author than about their reception by and influence on the audience. This problem is exacerbated by the book’s inverted chronological focus that devotes more than two-thirds of the space to the years before 1945, while nonetheless arguing that the crucial period of American material influence on European consumption patterns came after World War II.

Perhaps the deepest methodological problem with the book is the sheer capaciousness of its thesis. In almost Freudian fashion, rejection and resistance, as well as creative adaptation and selective modification to suit local circumstances, are all treated as confirmatory signs of the emerging hegemony of the U.S. mass consumption model. This leads us to wonder what kind of evidence, if any, could count as a disconfirmation of the book’s thesis, especially because de Grazia rarely engages directly with alternative interpretations of her material.

These methodological objections augment a set of substantive reservations about the book’s message. Is it really helpful to...