Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (review)

Leora Auschlander believes that "history can be made by objects, rituals, and practices" and "changes in culture … can be a motor of change." (13) Cultural Revolutions exploits these important insights, which Aulsander has developed in her previous work on early modern France, in a comparison of the English Revolution in the 1640s and 1650s, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution.

In each case, Auslander asserts, "the accessibility of consumer good, and the increasingly sophisticated advertising used to sell them, provided a new way of thinking about the place of objects in the construction of social meaning." (5) The all-too-brief sections in which she uses concrete examples to illustrate shifts in individual, social, and national identity are excellent. The study of the quotidian reveals suggestive parallels in early modern revolutions, particularly the powerful role of material culture in the disintegration of monarchical legitimacy. Consumer choice was a political act. Puritans in the 1640s wore clothes whose aesthetic of straight lines and simplicity amounted to a striking rebuke to the artificiality of the Stuart courts. Something similar occurred in North America in the 1760s and 1770s with the widespread embrace of homespun.

In England, America, and France, the logic of consumer choice was pivotal in the triumph of republics. Ironically, it also created the "fundamental conundrum" of "the modern nation-state:" a reliance on "affective bonds that are most effectively made through culture" focused attention on who was and who was not a citizen and forced white males (or their descendants) to expand their political community in ways they had never imagined. (148) At the intersection of political revolution and cups and saucers lay questions about the public and the private, coercion and consent, and women and men.

Unfortunately, Auslander's fascinating ideas are embedded in an awkward book. Her comparative framework—an introduction and conclusion with an essay on each revolution—is at cross-purposes with her argument. Much of this relatively short volume is necessarily devoted to establishing what happened, to generalizing broadly and then qualifying those generalizations. (The fact that an abundance of secondary sources forms the foundation of Cultural Revolutions calls into question Auslander's claim that "the concept of 'cultural revolution' itself—which implies a complex relation between such political transformations, culture, and emotions—has attracted little attention." (1))

While I recognize the advantages of a comparative approach, I am skeptical of political revolutions as an organizing principle. Why not make an argument about the meanings of material culture in the North Atlantic World from the middle of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries in which political events are consciously subordinated to social and cultural change? Auslander's wonderful questions and innovative method seem to demand that we rethink not only our sources but our categories of historical analysis, including the extent to which constructing books about around traditional political revolutions inhibits our ability to see trans-national patterns within a global narrative.