Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen (review)

Luxurious Citizens ends with a brief discussion of the 2008 financial collapse, when the US "media and government were quick to scrutinize the actions" of consumers to assign blame for the nation's economic crisis (227). Identifying an important alternative to this discourse of the dangers of consumption, the book explores how consumer acts were first invested with civic value in US political discourses, tracing how "indulging in the world of goods" came to be imagined as "a positive civic good" (3). Whereas Revolutionary-era consumer boycotts emphasized "the importance of putting the needs of the nation ahead of personal consumer inclination" (3), in the period between the birth of the United States in 1783 and the end of the Civil War, consumer freedom of choice became recognized as an inalienable right. By 1865, the "liberty to consume" cheap and desirable goods was reimagined as the basis of American democracy (2).

Focused on the nineteenth century, Luxurious Citizens fills a gap in existing historical scholarship, bridging the eras addressed in two major works, Timothy Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (2004) and Lizbeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic (2003). Indeed, the book centers on the figure Lizbeth Cohen calls the "citizen consumer," a term that itself intervenes in the liberal opposition between "private" marketplace and "public," civic action. But whereas A Consumer's Republic examines explicit and often racist public policies though which consumption was politicized during the Progressive and New Deal eras—policies, for example, that promoted the postwar housing boom and filled those houses with consumer goods—and tracks how the state expressly endorsed consumption as engine of economic growth, Luxurious Citizens offers a more generalized account of the legitimation of consumption in US political discourse. Specifically, the book traces the rise of the "certainty that liberty to consume has defined the meaning of American democracy and fueled the success of the modern American nation" (3).

Luxurious Citizens draws on a diverse array of sources (e.g., political tracts, newspaper and journal articles, business records and advertisements, consumers' letters and diaries) to present a textured account of the political meanings invested in consumption. Chapter 1 addresses ambivalence about consumption in the immediate wake of the Revolution. While Ben Franklin worried in his letters about Americans' taste for British "Luxuries and Trifles" that might jeopardize American independence by increasing the fledgling nation's debt to its political enemies, others followed Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in understanding consumer demand as an engine for economic growth. The latter view was embedded in the Constitution: ratification of Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution enabled the federal government to impose taxes, duties, and tariffs nationwide, creating a mechanism for collecting consumer-generated revenues and implicitly acknowledging the positive role consumption could have for the nation's economy. Cohen observes that in the Federalist era, "two modes of patriotic consumption" emerged. For some (especially wealthy male consumers), "buying imported goods in a responsible way could be construed as a virtuous act" (44). For "those who were poor or dependent, elites prescribed a course of restraint and retrenchment," a prescription that would "prove hugely unpopular" and was belied by the fourfold increase in imports for consumption between 1790 and 1807 (44, 50).

Chapter 2 addresses efforts under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to curtail US consumption of European goods in order to protect the nation's economy, leading to passage of a series of nonimportation bills between 1806 and the end of the War of 1812 that aimed to prevent foreign goods from entering the United States. Cohen makes clear that the Republicans' revival of Revolutionary strategies of consumer restraint were destined to fail, not only because European goods continued to reach American shores (partly through rampant smuggling) but because consumption had been woven into Americans' economic expectations. While during the Revolution consumers of tea and British luxuries would be castigated as Loyalists, in this later era, consumers...