CONFRONTING CONSUMERISM

In: Modern intellectual history: MIH, Band 3, Heft 1, S. 193-205

Abstract

Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 2003)Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004)To recapture the ideal vision that many late nineteenth-century American thinkers held for their society one can do no better than Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward, 1887–2000 (1888). In it Bellamy transports his young protagonist, Julian West, from the Boston of his day to a far more appealing version of the same city imagined as it was about to enter the twenty-first century. Julian finds a consumers' paradise, where each citizen receives a credit card to use in selecting from a virtually limitless variety of goods available for sale at local distribution centers. With everyone receiving a per capita share of the burgeoning national output, the entire society has now become securely middle class. Indeed, there is so much wealth that citizens are actively encouraged to spend rather than save. "The nation is rich," we are told, "and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing." Labor unions, strikes, and class conflict have all become a distant memory. Along with the working class, the unsightly factories that once dominated so much of the urban landscape have essentially vanished. A cornucopia of goods miraculously appears, with the apparatus required for manufacturing them entirely out of sight. Given this happy state of affairs, all citizens exhibit a strong degree of patriotism. Dissent and disloyalty have become unknown, since there is no longer any need for them.