CONSUMERISM

Gary Cross

Consumerism commonly refers to the unlimited and general desire for purchased goods and services that define self and social position in advanced market societies. Consumerism can also refer to a movement in the defense of the economic and personal needs of buyers of goods and services against dishonest, manipulative, or overly powerful manufacturing, retailing, and financial interests. This second meaning of the word emerged early in the twentieth century and was often associated with the cooperative movement that attempted in Europe to challenge the economic power of conservative retail chains and banks. This essay will concern itself with the first definition.

PRECURSORS OF MODERN CONSUMERISM

Europeans have tended to identify consumerism with the Americanization of European economies and culture (for example, the penetration of American soft drink and fast food companies since World War II). This perspective, however, tends to overlook the roots of consumerist attitudes in the longer history of European capitalism and culture. Some modern cultural critics influenced by Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research understand consumerism as a product of twentieth-century mass production capitalism. According to this theory, manufacturers and retailers with a surfeit of goods in inventory due to new mass production techniques created consumer demand for their wares by manipulating the masses through advertising and display. Insecurities, originating in feelings of cultural inferiority or the traumas of increasingly intense and meaningless work, made the working and lower middle classes especially susceptible to these merchandising appeals.

Increasingly, this view is challenged by historical analysis of earlier expressions of consumerism. While a tiny minority of the rich and powerful have pursued comforts and pleasures and hoarded luxury goods for millennia, the advent of consumerism required sustained and eventually widespread economic growth that occurred only in modern history. The aristocracy in Renaissance Italy and France congregated in the bustling life of urban centers such as Florence, Milan, Lyon, and Paris, where they abandoned warrior values. Following, for example, the dictates of Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), some cultivated reputation through the purchase and use of luxuries in the fine arts, dress, and household furnishings. Castiglione's model for "polite society" fit an age when the military prowess of the nobility was growing irrelevant with the development of modern military monarchies and the new gunpowder weapons of cannon and musket. Castiglione's Courtier taught aristocrats and aspiring bourgeois how dress and appearance could define and display individuality within socially acceptable norms. Moreover, close and frequent interaction in court and urban life led to imitation or emulation in the display of wealth and status.

Fashion in clothing and domestic furnishings played a key role. Whereas garment styles were relatively static in the Middle Ages and often marked the social function of the wearer, Renaissance fashion changed more quickly and gave vent to individual expression. Fashion stimulated the clothing industries in Italy and the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and later encouraged the fur trade in North America. While comfort, even in the dwellings of the aristocracy, was minimal and even discouraged by the ascetic tradition in the medieval Catholic Church, Renaissance upper-class home furnishings included such innovations as upholstered chairs, wallpaper, and carpets. Stimulating this new taste for innovative goods was the widening contact of Europeans with the luxuries and products of Asia and the Americas through exploration and trade. European collection of this exotica in "wonder cabinets" and reading about it in "wonder books" helped to create a taste for novelty.

In late-seventeenth-century Netherlands, wealth created by overseas trade, agricultural innovation, and a culture that favored self-restraint and investment led to an "embarrassment of riches" in the words of Simon Schama. Dutch burghers cultivated not only the arts (a form of elite consumerism) but also refined and fashionable domestic furnishings that displayed their social position and wealth. Another preindustrial center for nascent consumerism was in eighteenth-century London. The English capital was noted for its extraordinary size and wealth as a major center for trade and crafts. A "consumer revolution" in fashionable clothing and home furnishings preceded and paralleled the better-known industrial revolution in England. Indeed, demand for status goods stimulated industrialization at least as much as increased output encouraged new consumption.

A nascent consumerism resulted from the trickling down of a wide range of consumer goods and services from the aristocracy to the middle class. Some even touched the upper ranks of working people. Fashion and social emulation moved out of court society and into coffeehouses and pleasure gardens. There, money rather than birth gave the individual an opportunity to participate. Mass distribution of tea and fashionable crockery (through Wedgwood and others) redefined family life, and the cultivation of fashion in women's clothing created an identification of the feminine with the fashionable. Modern ideas about the desirability of the new and the attraction to the "star" performer, which many associate with modern mass marketing, were established in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commercial cities. Actors, lion tamers, and even healers became well known because they worked in a socially open market like London where information flowed freely. In this context, honor and fame could be obtained by the lowborn, earned by turning themselves into a commodity. The English pleasure gardens located in the London suburbs offered an aspiring middle class access (for a fee) to an experience similar to the private aristocratic gardens. In addition, aristocratic traditions of traveling to inland spas and seaside resorts trickled down to the middle, and eventually working, classes, beginning in the late eighteenth century. These watering places, like the pleasure gardens, offered those with the price of admission a packaged experience and an opportunity to interact with others, discover innovative fashions and products, and emulate trendsetters. Cost and rules of dress and decorum segregated the wealthy from plebeians, but many of the basic features of upper-class seaside resorts filtered down to the less respectable sea spots, like Blackpool, by 1860. A pattern was repeated: aristocratic pleasures and social practices formed a core of a broader consumer culture characterized by personal display and social emulation.

The British cultural historian Colin Campbell has argued that the social origins of consumerism in social imitation and emulation have been overstressed. He finds instead that new romantic attitudes emerged in the late eighteenth century that encouraged an imaginative anticipation of the pleasures and enhancements that new goods would bring the individual. When a new coat or hat, for example, did not produce the expected personal happiness, this disappointment did not temper desire, but only created the need for still more and different goods. For Campbell, a central factor in the development of consumerism is the transition from the desire for more necessities (food and drink, especially) and physical sensation (as in the gluttonous or avaricious sinner of medieval Europe) to the longing for emotional fulfillment in the symbolic meanings of goods.

Probably most important to the explanation of consumerism was simply increased wealth and its distribution. Constraint made sense in a time when the unlimited desire of the rich and powerful led to the exploitation of the many and the horrors of war and conquest. But even a partial and temporary liberation from the fears of food shortages and uncertain housing quickly removed this limit on desire, as can be seen in the often-noted attraction of the poor for luxury—be it in ostentatious clothing or in the form of the new consumer pleasures like tea or chocolate that the London poor adopted instead of more nutritious food or healthful lodgings.

The history of sumptuary laws is particularly revealing. Political and religious authorities found many of the nascent forms of consumerism a threat to social stability and traditional values. Indeed, sumptuary laws restricting luxurious spending peaked during upsurges in fashion in the sixteenth century, when, for example, Venetians and Genoans were prohibited from having extravagant weddings or ordering lavish clothing. The French were allowed only three courses at meals. These laws were intended to rein in desire and display among the rich. Other sumptuary laws were designed to dictate what each social class or occupational group could wear (for example, finding tailors who made lavish dresses for commoners or restricting the use of fur and velvet to the elite). Such laws were supposed to impede another purpose of consumerism—the use of goods to define the social position of their owners (in this case illegitimately, as when the commoner tried to "look" like the aristocracy). Inevitably, consumers circumvented these laws through such tactics as wearing outlawed fabrics in linings or embroidering plain cloth to make it look elegant. The decline of sumptuary laws in the eighteenth century coincided with the softening of religious scruples against luxury, a rejection of privilege (as in the abolition of these laws during the French Revolution), and more positive views of the impact of luxury and consumption upon economic growth.

CONSUMERISM AND ITS CRITIQUES, 1700–1850

The nascent consumerism that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the richest and socially most open corners of Europe produced a wide variety of responses. Bernard de Mandeville's notorious Fable of the Bees (1714) argued that pursuit of luxury was essential to the creation of wealth. Far from condemning materialist desire, Mandeville maintained that individuals should be encouraged to want things so as to create demand and thus expand the work of craftspeople and merchants. This frank embrace of the selfish pursuit of material goods was certainly consistent with an emerging doctrine of unimpeded markets and was, in more subdued terms, embraced by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The linkage between the demand for luxury and the expansion of markets, on the one hand, and the growth of capitalist production, on the other, was identified as the foundation of modern capitalism by the twentieth-century German historian Werner Sombart.

Yet Mandeville's ideas contradicted long-held concerns that stimulating desire undermined social stability, economic prudence, and traditional ascetic religious values. Eighteenth-century political economists Arthur Young and Restif de la Bretonne assumed that increased wealth reduced the motivation to work. In particular, when employers paid more than subsistence wages, working people would toil less. In their view, the desire for leisure was greater than the longing for more goods. Moreover, the stoic distinction between natural needs and unnatural wants remained powerful, especially because luxurious consumption seemed to undermine community and rational use of free time. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was only the best known of eighteenth-century thinkers fearful of releasing materialist desire. Misery and inequality, he claimed, came not from deprivation but from the need for things. His ideal republic was an alternative to the endless expansion of the market, offering a timeless community of self-sufficiency and self-imposed simplicity.

By the mid-nineteenth century, after the first wave of industrialization was well underway, a longer view of the problem of expanding needs and economic development was developed. John Stuart Mill anticipated a "stationary state," when economic growth and striving would culminate in a new leisure society. Then a learned class of educators could counteract the egoistic commercial spirit, and time could be devoted to noneconomic pursuits and social solidarity. Karl Marx, like Mill, rejected the utopian primitivism of Rousseau and dreamed of a society of abundance created by industrialization. The revolutionary movement that would end capitalism would also eliminate the profit-driven creation of false needs. It would guarantee instead a rational allocation of material goods for life and the social conditions for self-development. Marx shared with Mill's liberalism a dream of a society of limited and realizable material needs.

PRACTICE AND THEORY OF MASS CONSUMERISM, 1860–1930

The rise of consumerism was not a steady upward climb. Especially in the troubling years of the 1840s, food supplies failed to keep up with population increases, and wages lagged behind productivity in new industries, thus slowing the expansion of consumer demand. Especially during frequent economic crises, the standard of living of the European wage-earning and farming masses declined. However, from the 1860s, consumer desire became more a practical than a theoretical issue as rural incomes rose. Decreasing cost and increased variety of goods introduced a broader population to the attractions of spending. New venues of consumption emerged in shopping districts and department stores in major cities. These retail spaces created crowds and a new intensity of consumer emulation. Shops made goods more accessible by placing them on open shelves and displays (abandoning the need for an appointment to enter a shop or the requirement to seek a clerk's assistance to see and touch goods that formerly were kept out of sight). Department stores, like Bon Marché in Paris (opened in 1852), used visual appeals in display windows and especially luxurious presentations and store furnishings to create longings for new and exciting goods that approximated sexual desire, especially for women.

Like the department store, the great exhibitions also legitimized novelty and desire. London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 pulled together the world's luxuries and technological innovations in a magnificent, often theatrical display that drew millions in a kind of consumerist pilgrimage. The 1851 fair was followed by many others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Paris, Barcelona, and Brussels (as well as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco). New consumer products and brand names were introduced at these fairs, teaching the crowd to associate progress and the future with consumer goods like bicycles, cars, and domestic appliances.

As important were emerging entertainment centers in the form of music and dance halls. From the 1850s, music halls in the major cities of Europe sold drinks to large crowds while entertaining them with well-advertised singing and dancing acts. London music halls accommodated fifteen hundred customers, and chains of music halls signed popular troupes of can-can dancers, comedians, and singers to tour. In the 1870s the modern spectator sport emerged with the enclosed stadium and turnstile (1871) for paying customers. Although only 2,000 watched the English football (or soccer) Cup Finals in 1872, by 1885 the crowd reached 10,000; it increased to nearly 101,000 by 1901 and at least 200,000 at the Wembley Cup Final in 1923. Cheap excursion trains made seaside resorts accessible to wage earners by the 1860s, especially in England. More affluent holiday makers withdrew to exclusive resorts like Eastbourne or found refuge from "day trippers" in hotels distinctly separated from the crowd; still more wealthy English went to the pricier seaside towns on the French and Italian Riviera to join the continental elite.

Even if affluence replicated in consumption the class structure of Europe, it still created a dynamic mass entertainment audience. By the 1890s mechanized amusement parks and films captured the coins of the common crowds. Such parks appeared almost simultaneously in Copenhagen, Vienna, and Blackpool. Vastly easing the flow of the plebeian crowd was the introduction of the cheap electric streetcar in the 1890s. The tram freed working-class consumers from exclusive reliance on the neighborhood pub or ethnic fraternal society for leisure and opened their lives to the anonymous pleasures of mass entertainments.

In this context, the endless expansion of mass consumption had become problematic. Did growing affluence mean an endlessly widening desire? What would be the consequences of pleasure "trickling down" to the masses? Neoclassical economic (marginalist) theory was highly ambivalent about the idea of unlimited consumer desire. Developed in the 1870s by William Stanley Jevons of Britain and Léon Walras of France, marginalism shifted the focus of economics from production to consumption. It defined economic value as subjective utility with no necessary ceilings on the quantity of goods that could be desired by anyone. Still, utility shifted from basic biological needs to higher, less immediate ones when primary needs were satisfied. Jevons and others also retained the old idea that higher wages led to new desires not only for goods but also for freedom from work. Even John Maynard Keynes, the economist who taught the twentieth century to stimulate consumer demand in order to create economic growth, also reasserted Mill's vision when he predicted that affluence would bring the satisfaction of absolute needs and thus allow the full flowering of noneconomic interests and passions in leisure.

If late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century educated elites resisted the consumerist notion of limitless material desire, they also were reluctant to accept consumer goods as defining social relationships and personal aspirations. Conservatives were especially concerned about the impact of mass markets on high culture and social stability. Fears of the unrestrained mob had intensified after the French Revolution. Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd (1895) perpetuated these anxieties by insisting that the masses were suggestible and thus susceptible to the manipulation of would-be dictators. While Le Bon anticipated fascism, he also expressed a common fear that mass consumption would unleash undisciplined and frustrating desire. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim believed that ordinary people were incapable of sorting through choices and controlling their longings when tempted by the growing array of goods so tantalizingly showcased in stores. Moral confusion was the inevitable result. For Durkheim, the only solution was to impose constraint on the masses by organizing the consuming crowd into occupational groups and religious communities. The Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses (1930) argued that new shopping and amusement sections of cities amassed crowds of uneducated but no longer impoverished people. Uprooted from their traditional folk cultures and the control of village clergy and gentry, and yet unprepared to embrace the high culture of the urban elite, these crowds were supposedly lured by the promise of immediate pleasure onto the street. The crowd's economic power swamped cultivated values and institutions, leading to a general decline of the arts and learning. Ortega y Gasset and others, like the English critic F. R. Leavis in his Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), saw consumer culture as ephemeral, rooted neither in the permanence and conservatism of folk culture nor in the timeless value of high culture.

Early twentieth-century Marxists often shared these conservative understandings of consumerism. The leftist concept of "false consciousness" was similar to the notion of false needs. The Left saw false consciousness as originating in the traumas of industrial work rather than in the cultural inferiority of the masses. But both Left and Right agreed that the wage earner could not resist the passive if sometimes exciting entertainments mass produced by the "culture industry" in movie houses, dance halls, and amusement parks. With theories developed by the Frankfurt school and other Marxist cultural critics from the 1920s, the Left saw the mass consumer market as undermining the potential of individuals and society. It destroyed class consciousness by luring workers into the pursuit of personal comforts and pleasures and by tying them emotionally to bourgeois and nationalist values. One example is the English embrace of chauvinistic themes promoted in popular newspapers and music halls between 1900 and 1914. To the Left, the essential passivity of consumer culture also seemed to eliminate the will of workers to organize and fight for socialism. The direct authority and discipline of the rural lord or industrial employer was no longer necessary in a consumer culture to keep workers subdued. Bourgeois control was maintained indirectly over consciousness through the appeals of consumption. Finally, according to this view, the need to work for the capitalist in order to gain a "false" freedom in consumption disciplined the wage earner to accept the status quo and alienating work.

A few early commentators on mass consumption offered more positive assessments of the emerging age of affluence, even if they continued to recognize a distinction between natural needs and unnatural wants. The French economist Charles Gide (1847– 1932) argued that abundance would bring cultural refinement. But he also stressed the need for consumer education and cooperative control over distribution. In sharp contrast to Durkheim, the French sociologist Jean Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) believed that when working people purchased fashionable clothes or home furnishings, they were expanding their cultural horizons. Tarde agreed with the American economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) that mass consumption originated in common envy and the desire to buy into the lifestyle of trendsetting elites. But this was more than simple emulation, for it gave the masses a feeling of personal freedom. More important still, this spending resulted in the gradual reduction of the social distance between elites and the common people. Eventually, the rich would even imitate the taste and culture of the masses, leading to a society of shared values. In the long run, the exchange of fashions between social classes and regions would decrease social tensions. The localized and rare pleasures of the traditional village festival would be replaced by the widespread and frequent enjoyment of the night on the town or the Sunday excursion. The new dynamic world of mass consumption might be chaotic, but over time Tarde expected that it would lead to a new, higher civilization.

The German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) acknowledged that money and the things that it could buy increased personal freedom because consumption freed the individual from constant dependence on employers and an often oppressive folk culture. Keeping up with shifting styles of adornment, display, and entertainment did more than fill empty lives with fleeting pleasures. Such spending met the social as well as ego needs of the individual. Fashion, Simmel argued, combined individuality and conformity, maximizing one's membership in a group while distinguishing oneself from others. Still, Simmel saw a price for this freedom in that consumer society created impersonal social relationships and encouraged egotistical and calculating attitudes toward others, reducing them to what they owned. The only way that one could preserve individuality was to participate in fashion. In this system, the individual could never catch up and never find a stable identity. The quest for individuality was always frustrating in the fashionable crowd. The only solution for Simmel was to cultivate personal friendship and to develop individualistic taste.

For many Europeans in the interwar years, consumerism was identical with American culture and its threat to European values and economic life. America was the barbarian future of democratic and mechanical conformity and rootless superficiality, a worry reinforced by American dominance of phonograph music and film. Particularly influential was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), an attack on American mass culture with its passive amusements. Even Henry Ford's promise of inexpensive cars seemed to many Europeans to threaten native craft traditions and standards of quality.

CONSUMERISM AND ALTERNATIVES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the interwar years, many Europeans believed that mass production would eventually liberate humanity from the scarcity of "necessities," leading not to the endless expansion of symbolic or luxury consumption but rather to the reduction of work time. One seeming sign of this trend was the introduction of the eight-hour day in 1919. For many this prospect was worrisome. Conservatives feared that the assembly line undermined work incentives by diminishing the necessity of long hours to meet basic needs. Moreover, cheap mass-produced goods and pleasures seemed to threaten the value of hard work. This thinking created a seemingly insurmountable dilemma: how to stimulate and profit from mass consumption while also maintaining and fostering work discipline.

At the same time, conservatives feared that increased affluence eroded cultural standards by providing the masses the free time and money that gave them access to cultural goods. This thinking suggested that cultural standards had to be protected from mass consumption through elite domination of the mass media (as in the founding of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927) or through adopting educational standards that imposed a canon of literary, musical, and artistic classics on students. Conservatives were concerned about the impact of consumerism on the young, especially insofar as the influence of parents seemed to have declined and, with it, family solidarities and respect for authority. One common solution to the threat of the temptations of public amusements was industry and church sponsorship of youth camps, sports clubs, and playground centers. Throughout Europe, these organized youth activities provided pleasurable alternatives to commercial leisure in a controlled setting that also encouraged loyalty to the company or religious body. A striking example of this paternalism was the Duke of York's Camp, which brought together equal numbers of public (elite) school and industrial boys in shared games and bonfires in the interwar years. Italian and German fascists also found that noncommercial leisure was an excellent vehicle for fostering political loyalty. The dopolavaro and Kraft durch Freude organized tours and youth summer camps, using methods that were scarcely distinguishable from those employed by company and church organizations to instill a "politics of consent."

Much of the Left shared a similar disapproval of consumerism in the interwar years. And thus labor and leftist political groups tried to organize their own noncommercial leisure to foster loyalty to union and party. Since the 1880s in Britain, organized workers' leisure had been built around cooperative societies, trade unions, socialist Sunday schools, and leftist hiking and bicycle clubs. In the 1920s European socialist sports leagues won support from sympathetic local governments and competed openly with conservative nationalist and church sports organizations. Workers' Olympic Games were played in Frankfurt (1925) and Vienna (1931). Communists and their trade unions often used sports and cultural groups to create loyalty to union and party beyond the workplace. Especially important were efforts to link the whole family and not just the union member to the cause. In the 1920s and 1930s British adult educationists encouraged pleasurable hobbies rather than didactic lessons in high culture as an alternative to the crowd pleasures of drinking, gambling, dance halls, and amusement parks. Nonprofit groups like the Holiday Fellowship and Workers' Travel Association built guesthouses and organized vacation tours. The French Popular Front of 1936 continued the effort of the Left to organize loyalty through noncommercial leisure. Communist youth festivals and sports and leisure clubs were common. Large unions even had camps in an attempt to channel members away from consumer culture. French teachers' and other unions organized youth hostels and inexpensive vacation packages for members. The Popular Front official Léo Lagrange encouraged these noncommercial leisure and vacation programs both to foster political solidarity and to provide uplifting and healthy uses of free time by countering the allures of consumerism.

WHY CONSUMERISM WON

In the interwar years, both the Right and Left shared two assumptions—that mass production meant a shift from work to leisure values and that leisure time absorbed by consumer goods and services was a threat to social and political goals. The belief that affluence meant an expansion of leisure time (and for conservatives an undermining of the work ethic) assumed that consumer needs were satiable and that people preferred time to more goods. This essential assumption was wrong. Expanding opportunities to consume proved to be a more effective way of disciplining labor than long hours of toil. The key was the realization that psychological needs were not finite, as were most physiological needs. Higher wages could not only stimulate mass consumption but also create an open-ended desire for new goods and thus motivate wage earners to seek work rather than leisure. While the economist Lujo Brentano introduced this idea into his analysis in 1894, only in the 1920s did even a small group of industrial employers embrace this doctrine. This seemingly counterintuitive idea that expanding desire disciplined workforces has often been identified with Fordism, named after Henry Ford, the American automaker who introduced a high wage in 1914 to create a market for his cars and a disciplined consumer workforce.

The labor movement generally reinforced this idea of limitless consumption when unions tried to link productivity to wage increases. For example, the French socialist and head of the International Labor Organization Albert Thomas argued in the 1920s that workers should accept more of the intense and mechanized work of scientific management for higher wages. Labor embraced the "Fordist" ideal of mass production as a solution to the traditional dual economy divided between luxury and subsistence and as an opening to a consumer's democracy. This attitude reflects a shift from an emotional and social focus on the workplace to an embrace of the social and personal meanings of consumption off the job. It was simultaneously a recognition that conditions of mechanized industry made irrelevant the older ideals of workers' control over the job and a vision of the possibilities raised by a mass consumption economy for individual freedom to make consumer choices. Although this trade-off was rarely embraced by European industry between the world wars, it did become the implicit basis for economic growth in the postwar era.

The Great Depression experience of joblessness also encouraged this trend. Especially because unemployment was uneven across regions and occupations, sociologists and observers like George Orwell found that those without sufficient work often felt left out and humiliated. The jobless dreamed of the respect and freedom that came from the ability to consume. Even in hard times, European workers tended to hold on to luxuries. While labor leaders favored shortening the workday as a job-sharing measure in the depression, free time became relatively less important than higher income and freedom to consume for those with "time on their hands." Even when the system did not deliver the goods during the depression and World War II, the response was not massive resentment or revolution but quiet personal humiliation at being excluded from the consumers' feast and a longing to rejoin it when the opportunity came again after 1945.

Also during the depression of the 1930s, economists and politically active business leaders in France and England, especially, began to recognize that an expanding consumer economy was a politically feasible alternative to what they saw as the "stagnation" of reduced work weeks (as in the proposal for the forty-hour week). Eventually, the tapping of new and unlimited needs (through Keynesianism especially) not only would overcome the threat to the work ethic but guaranteed growth. Growth through mass consumption also meant more jobs (in new sectors like services rather than mining and basic industry), rather than a sharing of work through the reduction of work time. This new thinking had a profound impact on public policy that continues to the present.

A consumerist consensus emerged after 1945. It was built upon mass production and balanced with high wages, but it was also buttressed by governmental management of demand and business manipulation of needs through advertising. Neither work sharing nor expanded noncommercial leisure (based on a theory of limited consumer desire) had any serious role in the postwar recovery. The obvious explanation is that pressing demand for reconstruction and fulfilling pent-up material needs had long been deferred by the depression and war and that this precluded any choice but expanded production and consumption. A political consensus quickly emerged around expectations of "full employment" and unlimited consumption. The nearly universal commitment to higher levels of personal consumption was broadly shared by the left-wing British welfare statists and French economic planners, as well as more conservative Italian and German Christian Democrats. The American model of mass consumption was an alternative to the social rigidity of European culture, which still showed sharp distinctions between the lifestyles of the working and middle classes. Pro-American politicians favored "growth" rather than "protest" over the shares of the economic pie. The identification of liberty with consumer choice and democracy with mass access to goods became the ideal if not always the reality.

Despite critiques of consumerism as a threat to social stability and cultural values, consumption became the principal means of defining self and social relationships for many Europeans in the second half of the twentieth century. Although thinkers, social organizers, and even at times politicians struggled against it, none produced effective alternatives.

Consumer-culture critics like Simmel or Durkheim set up an illusory contrast between the acquiescent and impulsive consumption of the street crowd, on the one hand, and the sober and uplifting cultivation of self and family in the home, on the other. The twentieth century has shown that crowd pleasures were not nearly so self-destructive as once presumed. Critics of modern consumer desire failed to recognize how commodities met psychological and social needs in a transient and increasingly impersonal social world. Goods and purchased experiences provided ways of marking time throughout the year. This became a major role of developments such as the commercialization of Christmas and the packaged vacation that became an important part of European consumer culture after World War II. Consumer products helped identify stages in personal life and communicate status, aspirations, and complaints to others. The distinctive clothing, music, and social pleasures of youth that emerged after the war illustrate this kind of personal expression. Consumption was much more about reading and being read through the goods that one drove, wore, and ate than about unleashing dangerous desires. Rather than creating a frustrated, aggressive crowd that sought unattainable fulfillment in unrestrained longing, mass consumption fostered a relatively passive population quite easily satisfied with the latest fashions, novelties, and "new and improved" gadgets. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas have shown how mass consumption allowed the fulfillment of contradictory longings, the wearing of many roles, and endless experimenting—even if experiences were manufactured to meet consumer expectations and business profitability. Far from developing obsessions and addictions or slipping into the confusion of overchoice as predicted by Durkheim, modern Europeans generally have responded quickly and often happily to the latest display window. What is striking about consumer society is how well adjusted to affluence modern Europeans have become.

Moreover, home and individual "integrity" were not nearly so free of consumerist allures as expected by critics of consumerism. Instead, much of the social meaning of goods was organized around domesticity and the sexual division of labor. A middle-class ideal of male providing and female domestic spending had emerged in the nineteenth century and became in varying degrees an ideal of working families early in the twentieth century. For many, the depression solidified the gender order by revealing its stress points: the wife's domain of domestic spending and the husband's role of provider were undermined during the crisis. The slump showed that neither women nor men wished to abandon these roles, which after the war were reconfirmed (at least for another generation) in the male ideal of breadwinner and the female status as domestic consumer. By the 1960s this sexual division of labor was being replaced by a two-income household, but this too was an adaptation to the economic demands of rising standards of domestic consumption.

Moreover, reinforcing the trend toward domestic and private consumption was the coming of the radio (and later television) and the access of the working classes to cars. Although these goods were slower to penetrate European households than in the United States, in the 1960s and 1970s much of that gap was overcome. For example, in the 1960s television sets in British households increased from 66 percent to 90 percent, and a BBC study in 1974 found that half of leisure time was spent watching the screen. Even more dramatic was the coming of cars: ownership in France rose from 10 percent of households in 1950 to 75 percent by 1980.

A further sign of privatized consumerism was the rise in the share of family income devoted to housing costs. While planners in 1945 hoped for a more open community based on new public housing, Britons largely rejected the tower blocks. Instead, they longed for the suburban comforts of the semidetached houses that provided such opportunities for self-expressive and private consumption. While the French and other continental Europeans had long favored urban apartment living and had been indifferent to Anglo-American lawn and garden culture, during the 1970s new housing was increasingly suburban and detached, and home ownership rose also. Modern consumerism was less a social or cultural challenge to social stability than an affirmation of domestic and intrafamily values.

Consumer society has become a substitute for civil society. The disappointing results of nonprofit religious, political, or simply voluntary leisure organizations are one illustration of this claim. Consumerism met real needs of personal identity and individual distinction from the group in a society where primary groups had largely disappeared. The utopian idea of a culture of free time beyond the market could not satisfy those needs nearly as effectively as could the consumer culture. Ironically, social groups organized around ideas or even leisure activities may be less flexible and more threatening to members than consumer markets. Because noncommercial holiday clubs that appeared early in the twentieth century were dominated by their members, they often unintentionally excluded others, became fractionalized, and were slow to adapt to change. It has been much easier for commercial impresarios like the Butlin Holiday Camps of the 1930s or the Club Meds from the 1950s, which stand outside the markets they organize, to get people to join in. There was less personal risk in disclosing oneself as a "member" of a society of Porsche owners than to risk humiliation by joining a group that demanded personal interaction. It was relatively easy to buy one's way into a community of shoppers, and there were so many from which to choose.

The collapse of European communism in 1989 is a good example of the success of consumerism. For all of its claims of producing full employment and meeting everyone's basic needs for health, education, food, and other necessities, the Marxist system in the 1970s and 1980s was unable either to increase productivity or to meet the widening horizons of desire. The lack of consumer incentives for hard work created a society in permanent slow motion, which consequently could never meet the demand for consumer goods. In the West, the simultaneous discipline and freedom built into the consumer economy was able to do both.

However, consumerism did not eliminate frustration as Jean Gabriel Tarde and other optimists predicted. Through emulative spending, the poor and marginal population might have become more like the rich. But then the elite moved on to new "inventions," creating a new social distance from the masses. When the people had cars, the rich needed second homes. Frustration was inevitable and unrelenting even when the majority enjoyed material security and participated in the consumer culture directed by the rich. They could never catch up, and the closer they seemed to get to the prize, the more humiliating was their inability to grasp it. Resentment hardly declined because of greater material security. The significance of goods that define status (cars, education, vacations, and houses) increased as basic needs were met and with them the increased frustrations of status seeking.

LIMITS AND CHALLENGES TO MODERN CONSUMERISM

Diversity in the history, society, and economic development of European countries produced somewhat different degrees and varieties of consumerism in the second half of the twentieth century. Relative to the more mobile and market-oriented United States, European bonds to community and family have countered consumerist predilections. In countries like Spain, relatively slower rates of economic development limited discretionary spending, at least until the 1990s. Political traditions restricting markets (like prohibiting Sunday shopping) have impeded the spread of consumption as a leisure time activity. Attempts in the 1990s to extend shopping hours in Germany and England, for example, were rebuffed by social conservatives as well as labor unions. Allocations of economic surpluses to public culture (for example, municipal orchestras) and other nonmarket leisure and recreational purposes have also countered the growth of consumerism. Moreover, cultural and historical differences have channeled consumer desire in western Europe in somewhat different directions than in the United States. One prominent example is the greater emphasis on vacation spending, due to four or more weeks of holiday time in most European countries as compared with the common two-week or less vacation of Americans. This difference has its roots in the paid holiday that came to many European countries in the 1920s and especially the 1930s. Another example is the still greater tendency of Europeans to spend discretionary income on public leisure like social dining and drinking.

Since the 1960s European opponents of consumerism have rallied around movements for environmental protection, noncommercial leisure, reduction of work time, and consumer education. According to the political scientist Ronald Inglehart, in the 1960s a "postmaterialist" cohort began to emerge in Europe. The gradual disappearance of those age groups which had been shaped by the economic insecurity of the depression signaled a "cultural shift" toward the post-scarcity values. In the 1960s and 1970s New Left advocates of postmaterialist values expected a political shift from questions of distribution, growth, and security and toward quality of life and consumer rights issues. These groups attacked the compromise of the traditional Left (Labor, Communist, and Social Democratic parties) for its support of the unrestrained growth of a consumer culture.

In particular, the environmental, or green, movement opposed the impact that unrestrained consumption had upon land use (for roads, for example) and pollution of the ecosphere. In the 1970s new leftists associated with the labor movement argued that the linkage between economic growth and jobs was no longer valid. Technological and business change would no longer create sufficient jobs for full employment (as had previous economic upheavals). The computer was eliminating both white collar and blue collar jobs even as it increased productivity, and the older pattern of technological advance, shifting jobs from one sector (like industry) into another (like service), no longer applied. An expanding mass consumption economy would not produce sufficient jobs. For this group, the solution was reduced work time rather than simply increased output and demand for goods. As important, these advocates of reduced work time saw expanded time away from market work as an alternative to the spread of consumerist values.

Still others supported noncommercial uses of leisure time, perpetuating activities dating from before the commercialization of free time and actually expanding alternatives to consumerism. Surveys found that up to 39 percent of Britons participated in a sport in 1977, and in 1980 there were roughly thirty-six thousand football clubs and fifty thousand other sporting clubs. Numbers of sports clubs rose 3.6 times in France in the 1960s and 1970s. During the same period, cultural clubs increased even more dramatically from 600 to 4,116. An active cultural education policy, encouraged first by André Malraux's famous tenure as cultural minister from 1959 to 1969, bore fruit in rising attendance at artistic and educational events. French promoters of popular arts and recreation may have sought to perpetuate loyalty to church or political party, but all stressed wide participation and many eventually lost their political or religious character. Government facilities and educators have contributed to the growth of amateurism in music and the other arts. Sociologists found in the mid-1980s that middle-class people especially still readily joined groups around a wide variety of enthusiasms (caving, morris dancing, lace making, and lapidary, for example). Such organizations stressed their distinction from others but also their solidarity within, and often did so with a militant opposition to commercialization as if in protest of the profit motive of sellers and the passivity of buyers.

Despite these protests against consumerism, there does not appear to be any systematic alternative to its value of limitless material innovation and social and self-definition in and through goods. While many Europeans question the long-term viability of the consumerist ethic for the environment and the seemingly corrosive effect of consumerism on social relations and political commitments, few have seriously questioned the benefits of growth or have found ways of effectively articulating a form of postmaterialism.

See alsoAmerica, Americanization, and Anti-Americanism (volume 1);Capitalism and Commercialization; Communications, the Media and Propaganda; Shops and Stores (volume 2);Sports; Consumer Leisure; Vacations; Travel and Tourism; the sectionEveryday Life (all in this volume); and other articles in this section.

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