Matthew Hilton

The Legacy of Luxury: Moralities of Consumption Since the 18th Century

This article argues that the luxury debates of the 18th century left a legacy for discussions of consumption up to the present day. First, the vices and virtues of moral discourse became the use and abuse, productive and unproductive, of 19th-century liberalism; second, in the early 20th century, these dichotomies were applied to the new mass market, as cheap standardized goods were alleged to destroy the liberal individuality of the consumer; third, in the late 20th century, economics, politics and even the modern consumer movement have seemingly abstracted consumption from such moral categories, leaving only a morality of reaction as specific goods are seen to infringe societal norms. However, in recent years, consumption has become increasingly remoralized, posing important challenges for the academic and critical discussion of ethics and current consumer society.

Consumers and the State since the Second World War

In the twentieth century, consumption became a political project intimately bound up with the state. By the 1950s, governments across the world worked to promote a vision of consumer society based around access and participation—affluence for all—rather than choice and luxury for the few. This vision of consumerism was tied in with the geopolitics of the cold war but was also constitutive of other globalizing trends that connected not only Western Europe to North America but also both sides of the Iron Curtain as well as the global South and North. The article analyzes the development of, and compares the differences in, the various consumer protection regimes that emerged in the latter half of the century. It points to processes of convergence in consumer politics across the globe that saw the development of consumer political thinking in the Soviet bloc and the development of supranational protection regimes at the European level. In more recent decades, the politics of consumer society based upon access and the collective has been eclipsed by a politics that emphasizes choice and the individual. Such a change represents a profound shift in the relations between consumers, citizens, and governments.

Social activism in an age of consumption: the organized consumer movement

What is the meaning of social activism in an age of consumption? The term ‘consumer society’ usually invokes that which is being reacted to – or rebelled against – than that which is being fought for. In a literature very much inspired by the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and, most particularly, by the events of May 1968, consumer society is more often regarded as the cause of, rather than the cure for, society’s ills. On the one hand, the 1960s inspired a range of new engagements with consumer society, many of which have become canonical texts in consumption studies. Works such as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Baudrillard’s exploration of the self-referential chains of signification have inspired a focus on ‘sign values’ as the main feature of modern consumer culture. In the society of the image, it seemed that the only means of demonstrating political agency was to play with these images – to throw back on consumer society its own projections and thus, hopefully, demonstrate the contradictions of capitalism. Here was an analysis that coalesced with many of the central concerns of an emerging discipline of cultural studies, not least that of the Birmingham School’s focus on ritual and the negotiation and appropriation of, as well as the resistance to, the meanings held by objects. Later, it wove seamlessly into the emphasis on bricolage and moments of poiësis (active re-creation) found in de Certeau’s analysis of people’s engagement with consumption. Rather than being exploited or manipulated in the world of goods and images, consumers, it

Consumerism, Solidarity and Communism: Consumer Protection and the Consumer Movement in Poland

It has long been assumed that inattention to matters of consumption contributed to the collapse of the centrally planned economies of the Soviet bloc. In Poland, the party-state followed a productivist model which occasionally paid lip-service to the consumer but which ultimately focused on the dictates of production. Yet, by 1981, there existed an organized consumer movement (Federacja Konsumentów) which emerged amidst the broader challenges to the state associated with Solidarity. In the transition to democracy, a form of consumer agency developed in Poland concerned less with the relative benefits of capitalism or communism in supplying consumer wants and desires, and more with a less overtly ideological notion of rights and protection promoted at the global level. This article demonstrates that Polish consumers and their expert representatives, both within and beyond the state, were capable of exercising an agency more complex than the negative one of frustration and recourse to alternative forms of provisioning usually associated with a command economy.

Retailing History as Economic and Cultural History: Strategies of Survival by Specialist Tobacconists in the Mass Market

This article stresses how the history of retailing can be seen as both economic and cultural history. It does so by using a case study of the history of the specialist tobacconist from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. These independent retailers moved from a position of skilled artisan traders in which they not only sold commodities but played a major role in the direction of consumption to one in which they merely formed the intermediary between the two greater cultural forces of the producer and mass of consumers. Despite various efforts to re-install agency into their trading role, their history mirrors that of many other institutions in a society which became increasingly polarised between the perceived masses and the emerging economic and cultural elities.

Michael Young and the Consumer Movement

It would be foolish to associate the modern, comparative-testing consumer movement with just one individual. When consumer organisations emerged in Europe in the 1950s, following the lead taken in the United States in the 1930s, there were a range of structural issues of a social and economic nature motivating consumer action. An increasingly affluent and expanding middle class worried over making choices in a new electrical and technical age. They were imbued with a professional, technocratic and progressive ethic which optimistically held faith in the ability of information, expertise and rational individualism to modify the market, society and the economy to the needs to the people. And they believed that too often the interests of business and trade unions had produced a sectionalism not conducive to post-war planning. Instead, the consumer could stand as an independent, non-political rational actor whose interest in improving their standard of living through the improvement of better quality goods and services would serve the interests of all – workers, manufacturers, retailers, citizens and consumers alike. Yet reflections on the consumer movement do revolve around the activities and actions of just one individual. In the development of consumer activism across the entire Asia-Pacific region in the 1970s and 1980s, the Malaysian consumer leader Anwar Fazal stands at the centre, particularly of a social justice model of consumerism that fought more for the rights of poor consumers than those of the rich. In the United States, and despite the political interventions of the Consumers Union, the movement is usually associated with Ralph Nader, from his publication of Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965 to his embrace of environmentalism and an aggressive, confrontational stance against business leaders and politicians. And in Britain consumerism is inextricably linked with Michael Young, the founder of the Consumers’ Association in 1956

Humanitarianisms in context

Abstract This introduction describes the rapidly expanding history of non-state humanitarianism in terms of three themes. First, it argues that we should think about humanitarianism less in terms of ruptures or breaks, and focus more on the moments of acceleration and the continuities that shaped that narrative: how the relationships among local, national and international discourses were played out in the shift between imperial and post-colonial worlds, in the dialogue between religious and secular traditions, and in the transformative processes of decolonization, de-regulation and globalization. Second, we suggest the need to re-think the geography of non-state humanitarianism. Drawing attention to the transnational contexts and traditions in which ideas of humanitarianism have been articulated not only adds to our understanding of transnational action and the strength of global civil society beyond the West, we argue, it allows us to better appreciate the myriad languages and practices of humanitarianism employed in a global context. Finally, this introduction also re-visits the question of motivation. By looking beyond the state, we argue, we can better understand the variety of motives that shaped the act of giving: from compassion to capturing markets, the search for efficiency, and the construction of local, national and international identities.

Ken Loach and the Save the Children Film: Humanitarianism, Imperialism, and the Changing Role of Charity in Postwar Britain*

This article offers a critical assessment of British humanitarianism using a case study of the first fifty years of one of its largest charities, the Save the Children Fund ðSCFÞ. It is an exercise the organization was once keen to conduct itself. In the run-up to its fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1969, SCF decided to commission a film. Very much the “establishment” charity of the humanitarian sector, it nevertheless made a surprising decision to approach the avowedly left-wing, social realist filmmaker Ken Loach, who at that time was arguably reaching his creative peak ðhis most well-known film, Kes, was made in the same yearÞ. SCF did not want a film that simply celebrated the achievements of the organization over the years. It wanted a controversial documentary to be shown on national television that would highlight the problems of poverty in both Britain and the developing world and that would go on to showcase the work of SCF in alleviating suffering. Ideally, it sought to stamp on the public consciousness an association between film and charity like the one created when Loach’s Cathy Come Home ðaired as a BBC Wednesday Play on November 16, 1966Þ was followed by the launch of the homelessness organization Shelter two weeks later. Precisely because of Loach’s prior success, SCF was happy to grant him free rein. And while it hoped that the filmwould “reflect credit on the organisation,” it knew it was not to be a “direct-appeal film”; indeed, SCF explicitly gave the film company “carte blanche in preparing the theme.” Loach took the instruction to heart. After he had visited Kenya to record SCF’s activities, it seemed to him that

Consumerism in health care: the case of a voluntary sector HIV prevention organization

This paper examines the potential for, and the contradictions inherent in, voluntary sector health service providers acting as consumer representatives. The paper examines a U.K. gay mens HIV prevention organization to consider whether members are united by their experiences of using services, whether their work involves consumerist strategies, if so whether these are influential, and what tensions emerge from the dual provider/consumer role. Fieldwork was carried out in 1997–98, examining, via documents and interviews, activity between 1992 and 1997. Qualitative analysis was performed. Consumer action is shown to emerge not so much from abstract constructions of consumer interest, but more from the particularities of consumption, which become politicized more powerfully through their attachment to other interests and ideologies.

Class, consumption and the public sphere

G. Crossick and S. Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999; pp. xvii + 326; ISBN 1840142367 A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999; pp. xiii + 223; ISBN 0719056764 S. Strasser, C. McGovern and M. Judt (eds), Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; pp. xiv + 477; ISBN 0521626943