Social Opulence and Private Restraint: The Consumer in British Socialist Thought Since 1800
Noel Thompson
Abstract
This volume represents a unique study of the place of the consumer and consumption in the political economy of British socialism, from its early-nineteenth-century origins through to the consumer-focused New Labourism and political economies critical of consumerism articulated by the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Left. The work considers socialist discussion of the potentialities and dangers of abundance; consumers’ rationality, freedom, sovereignty and capacity to choose; their malleability and acquisitiveness; the morality implications of consumption; the satisfactions of co ... More
This volume represents a unique study of the place of the consumer and consumption in the political economy of British socialism, from its early-nineteenth-century origins through to the consumer-focused New Labourism and political economies critical of consumerism articulated by the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Left. The work considers socialist discussion of the potentialities and dangers of abundance; consumers’ rationality, freedom, sovereignty and capacity to choose; their malleability and acquisitiveness; the morality implications of consumption; the satisfactions of consumption as against the disutility of labour; the tension between private and social opulence; consumerism’s corruption of civic virtue and dissolution of social bonds; the education and/or liberation of desire; and the environmental consequences of rising levels of consumption. The volume also shows how the disparate ways in which the consumer and consumption were theorized reflected and shaped the character of the socialist political economies that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Keywords:
socialism,
political economy,
consumption,
consumer,
material culture,
citizen-consumer,
consumerism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199646012 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646012.001.0001 |
