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From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society

ANDREAS WIRSCHING

Contemporary European History / Volume 20 / Issue 01 / February 2011, pp 1 - 26 DOI: 10.1017/S0960777310000330, Published online: 14 December 2010

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0960777310000330

How to cite this article: ANDREAS WIRSCHING (2011). From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society. Contemporary European History, 20, pp 1-26 doi:10.1017/ S0960777310000330

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Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CEH, IP address: 130.92.9.58 on 14 Apr 2015 From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society

ANDREAS WIRSCHING

Abstract This essay deals with the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between labour, consumption and individuality in modern mass culture. This relationship has been conceptualised rather differently in American and European visions of individuality. In recent years, the long-lasting tradition of European (and especially German) scepticism towards the consumer society, which was nourished by conservative, (neo)liberal and Marxist influences, has retreated in favour of a more general acceptance of modern consumerism. While labour has not been replaced as the most important means of economic and cultural participation, the social construction of personal individuality is seen to take place through an ever-increasing multitude of means of consumption. The article analyses this profound process of cultural change and at the same time reflects upon the opportunities and limits of the current scholarly paradigm concerning the consumer society.

Imagine a modern housewife who has just acquired a washing machine, which will make a big contribution to rationalising her housework and saving time. And what will she do with the time she’s saved? She will turn on the television and look at adverts for washing machines.1 Jean Baudrillard’s ironically exaggerated portrayal of the modern consumer society (1970) postulates a specific interaction between labour and consumption. It reflects the contemporary icon of the Fordist model which underlay the post-1945 welfare dynamic. Rationalised, Taylorised labour increases productivity so that higher productivity boosts wage levels and higher wage levels increase mass purchasing power. Ideally, this mechanism should produce a new standard of living2 in which

Lehrstuhl für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte, Sekretariat (Raum 2006), Universitätsstraße 10, 86159 Augsburg, Germany; [email protected] 1 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (London: Sage Publications, 1998 [1970]), 153. 2 Cf. Andreas Wirsching, ‘Erwerbsbiographien und Privatheitsformen. Die Entstandardisierung von Lebensläufen’, in Thomas Raithel, Andreas Rödder and Andreas Wirsching, eds., Auf dem Weg in

Contemporary European History, 20, 1 (2011), pp. 1–26 C Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0960777310000330 2 Contemporary European History work and consumption are in perfect balance: husband as sole wage-earner, with a factory job for life, married to a housewife and mother – hopefully equipped with all modern conveniences including a television and washing machine. An assured wage would bring more leisure time and increased consumption. In the 1950sand1960s this living standard had a formative influence on practically all industrialised Western societies and shaped the existences of millions of men and women. The labour society and the consumer society balanced and stabilised each other to produce unprecedented levels of well-being. Adding an extra flourish to Baudrillard’s portrait, we may postulate that the husband works in a factory producing domestic appliances – washing machines, or maybe television sets. Cultural critics in continental Europe from the 1950stothe1970s, and particularly in Germany, thought otherwise: to them the ideal just described was a stumbling block. They saw both labour and consumption as alienated modes of living that left no room for genuine individuality. They complained that the ‘habits of mind created by externally imposed working practices’ (Jürgen Habermas, 1956) were becoming universal, with the result that ‘this attitude to work – disguised as consumerism – now pervades every facet of life and imposes its particular brand of alienation’.3 So much by way of introduction to the theme of this essay: the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between labour, consumption and individuality. This essay links to a conspicuously powerful trend in recent historical, cultural and sociological research: over the last few years the paradigm of the consumer society has become a favourite subject of study, generating a plethora of substantial, empirical studies.4 It

eine neue Moderne? Die Bundesrepublik in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 83–97. 3 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notizen zum Mißverhältnis von Kultur und Konsum’, Merkur 10, 97 (1956), 212–28, here 221. See also Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II (Boston: Bacon Press, 1989), 356. 4 The literature on the development of the consumer society, and on various aspects of it, is large and wide-ranging, and cannot be fully reviewed here. An influential collection is Neil McKendrick, John BrewerandJ.H.Plumb,The Birth of the Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications Ltd, 1982). More recent overviews include Wolfgang König, Geschichte der Konsumgesellschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000); Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History. The Global Transformation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2001); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Konsum und Handel. Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Hartmut Kaelble, Sozialgeschichte Europas 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2007), 87– 94; Christian Kleinschmidt, Konsumgesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht, 2008). Important collections of essays include Hannes Siegrist, Hartmut Kaelble and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Europäische Konsumgeschichte. Zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (18. bis 20. Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1997); Hartmut Berghoff, ed., Konsumpolitik. Die Regulierung des privaten Verbrauchs im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, The Politics of Consumption. Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Michael Prinz, ed., Der lange Weg in den Überfluß. Anfänge und Entwicklung der Konsumgesellschaft seit der Vormoderne (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003); Reinhold Reith and Thorsten Meyer, eds., ‘Luxus und Konsum’ – eine historische Annäherung (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2003); Frank Trentmann, ed., The Making of the Consumer. Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Claudius Torp, eds., Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890–1990. Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main and New York: From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 3 is also, and deservedly, gaining ever-greater significance as an element in concepts of modern Western societies.5 But this development cannot simply be taken for granted: it calls for explanation, historiographical contextualisation and critical comment. I shall begin by examining a range of critical approaches to consumer studies. Then I shall look at earlier, more positive views of consumerism and show how, from the 1980s if not before, adverse criticism gradually lost its bite and yielded to widespread acceptance of the American consumerist model. Thirdly, I shall propose an interpretive tool for probing the roots of this conceptual revolution, which seems to have originated in a long-term historical shift. In modern mass societies the construction of selfhood depends ever less on work and ever more on consumption: it is through consumption that individual identities are constructed and defined. Finally, in the light of current trends, I shall offer some reflections on the true extent of this shift and the nature of the conceptual problems it has engendered.

I.

In the famous opening chapter of Das Kapital, Karl Marx uses the striking phrase ‘the fetishism of commodities’, by which he meant that commodities have a life of their own which depends not on their use value, but rather on a fictitious exchange value which, in capitalist societies, soars so high above the use value that commodities assume a ‘mystical character’.6 For a century, Marx’s analysis shaped left-wing critiques of consumerism – meaning consumerism in the alienated living conditions created by capitalist production. The most potent developments took place from the 1920s on- wards in the emerging field of critical theory, which added new critical categories and brought Marx’s theory of alienation to bear on the novel phenomenon of mass culture. Applied to works of art, this critique saw something that had once been unique but had, in the age of mass culture and ‘mechanical reproduction’, lost its ‘auratic’ character and become a mere commodity.7 In 1938, Theodor W. Adorno took a similar view of the latest trends in popular music, lamenting ‘The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’.8 This established the core categories for

Campus Verlag, 2009). For a comparative approach to the emergence of the consumer society in Western Europe, see Sabine Haustein, Vom Mangel zum Massenkonsum. Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien im Vergleich 1945–1970 (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2007). 5 See, e.g., Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar, ‘Régimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth-Century German History’, German History, 19, 2 (2001), 135–61; Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past. Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princetown University Press, 2003), 269–314. 6 Karl Marx, Capital,Chapter1, see http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01. htm#S1 (accessed 10 Nov. 2010). 7 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, new edn (New York: Classic Books America, 2009 [1935]). 8 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (originally published 1938), in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Part II, reprint (New York: Continuum, 1997), 270–99. 4 Contemporary European History the Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its profound – and still relevant – critique of the ‘culture industry’, in which Max Horkheimer and Adorno analysed entertainment, media, leisure and advertising as central paradigms of the modern consumer society and pronounced a devastating verdict, inspired partly by their experiences of fascism and Nazism, and partly by their exile in the United States and study of American life.9 From this critical viewpoint, manipulation is the key element of modern mass and consumer society, leaving little room for individual freedom. The capitalist culture industry governs individuals, body and soul, forcing them to surrender ‘without resistance’ to commodification: ‘individuals experience themselves through their needs only as eternal consumers, as the culture industry’s object’. This industry perpetually betrays its consumers through the very promises that it perpetually makes to them.10 This profoundly sceptical attitude towards the burgeoning consumer society, with its ever-growing audiovisual underpinning, was shared by the vast majority of Western intellectuals in post-war Europe.11 Marxist critics consistently denied the possibility of gaining authentic individuality through the glitzy, manipulative pseudo-world of capitalist consumerism. The ‘standardisation of products’ automatically entailed the standardisation of ‘needs’.12 This was a point of contact between the left-wing critical approach and the established bourgeois liberal or conservative critical tradition. Indeed, the overlap is surprisingly wide, and merits further attention. Post-war bourgeois cultural critics had long been grappling with the problem of individuality in modern mass society – individual versus society – but it now confronted them in a new and baffling guise. Before the War, philosophy had more or less run out of suggestions for constructing selfhood in the modern world, having run the gamut from Friedrich Nietzsche’s call for principled autonomy and individual freedom to Martin Heidegger’s existentialist belief that human beings were ‘randomly cast’ (geworfen) into the world. Rejection of ‘massification’ was intensified to the point of helplessness by experience of life under the Nazis. ‘The nineteenth century,’ wrote the evangelical theologian Gerhard Gloege in 1958, ‘failed to find a theoretical solution to the problem of “the individual and society”. The twentieth century has yet to find a practical solution.’13

9 On the relative importance of German and American experiences for Adorno and Horkheimer, see Alex Demirovic,´ Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), especially 98–103. 10 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 113. 11 See Detlef Vriesen, Warenhaus, Massenkonsum und Sozialmoral. Zur Geschichte der Konsumkritik im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2001); Ulrich Wyrwa, ‘Consumption, Konsum, Konsumgesellschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte’, in Siegrist, Kaelble and Kocka, Europäische Konsumgeschichte, 747–76,here757–61. 12 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1956), 171 (emphasis in the original). See also, e.g., Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti Corsari (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), especially 53–6 and 74–7; Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Kritik der Warenästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971); Henri Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), especially 171–87. 13 Gerhard Gloege, Elite (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1958), 140. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 5

Post-war German conservatism, while making its slow and cautious way via anti-totalitarianism to democracy,14 long kept its distance from Western society as far as cultural criticism was concerned. Essentially conservative thought patterns – freedom through commitment, the vindication of elitism vis-à-vis the masses, etc. – remained strongly influential in the immediate post-war period. Hans Freyer is perhaps the best example of how anti-modern thought patterns, which had so played into Nazi hands in the run-up to 1933, could be successfully re-formulated on a democratic basis. The isolation and uprooting of individuals and their organised massification in industrial society were identified as the original cultural sin – just as they had been before the war. The ‘superfluous progeny’ of this industrial society ‘drips away in the form of isolated individuals who are free in the most negative sense: homeless, landless, propertyless, bereft of relationships, bereft of a personal world view’.15 After the war, Freyer did distance himself to an extent from his earlier, radical conservative views,16 but the cultural attitudes that inspired his criticisms of some essential elements of post-war West German society were substantially unchanged: he claimed to speak for the individual, threatened by the forces of modern life. The modern welfare state was draining individuals of their personality and individuality, autonomy and self-sufficiency, leaving only ‘prescribed surrogates of individual freedom’ – particularly the freedom of choice offered by mass consumerism.17 Consumption and the consumer society were central to the old – and/or new – bourgeois cultural criticism of the 1950s. Freyer himself, together with reformist conservatives such as Rüdiger Altmann, saw modern mass consumption as both perpetuating modern industrial society and unwarrantably extending its inner logic into the private sphere. Even that primary individual space, the family, was not proof against consumer culture; indeed, it ‘imposed a duty of consumption’.18 ‘The headlamps of publicity shine deep into the private sphere, which has become more nugatory than ever: mere statistical fodder for pollsters, consumer researchers, sexual behaviourists, all busy measuring and functionalizing people’s private space.’19

14 Jean Solchany, ‘Vom Antimodernismus zum Antitotalitarismus. Konservative Interpretationen des Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland 1945–1949’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 44 (1996), 373–94; Solchany, Comprendre le nazisme dans l’Allemagne des années zéro (1945–1949) (Paris: PUF, 1997), especially 257–303. 15 Hans Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1954), 565. 16 On Freyer’s position in the nascent Federal Republic see the ground-breaking study by Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed. Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princetown University Press, 1987), especially 330–9. See also Paul Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich:C.H.BeckVerlag,2000), 287–90; for a more critical approach, see Ulrich Bielefeld, ‘“Die Ausgangslage, von der aus nur noch nach vorn gedacht werden kann.” Hans Freyer und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, in Manfred Hettling and Bernd Ulrich, eds., Bürgertum nach 1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005), 164–84. 17 Hans Freyer, ‘Das soziale Ganze und die Freiheit des Einzelnen unter den Bedingungen des industriellen Zeitalters’, Historische Zeitschrift, 183, 1 (1957), 97–115, especially 112. 18 Hans Freyer, Schwelle der Zeiten. Beiträge zur Soziologie der Kultur (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1965), 240–47, quotation 245. 19 Rüdiger Altmann, ‘Schwindet die Öffentlichkeit?’, Merkur, 24/1 (1970), 201–3, especially 201. 6 Contemporary European History

This scepticism proved extraordinarily infectious throughout the 1950s, as private consumption continued to expand at unprecedented rates. It surfaces in a very similar guise in neo-liberal intellectuals such as Wilhelm Röpke, who advocated a spiritual aristocracy, a morally rooted individualism, as the antidote to rampant commercialism. Röpke is also a good example of the way continuing post-war devotion to liberal but elitist individualism could underpin both approval of the market economy and strongly worded criticism of modern mass culture.20 Atthesametime,however,theconservativeZeitgeist was undergoing a profound realignment. Axel Schildt has shown that the idea of a head-on confrontation between ‘the menacing masses and the conservative elite’ more or less went out with the 1950s;21 West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ had decisively shifted the balance. Economic success, the growth of the market and consumption combined to reconcile traditional conservatives to capitalism, with the hand of friendship also held out to the bourgeois liberals. The antithesis beloved of conservative cultural critics – consumer society and mass culture versus individuality and selfhood – retreated over the horizon, where it remained as the preserve of an increasingly marginalised minority. One representative of this minority is the formerly much-read, but now largely forgotten, writer and essayist Gerhard Nebel, a devotee of Heidegger and follower of the brothers Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger. As late as 1970 Nebel published a deeply embittered book, ‘Jumping off the Tiger’s Back’ – a quintessentially ineffectual pot-pourri of every cliché ever thrown up by conservative ‘civilisation criticism’. He considered that: the overall situation is hopeless, and it makes very little difference whether the final collapse is the result of capitalism or dirigisme, democracy or fascism. But because men have been individuals since the time of Socrates, or at least that of Jesus, they do not have to submit tamely to such a fate: they can jump from the fearsome predator’s back, but only one by one, or in small groups. Today the category of selfhood, formerly the key to spiritual salvation, is again of supreme importance to world history, because without it men cannot be free to refuse.22 Nebel’s nihilism evokes the modern individual only in a context of heroic failure, in tragic polar opposition to modernity. By 1970 this kind of existentialist civilisation criticism was seldom making itself heard even in the most conservative circles: its fading tones were drowned out by the roar of scientific and technical progress and the expanding market. Nebel died shortly afterwards, embittered and intellectually

20 Typical examples are: Wilhelm Röpke, ‘Marktwirtschaft ist nicht genug’, in Hat der Westen eine Idee? Vorträge auf der siebten Tagung der Aktionsgemeinschaft Soziale Marktwirtschaft am 8. Mai 1957 in Bad Godesberg (Ludwigsburg: Martin Hoch, 1957), 9–20. For background information, see Hans Jörg Hennecke, Wilhelm Röpke. Ein Leben in der Brandung (Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel Verlag, 2005). 21 Axel Schildt, ‘Ende der Ideologien? Politisch-ideologische Strömungen in den 50er Jahren’, in Schildt and Arnold Sywottek, eds., Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre, 2nd edn (Bonn, Dietz, 1998), 627–35, especially 634. 22 Gerhard Nebel, Sprung von des Tigers Rücken (Stuttgart: Klett, 1970), 5–6. On Nebel’s intellectual journey, see the editorial comments in Friedrich Georg Jünger, ‘Inmitten dieser Welt der Zerstörung’, in Ulrich Fröschle and Volker Haase, eds., Briefwechsel mit Rudolf Schlichter, Ernst Niekisch und Gerhard Nebel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 157–72. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 7 isolated. His death could be seen as symbolic: his was the last truly eloquent voice to be raised in support of what remained of conservative cultural criticism. In their basic understanding of selfhood and consequent attitude to consumerism, these lingering elements of bourgeois cultural criticism frequently resembled, and sometimes even coincided with, elements of critical theory. Their discourses converged increasingly through the 1950sand1960s, harking back in many ways to the period before 1933. Cultural journals such as Merkur published articles by authors as diverse as Arnold Gehlen, Freyer, Ernst Forsthoff, Adorno, Habermas and Gerhard Zwerenz, all linked by a common concept of culture that set itself against massification and commercialisation and saw itself as the sole guarantor of authentic selfhood. This concept of culture and the individual points to a shared background in neo-humanism: individuality can succeed only to the extent that it encompasses the multiplicity and diversity of the real world. It is inseparable from education and from freedom. Such an authentic selfhood, embodying a ‘universal’ in the Humboldtian sense of the term, was now unattainable, wrote Freyer in 1961.23 Horkheimer considered that it had long since been obliterated by the principle of the free market: liberalism that is expressed through the principle of trade, exchange and consumption leads only to conformity. In modern mass culture, individuality becomes a mere means of exchange, losing its ‘individualistic overtones’.24 And Adorno in the late 1950swas already evoking a ‘crisis of the individual’.25 Such were the destructive and pessimistic views of both critical theorists and bourgeois conservatives with respect to the possibility of selfhood amidst mass culture. The culture industry turned individuality into an illusion, ‘pseudoindividuality’.26 ‘Mass culture will use every possible means to increase the social pressure on the individual by excluding all possibility of retaining individuality in the face of the

23 Hans Freyer, ‘Die Wissenschaften im 20. Jahrhundert und die Idee des Humanismus’, Merkur, 15/1 (1961), 101–17, especially 105–6. A similar opinion was expressed by Albert Mirgeler, in ‘Der Zusammenbruch des klassischen Humanismus’, Merkur, 16/2 (1962), 1101–15. The classic statement of Humboldt’s ideas on the formation of character is Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’, in Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, eds., Werke in fünf Bänden,vol.I,2nd edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 235–6: ‘The ultimate task of our existence is to do all we can to enrich the concept of humanity, both in our own persons during our own lifetime, and also through the living influence that we leave behind us. This task can be performed only by linking our selves with the world through the widest, most vigorous and untrammelled reciprocity.’ The debate about the end of Humboldtian humanism, which was just beginning around 1960, would repay further investigation. 24 Max Horkheimer, ‘Aufstieg und Niedergang des Individuums’, in Max Horkheimer and Alfred Schmidt, eds., Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften,vol.6 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 145. 25 Theodor W.Adorno, ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’, in Brian O’Connor, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1957]), 212–29,here220. See also Christian Thies, Die Krise des Individuums. Zur Kritik der Moderne bei Adorno und Gehlen (Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997); Udo Göttlich, ‘Die Krise des Individuums. Literatursoziologie und Massenkulturkritik bei Leo Löwenthal’, in Renate Glaser and Matthias Luserke, eds., Literaturwissenschaft – Kulturwissenschaft. Positionen, Themen, Perspektiven (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 147–68, especially 158–65. 26 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 125. 8 Contemporary European History juggernaut of modern society.’27 In a similar vein, Günther Anders describes the ‘quiet terrorism’ of conformist popular entertainment, which disarms the individual and his cultural potential, leaving him defenceless.28 These clamouring voices posed a problem that perhaps emerges most clearly in critical theory: how can individuality survive in an environment which has reduced it to a manipulated projector screen? The scalpel wielded by Horkheimer and Adorno exposed the powerlessness of the manipulated self. The objective underpinning of their trenchant criticism of American/Western, media-dominated consumer society was hard to refute; but critics such as Wolfgang Abendroth had some reason to complain that their opponents were inclined to ignore real-life examples and cling to a sterile determinism. Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno failed to suggest any means of overcoming the modern consumer culture that they were so fond of denouncing: theory remained ‘the handmaid of emancipation in a world that no one was seeking to emancipate’.29 Apart from Herbert Marcuse’s ominous socially marginalised groups, it is impossible to discern actors, subjects or individual powers capable of shattering the armour of conformity. History had apparently come to a stop, paralysed at the intersection of ever-the-same and ever-new, which mass culture had reduced to a single, dull dimension.

II.

One of the most striking phenomena of recent cultural history is that the critical approach described above more or less fell away in the 1980s. In place of consumer criticism, continental Europe, including Germany, basically accepted a model with entirely different historical antecedents: American prosperity, which from the outset entailed a much more positive, indeed affirmative, attitude to consumption and the consumer society; a model which defined ‘selfhood’ and ‘consumption’ along entirely different lines.30 The United States had its own brand of consumer criticism, directed mainly against the consumption, leisure and entertainment habits of the middle classes in America’s ‘affluent society’. The most influential writers in this school include

27 Horkheimer, Aufstieg, 160. 28 Günther Anders, ‘Der sanfte Terror. Theorie des Konformismus’, Merkur, 18/1 (1964), 209–24.See also his Antiquiertheit. Further Daniel Morat, ‘Die Aktualität der Antiquiertheit. Günther Anders’ Anthropologie des industriellen Zeitalters’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, online edn, 3 (2006), H. 2, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Morat-2–2006 (accessed 10 Nov. 2010). 29 Richard Heigl, Oppositionspolitik. Wolfgang Abendroth und die Enstehung der Neuen Linken (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2008), 253–61, quotation 253. In general, see also Demirovic,´ Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle, 44–45 and passim. 30 See also Jakob Tanner, ‘Industrialisierung, Rationalisierung und Wandel des Konsum- und Geschmacksverhaltens im europäisch-amerikanischen Vergleich’, in Siegrist, Kaelble and Kocka, Europäische Konsumgeschichte I, 583–613. On the time-lag between American and European developments (with particular reference to Germany), see König, Geschichte der Konsumgesellschaft, 108–22. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 9

David Riesman,31 John Kenneth Galbraith,32 Neil Postman33 and Christopher Lasch.34 Nonetheless the dominant American attitude towards consumerism became, and remained, optimistic,35 an attitude which has two separately traceable historical roots. One of these roots is cultural sociology, deriving from Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe the behaviour of the upper classes: consumption is an act that confers social distinction, a symbolic representation of superior status. In this comparatively early work consumption is already elevated to a cultural act with a ‘ceremonial character’; as ‘evidence of wealth’ it also has an eminently social meaning.36 Even so, Veblen strikes a note of normative consumer criticism from time to time, as when he links ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘conspicuous leisure’ with ‘conspicuous waste’ (waste of time and waste of goods).37 But he claims to use ‘waste’ as a purely technical, not a condemnatory, term.38 Most important, Veblen was the first to discern in consumption an inherent trend not to destroy individuality, but on the contrary to sanction and identify it as a badge of distinction. The other root of this optimistic American attitude to consumerism lies in materialist economics: in Henry Ford’s vision of a mass consumption society based on rationalisation, mass production and higher mass spending power. Both approaches, though with radically different thrusts, agree in identifying the consumer as actor. Consumption is seen as an expression of modern civilisation; the standardised mass production and mass culture that shape the consumer’s environment actually guarantee his individuality, in that his purchasing decisions are made of his own free will. Horkheimer and Adorno described the basic question ‘What do people want?’ as ‘shameless’, a purely rhetorical question.39 The American model assumed that the forming of individual taste, and with it the purchasing power of the consumer, could exercise a decisive influence on economic development. This reading is completely opposed to the patterns of Marxist and conservative bourgeois consumer criticism, chiefly because it has a fundamentally different concept of selfhood, abandoning the classic, liberal bourgeois notion of individual

31 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950). 32 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 11th edn (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), especially 158–60 on the ‘dependence effect’: ‘As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied’. 33 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (London: Methuen, 1987), especially on television as a ‘meta-medium’. 34 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York:W.W.NortonandCo.,1978). 35 A classic is George Katona, The Mass Consumption Society (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). 36 Thorstein Veblen, A Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor Books, 1953,[1st edn 1899]), especially 60–80, quotation 61. 37 Ibid., 74–75. 38 ‘It is here used for want of a better term that will adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate expenditure of human products or of human life. In the view of economic theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less legitimate than any other expenditure.’ Ibid., 78. 39 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116. 10 Contemporary European History personality grounded in property and (humanistic) education. Instead it assumes that consumption can foreground individuality despite the inexorable tendency towards uniformity in mass culture. The American sociologist Hazel Kyrk, later known principally for her work in home economics, expressed this quintessential idea as early as 1924:

This is a regime of individualism in consumption, as it is in production, in government, in religion. Freedom of choice in the use of goods is one of many forms of freedom, economic and otherwise, that differentiate the status of the individual in the present social order from what it was in the past. All the individual and social advantages claimed for liberty and freedom in other fields may be claimed for them here.40 Kyrk firmly rejects the idea of consumers as purely passive and manipulable victims of market relationships. When a consumer decides what to buy, he becomes an active ‘chooser’, hence an individual on the market and an ‘active force’.41 Thus Kyrk, at this early stage, had already brought together the two historical roots of American consumer optimism – cultural sociology and economic materialism – into a single ‘theory of consumption’. This approach, breaking decisively with classic humanist concepts of the individual, was inseparable from the developing urban environment. Amidst the anonymity of the city it was important to stand out as a person, to ceremoniously exhibit one’s own status, to spend more than one’s country cousins. ‘In the struggle to outdo one another,’ says Veblen, ‘the city population push their normal standard of conspicuous consumption to a higher point.’42 At about the same time, Georg Simmel in Germany was moving towards a similar viewpoint in his discussion of the ‘difficulty of asserting one’s own personality within the dimension of city life’:

When the quantitative growth in significance and energy reaches its limit, people will seek to individuate themselves (Besonderung) in order to win the esteem of their social circle by marking themselves out as different. The result is a tendentious zeal for the exceptional, the sort of extravagant apartness, caprice and preciosity that are only found in cities: a kind of behaviour whose meaning depends not on its content but only on its form, the obsession with being different, standing out from the crowd and so attracting attention. Many people think this is the only way to impinge on other people’s consciousness and so preserve their own self-esteem and convince themselves that they belong somewhere.43

40 Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption, 41. Later Kyrk refutes the objection that standardised production and commercialism are destructive of individuality: ibid., 79–81. 41 Ibid., 5. 42 Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 72. 43 Georg Simmel, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (1903), in Michael Landmann, ed., Brücke und Tür, Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: K. F.Koehler Verlag, 1957), 227–42, especially 239–40. See the similar (but more critical of both culture and consumption) pronouncements by Ortega y Gasset, ‘Dinámica del tiempo’ (1927), in J. Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1998), 343:‘Nowadaysamancanarriveinatownandaftera few days become its most famous and envied inhabitant, merely by strolling past the shop windows, choosing the best wares – the best car, the best hat, the best cigarette lighter, etc. – and buying them. He might as well be an automaton equipped with a pocket that it can mechanically put its hand into; it would still become best-known person in the town.’ More generally, see the discussion in Karl Oldenberg, ‘Die Konsumption’, in Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, part II, Die natürlichen und technischen From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 11

Here is a page in the history of German cultural politics that has only recently been opened to view. While echoing the ever-recurring shibboleths of social conservative anti-urbanism,44 it also offers another view of city life and city living that is probably far truer to life. Even contemporary observers such as the Berlin pastor Günther Dehn commented on the readiness with which young workers embraced the efficiency of modern city life. Perhaps this was due to the fact that proletarian youths were able to devote less time to the untrammelled development of personality than their upper-middle-class contemporaries; nonetheless the ‘thoroughly individualistic trait’ that Dehn identified in them arose from the multiple learning processes to which the city inescapably subjected them. ‘The thousand attractions and stimuli of the urban world make young people active, responsive, reactive.’ This, combined with the harsh necessity of working for a living, produced a constantly shifting balance between ‘work and pleasure’ which could elicit both ‘noble’ and ‘primitive’ life choices. Characteristically, Dehn links this balance to a prevailing ‘Americanism’ which young workers seemed to have adopted with as much enthusiasm as anybody else: ‘These people are thoroughly Americanised, rationalised down to the deepest roots of their thinking.’45 Similar observations were made with regard to women’s freedom of manoeuvre. Veblen pointed out that women traditionally had few opportunities to make consumer choices, except for a ‘vicarious consumption’ of household objects. Certainly the encoding of consumer attitudes was strongly gendered until well into the twentieth century; at the same time, the mass culture that had been developing since the late nineteenth century also offered women new ways of constructing their identity and new outlets for feminine selfhood. More and more women were seizing opportunities to raise themselves above the level of the urban masses through ‘conspicuous consumption’ and so develop their identities in new ways. A particularly striking example is the transformation in the way cosmetics were ‘consumed’. Originally, buying and using cosmetics was frowned on even in the United States insofar as a woman’s ‘natural’ face was assumed to mirror her authentic inner self. This changed radically in the first third of the twentieth century, when an unprecedented expansion in the sale and advertising of cosmetics led to commodification of the female body.46 Society’s increasing acceptance of the right of women to make (up) their own faces

Beziehungen der Wirtschaft. Wirtschaft und Natur (1. Teil), 2nd revised edn (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1923), 188–260, especially 201–3. 44 Cf. Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1970). 45 Günther Dehn, Proletarische Jugend. Lebensgestaltung und Gedankenwelt der großstädtischen Proletarierjugend, 2nd edn (Berlin: Fürche-Verlag, 1930), 36–39. Detlev J. K. Peukert, in particular, has reached a similar conclusion: see his Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise. Lebenswelten von Arbeiterjungen in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1987), and ‘Das Mädchen mit dem “wahrlich metaphysikfreien Bubikopf”. Jugend und Freizeit im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre’, in Peter Alter, ed., Im Banne der Metropolen. Berlin und London in den zwanziger Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 157–78. 46 See Joel Spring, Educating the Consumer Citizen. A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising, and Media (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003), 47. 12 Contemporary European History widened their social options and became a vehicle for the construction of feminine identity.47 It was during this same period that Europe’s great cities, particularly Paris and Berlin under the Weimar Republic, were becoming laboratories for testing new forms of female individuality against a background of modern, urban mass culture.48 This is an area which calls for more detailed research, but already there is no doubt that a new cultural dynamic was evolving in the first third of the twentieth century, or that it was active in Germany. It could be labelled ‘post-bourgeois’ and consisted of a reciprocal influence between economically driven mass culture and expanding consumption, which jointly led to a widening of social options and new ways of constructing identity and individuality.49 Though vehemently rejected by contem- porary bourgeois and Marxist critics alike, it was already shaping the lifestyles of an ever-widening section of the population. One might suggest that at this stage two different concepts of selfhood, which had developed at different times, had attained an uneasy but remarkably durable co-existence: first, the classic liberal bourgeois concept, which was now sliding into deep crisis, clinging to elite individualism while continuing its bitterly eloquent denunciations of modern mass culture; second, the

47 Among many other contributions, see Kathy Peiss, ‘Making Up, Making Over. Cosmetics, Consumer Culture, and Women’s Identity’, in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things. Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 311–36, and her Hope in a Jar. The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), especially 61–158. The extract from an interview in Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 36, is both amusing and enlightening in this connection and vividly illustrates how earlier attitudes were contending against new trends in American society around 1950: ‘Q[uestion]. Do you think the teachers should punish the children for using make up? A[nswer]. Yes, I think they should punish them, but understand, I’m a modern mother and while I’m strict with my daughters, I am still modern. You know you can’t punish your children too much or they begin to think you are mean and other children tell them you are mean.’ 48 See, with varying focuses, Annelie Lütgens, ‘Passantinnen/Flaneusen. Frauen im Bild großstädtischer Öffentlichkeit der Zwanziger Jahre’, in Katharina Sykora et al., eds., Die Neue Frau. Herausforderung für die Bildmedien der Zwanziger Jahre (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1993), 107–18, especially 114–15; Gesa Kessemeier, Sportlich, sachlich, männlich. Das Bild der „Neuen Frau“ in den Zwanziger Jahren. Zur Konstruktion geschlechtsspezifischer Körperbilder in der Mode der Jahre 1920 bis 1929 (Dortmund: Eberbach, 2000); Burcu Dogramaci, ‘Mode-Körper. Zur Inszenierung von Weiblichkeit in Modegrafik und -fotografie der Weimarer Republik’, in Michael Cowan and Kai Marcel Sicks, eds., Leibhaftige Moderne. Körper in Kunst und Massenmedien 1918 bis 1933 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2005), 119– 35; Moritz Föllmer, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem eigenen Leben. Junge Frauen und Individualität in der Weimarer Republik’, in Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, eds., Die „Krise“ der Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005), 287–317. On the discourse of female selfhood around 1900, see Andrea Bührmann, Der Kampf um „weibliche Individualität“. Zur Transformation moderner Subjektivierungsweisen in Deutschland um 1900 (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, 2004), especially 76–90. More critically: Angela McRobbie, ‘Bridging the Gap. Feminismus, Mode und Konsum’, in Jan Engelmann, ed., Die kleinen Unterschiede. Der Cultural Studies-Reader (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus,1999), 202–20. More general works on the development of urban mass culture include Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 49 See, especially, Moritz Föllmer, ‘Die Berliner Boulevardpresse und die Politik der Individualität in der Zwischenkriegszeit’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig, ed., Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007), 293–326; Per Leo, ‘Der “fremde Andere”. Zur Sichtbarkeit des Einzelnen in den Inszenierungen der modernen Großstadt’, in Hardtwig, Ordnungen in der Krise, 261–91. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 13 new forms of selfhood that had emerged at the turn of the century and which, far from opposing modern mass society, depended on it for its very existence. It was the rise of a mass culture rooted in abundance and uniformity that gave individuals new tools for the construction of selfhood without reverting to the traditional cement of ancestry and family, social class, religious affiliation and education. It was, however, in America that the reality of this new lifestyle was first perceived, and immediately conceptualised as a positive social blueprint. It meant considering the consumer as an eminently political animal. From early in the twentieth century, armies of marketing professionals and product managers had striven to create a hegemonic discourse that drew a clear parallel between the world of the consumer and the world of politics.50 To elevate unrestrained consumerism to a basic social entitlement was to underscore the principle of democratic equality in the teeth of all forms of economic inequality, however persistent. Consumption was a road to cultural equality that cut across social boundaries; since it enabled individuals (in the mass!) to stand out from the crowd it could be seen as a complement, if not a guarantee, of democracy. The New Deal assumed a Keynesian readiness to intervene in times of economic crisis that was based on mass purchasing power and accepted consumer representatives as political actors.51 From this emerged the influential – and for a time all-conquering – construct of the ‘consumer citizen’.52 The active consumer, constructing his own subjectivity and deciding his own market relationships, became a key figure in the democratic state. It is here that we find the specific difference between American and continental European consumer history. The sources of this difference lie in moral and ideological history. The material and economic elements of consumer society, such as standardised mass production, new sales approaches, continual marketing and new social openings in city culture, were by no means confined to the United States; indeed, the time-lag before they made an impact on European lifestyles was generally short.53 Even in the 1950s, economists in the German Federal Republic had a highly optimistic notion of the consumer’s role. Scholars such as Herbert Gross hailed the opportunities for participation offered by the mass market, the new possibilities of self-realisation which

50 Charles McGovern, ‘Consumption and Citizenship in the United States, 1900–1940’, in Susan Strasser et al., eds., Getting and Spending. European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 37–58. For a broader view, see Spring, Educating the Consumer Citizen, which traces the beginnings of this ‘consumer ideology’ back to the late nineteenth century. 51 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic. The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 18–61, especially ‘The New Deal State and the Making of Citizen Consumers’, 111–26. 52 Lizabeth Cohen, ‘Citizens and Consumers in the United States in the Century of Mass Consumption’, in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption, 203–22, especially 214; A Consumers’ Republic, passim. See also Sheryl Kroen, ‘Der Aufstieg des Kundenbürgers? Eine politische Allegorie für unsere Zeit’, in Prinz, Der lange Weg in den Überfluß, 533–64, especially 555; Frank Trentmann, ‘Knowing Consumers – Histories, Identities, Practices: An Introduction’, in Trentmann, ed., Making of the Consumer, 1–27, especially 3. 53 On the impact of the ‘American way of life’, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 14 Contemporary European History

‘enthroned the consumer as emperor of the market’.54 Others insisted on maintaining a clear distinction between consumption as a category of cultural criticism, and the economic analysis of consumers and consumer behaviour. ‘The degradation of a human being to the status of an end consumer has nothing to do with the activation of the consumer as a factor of economics.’55 In other words, what one person saw as ‘putting pressure on consumers’ was hailed by others as consumer power. The 1977 report of the Federal German Commission for Economic and Social Change revealed a similar difference of opinion among its members. The majority refused to see the consumer as ‘a market partner on equal terms’ and thought that ‘the idea of influencing consumers’ preferences in a way that they can neither perceive nor control ...undermines their freedom of choice’. The minority insisted that consumers were ‘individuals endowed with freedom of choice and freedom of action’ and rejected wide-ranging consumer protection measures as an assault on ‘the intelligence of the consumer as a responsible citizen’.56 Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, European practitioners in the human and social sciences, bending to the tenaciousness of conservative bourgeois criticism and Marxist anti-capitalism, would have scorned the concept of the American-style citizen consumer. The image of a sovereign consumer constructing his own subjectivity through active purchasing choices, and so generating social and political cohesion, was quite simply incompatible with the classic concept of selfhood cherished by European neo-humanists and late Marxists. Nonetheless, in the 1980s this transatlantic opposition began to move towards a new consensus. To be more precise, the American paradigm triumphed over European scepticism, and the resulting convergence is one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the recent history of ideas. The reasons for this profound paradigm shift are complex. Most important of all, a new generation, born and bred amidst a general economic boom, shook off older ideological patterns. The rejection of traditional, originally nineteenth-century bourgeois cultural conservatism made itself generally felt in the 1960s: an environment so visibly and sensuously characterised by well-being, consumption and proliferating media scarcely encouraged younger people to espouse the anti-consumerist cultural pessimism of their elders. In 1960, Jean-Marie Domenach, editor of the French cultural magazine Esprit, observed with resigned accuracy that ‘Only ten years ago we could look down, from our lofty perches, on snack-bars, supermarkets, strip-teases and all the paraphernalia of the acquisitive society. Now it has more or less infested every corner of Europe. This is no longer our society, but it may ... be the only society our children will ever know.’57

54 Herbert Gross, Die Wirtschaft sind wir. Von der Schlüsselstellung des Verbrauchers (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1955), especially 12–24, quotation 22–23. 55 Josef Bock, ‘Der Verbraucher in soziologischer Sicht’, in Josef Bock and Karl Gustav Specht, eds., Verbraucherpolitik (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1958), 25–49,here33. There is an allusion here to Friedrich Sieburg’s attach on this trend in ‘Vom Menschen zum Endverbraucher’. 56 Wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Wandel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Gutachten der Kommission, veröffentlicht durch die Bundesregierung (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz & Co., 1977), 405. 57 Jean-Marie Domenach, ‘Le modèle américain’, Esprit, 28, July/Aug. (1960), 1219–32,here1221.On the reception of America and American consumerism in France, see also John Ardagh, The New From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 15

The new generation in West Germany was ushered in by a profound socio-cultural liberalisation,58 which among the middle classes went hand in hand with increasing acceptance of economic priorities and consumerist lifestyles. German historiography followed suit by adopting an American approach in tandem with the ‘cultural turn’. Not only did consumption and the consumer society become favourite subjects for research, but consumption was seen as a – perhaps the – key to the historical analysis of modern societies. The moral legitimacy of consumption in a capitalist society ceased to be disputed; criticism of the possibly manipulative structures of consumerism faded into the background or was left to other disciplines.59 In fact, cultural historians no longer felt bound to approach consumption in the spirit of latter-day enlightened philosophers: they set out to decode the cultural and social significance of consumption rather than engaging in critical analysis of dependences, profit forecasts or the dynamics of what Marx called Kapitalverwertung, the valorisation of capital:

Consumers long ago ceased to be people without much money who dangled like puppets on strings manipulated by shrewd marketing men ...Recent research in cultural history has put consumers – of goods and services – at centre stage and takes them seriously as active contributors to past and future developments, even if they are not considered to be absolutely autonomous. The cultural historian’s quest for meaning is particularly fruitful when he takes this line, because consumer goods are in fact the most important means of constructing and representing identity in modern societies.60

Thus the ‘citizen consumer’ emerged in Western Europe as a new social type whose sense of self derived entirely from the market, in which he participated as a largely autonomous subject. Particularly in West Germany, this figure was fundamentally different from the bourgeois or the Bildungsbürger of former times.

His capital derives neither from the production of goods nor from the acquisition of symbolic profits from the practice of science or art; rather it derives from the fact that he has the wherewithal to participate in a world of ubiquitous commodification and through it find both a place in society and an individual identity. The citizen consumer represents the quintessential lifestyle of modern consumer society: just like everybody else and yet sufficient to himself, interpreting liberty as freedom of choice, universality as a world in which everything is for sale.61

French Revolution. A Social and Economic Survey of France (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French. The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Philippe Roger, Rêves et cauchemars américains. Les États-Unis au miroir de l’opinion publique française (1945–1953) (Arras: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996). For more on the context, see Stefanie Middendorf, Massenkultur. Zur Wahrnehmung gesellschaftlicher Modernität in Frankreich 1880–1990 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009). 58 Cf. Ulrich Herbert, ed., Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland. Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002). 59 An example of a Freudian psychoanalytical approach is Wolfgang Schmidbauer, Jetzt haben, später zahlen. Die seelischen Folgen der Konsumgesellschaft (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1995). 60 Michael Prinz, ‘Die konsumgesellschaftliche Seite des “Rheinischen Kapitalismus”’, in Volker Berghahn and Sigurt Vitols, eds., Gibt es einen deutschen Kapitalismus? Tradition und globale Perspektiven der sozialen Marktwirtschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2006), 113–28, especially 115. 61 Michael Wildt, ‘Konsumbürger. Das Politische als Optionsfreiheit und Distinktion’, in Manfred Hettling, ed., Bürgertum nach 1945 (Hamburg, 2005), 255–83, especially 256. 16 Contemporary European History

Observations of this kind strongly influenced the subject matter and method of research in the humanities and social sciences. The history of advertising as a research subject is a notable example. Its economic and ethical status had long been a matter of dispute among American students of the consumer society. Whereas Galbraith considered that the main function of modern advertising was ‘to bring into being wants that previously did not exist’,62 George Kantona upheld the opposite view, that advertising was genuinely informative, and that the consumers could be viewed optimistically as equal partners in the marketing process.63 A similar reassessment took place in German historiography and sociology. Few things were more repellent to German ‘educated citizens’ and scholars than advertisements; many would have agreed with Werner Sombart’s stigmatisation of them as ‘aesthetically repugnant and morally insolent’.64 Previous critics such as Röpke had fulminated against ‘advertisements spoiling the landscape’;65 nowadays they are accepted as ‘everyday iconography’.66 Horkheimer and Adorno had located the ‘triumph of advertising’ in ‘compulsive imitation by consumers’;67 critics such as Wolfgang Fritz Haug had shown how manipulative advertising created a compulsion to buy. Now, researchers are more likely to talk about ‘the discourse of meaning in the consumer culture’.68 Haug’s excoriating criticism of the aesthetics of advertisements for British underpants – ‘Mother wouldn’t like it’ and ‘It’ll bring out the animal in you’ – sounds like a voice from a lost world.69 The citizen consumer is now a standard academic model, an autonomous subject endowed with ‘equal communication rights’. Advertising is no longer seen as simply ‘telling about the product, but as an aesthetic exercise in innovative media technology and the visual discourse of extended ... lifestyles’.70

62 Galbraith, Affluent Society, 155. 63 Katona, Mass Consumption Society, 61: ‘[The consumer] is neither a puppet nor a pawn. For a while some consumers may be stimulated into buying something that is useless or wasteful, but they do eventually learn better. A study of empirical evidence will show that most consumers, though they are not ideal “rational men”, are circumspect and sensible.’ 64 Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois. Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen,newedn (Reinbek: Rohwalt, 1988 [1913]), 178. Even Max Weber, who took a more moderate attitude towards the market, considered that consumers’ demand functions in a capitalist society depended essentially on the way ‘new wants are created and others allowed to disappear’ and that ‘capitalistic enterprises, through their aggressive advertising policies, exercise an important influence on the demand functions of consumers’. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 99. 65 Röpke, ‘Marktwirtschaft ist nicht genug’, 19–20. 66 See the instructive overview by Clemens Wischermann, ‘Grenzenlose Werbung? Zur Ethik der Konsumgesellschaft’, in Peter Borscheid and Clemens Wischermann, eds., Bilderwelt des Alltags. Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 372–407. 67 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 136. 68 Stefan Haas, ‘Sinndiskurse in der Konsumkultur. Die Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung von der ständischen bis zur postmodernen Gesellschaft’, in Prinz, Der lange Weg in den Überfluß, 291–314. 69 Haug, Kritik der Warenästhetik, 108–9. 70 Haas, ‘Sinndiskurse’, 291–92. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 17

III.

Can we conclude at this point that the cessation of pessimistic denunciations of consumer culture and the associated paradigm shift indicate a thoroughgoing ‘Americanisation’ of culture? To do so would be over-hasty and unrewarding. To attain a deeper level of understanding it is necessary to examine the actual process of historical change and so take a fresh approach to the relationship between individual and society in modernity. For centuries there was a strong connection between work and the skills of the individual worker, on the one hand, and the construction of selfhood on the other. Le métier fait l’homme: the French proverb is an accurate expression of pride in work, the moral value of skilled work, and hence the self-awareness of the producer.71 It is also necessary to locate this motif – personal labour skills – in the context of a history of ‘selfhood’, meaning the progressive liberation of the individual from imposed restrictions, assumptions and certainties that is the constitutive process of Western modernity. If autonomy is an individual’s natural right, he then accedes to a new, increasingly self-reflexive contact with the world around him.72 It is of course no coincidence that the modern labour theory of value originated with John Locke in late seventeenth-century England, where labour had come closest to bursting out of its late-medieval/early modern legal framework.73 Nineteenth-century thinking was dominated by the Marxist concept of the value of labour: wage labour becomes itself a commodity and is subject to discipline and exploitation by industrial capitalism. From a sociological point of view, however, it is important not to underestimate the emancipative potential of the individual ownership of labour, which can be seen as an ideal type: for a brief moment of historical transition, labour gave the worker ‘free agency’ and so laid the foundations

71 Cf. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, ‘Arbeit und Solidarität. Formen und Entwicklungen der Handwerkermentalität im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert in Frankreich und Deutschland’, in Ulrich Engelhardt, ed., Handwerker in der Industrialisierung. Lage, Kultur und Politik vom späten 18. bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Ulrich Engelhardt, 1984), 469–96. 72 Classics of this mode of thought include Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, new edn (London: Penguin, 2004). See also Richard van Dülmen, ed., Entdeckung des Ich. Die Geschichte der Individualisierung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Publikation der Arbeitsstelle für Historische Kulturforschung, Universität des Saarlandes (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001); Charles Taylor’s major study Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Ulrich Beck’s closely argued Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1994). 73 The locus classicus for this is John Locke, ‘An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government’, in Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government, Book II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), § 27, 305–6: ‘Though the Earth and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.’ Cf. also Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), especially 148–9, 163; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1962). 18 Contemporary European History for the moral autonomy of the individual.74 The moral autonomy of the artisan, or skilled worker, which is closely allied to the bourgeois work ethic, is deeply rooted in European social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.75 Without it the modern society of labour – in which labour itself is the mediator of individuality and identity – could scarcely have developed when it did. The picture changed only gradually, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and only to the extent that wage labour had established itself beyond question as a principle of the capitalist economy. A wage-earner who feels at home in his role as part of an industrialised production process, highly dependent on division of labour, is unlikely to rebel against the factory per se; he will be more interested in the purchasing power of his wages. His self-image will be very different from that of an artisan: he will look more like a consumer who follows his own interests outside his place of work, in an ever-widening sphere of leisure and consumption.76 The labour movement followed suit by focusing on the purchasing power of wages over and above meeting daily needs. It is here that we should look for the roots of the Fordist compromise between labour and capital with the twin aims of rationalising production and increasing mass purchasing power. The twentieth century saw huge increases in productivity that reduced working time and stimulated consumption; the importance of work in the construction of selfhood was correspondingly reduced. In the industrialised world mass production, symbolised by the conveyor belt and the factory gate, turned human labour skills into saleable articles, leaving ever less room for the creation of an individual identity distinct from its environment. And the more workers saw themselves as consumers, the larger their non-working time budgets and the fatter their pay-packets, the more consumption tended to replace work as the determiner of individual identity.77

74 See Karl Heinz Metz, ‘Arbeit als Geschichte. Überlegungen zu einer analytischen Geschichte der Arbeit in Europa seit dem Mittelalter’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 85 (2003), 471–92, especially 479. 75 A groundbreaking study is Michael Maurer, Die Biographie des Bürgers. Lebensformen und Denkweisen in der formativen Phase des deutschen Bürgertums (1680–1815) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1996), 378– 436. See also Hans-Jörg Zerwas, Arbeit als Besitz. Das ehrbare Handwerk zwischen Bruderliebe und Klassenkampf 1848 (Reinbek: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 225–28; Werner Conze, ‘Arbeit’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland,vol.1 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972), 154–215, especially 171–4. For reflections in literature, see Petra Weser-Bissé, Arbeitscredo und Bürgersinn: Das Motiv der Lebensarbeit in Werken von Gustav Freytag, Otto Ludwig, Gottfried Keller und Theodor Storm (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007). On the concept of bourgeois individuality, see Manfred Hettling, ‘Die persönliche Selbständigkeit. Der archimedische Punkt bürgerlicher Lebensführung’, in Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, eds., Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel. Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000), 57–78. 76 See Andreas Wirsching, ‘Massenkultur in der Demokratie. Zur Entwicklung von Kultur und Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich nach 1945’, in Hélène Miard-Delacroix and Rainer Hudemann, eds., Wandel und Integration. Deutsch-französische Annäherungen der fünfziger Jahre (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), 379–96, here especially 385–6. 77 Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 79, makes a well-known distinction between the ‘inner-directed person’, whose energy is channelled into production, and the ‘other-directed person’, whose energy ‘is channelled into the ever-expanding frontiers of consumption’. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 19

The beginning of this process can be traced back to the first third of the twentieth century in the United States. To begin with, as one would expect, the consumerist paradigm competed with the work-related productionist paradigm. Even Veblen observed that the ‘conspicuous waste’ of the ‘leisure class’ was opposed by an ‘alien factor ... the instinct of workmanship ... That instinct disposes men to look with favor upon productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use.’78 Overall, however, as we noted earlier, American scholars in the 1920s tended to take a positive view of consumer society. It is important to point out that a similar process was already apparent – at least in outline – in the Weimar Republic. Indeed, German industry was seen internationally as a model of fast-track rationalisation on Taylorist and Fordist lines.79 And rationalisation contributed decisively to an attitudinal change, from the productionist paradigm to self-identification as a consumer. Reformist trade unions were particularly attracted by the Fordist model with its stress on increased productivity, higher wages and mass consumption; a good many members of the workers’ movement were allured by the promise of prosperity for workers, who would then be seen primarily as consumers. One such was Fritz Tarnow, one of the most influential advocates of the trade union concept of ‘economic democracy’, who became an eloquent advocate of the Fordist approach to stimulating both productivity and consumption. If paid labour depended on capital, he wrote in 1928, it was now equally true that ‘capital depends on the worker- consumer’.80 From this viewpoint, rationalisation could be seen as a first step towards socialism; the ‘revolutionary automobile’ would ‘serve the cause of the revolutionary working class’.81 However we judge the politics of this approach, the discourse of rationalisation, brought to bear on mass consumption, undoubtedly strengthened the reformist muscle of the Weimar labour movement, which believed that a stable political system was in the workers’ best interests. Indeed, the establishment of a stable consumer society would certainly have strengthened the internal cohesion of the Weimar Republic. There is a link here to the cultural resurgence of the 1920s: far from being confined to the superficial glitter of the ‘roaring twenties’, it had every mark of a developing Americanised mass culture. Department stores and cinemas,

78 Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 76. 79 Robert A. Brady, The Rationalization Movement in German Industry. A Study in the Evolution of Economic Planning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1933). The most important modern study of workplace rationalisation in Germany is Heidrun Homburg, Rationalisierung und Industriearbeit. Arbeitsmarkt – Management – Arbeiterschaft im Siemens-Konzern, Berlin 1900–1939 (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1991). On the ‘Fordist’ debate in the Weimar Republic, see Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 20–34. 80 Fritz Tarnow, Warum arm sein? (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft des ADGB, 1928), 71, quoted in Gunnar Stollberg, Die Rationalisierungsdebatte 1908–1933. Freie Gewerkschaften zwischen Mitwirkung und Gegenwehr (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1981), 180. 81 Fritz Kummer, ‘Das revolutionäre Automobil’, Metallarbeiter-Zeitung, 8 Oct. 1930, quoted in Cora Stephan, ‘Wirtschaftsdemokratie und Umbau der Wirtschaft’, in Wolfgang Luthardt, ed., Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterbewegung und Weimarer Republik. Materialien zur gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung 1927–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), vol. I, 281–92, especially 284. See also, with further supporting evidence, Stollberg, Rationalisierungsdebatte, 86–91. 20 Contemporary European History sporting events and Sunday outings, ‘new woman’ and modern man: individual participation through consumption was gradually turning into an ‘experience value’, not the least of whose virtues was that it offered a thousand small escapes from what was still, for most people, a grey and dismal everyday reality.82 It was not by chance that the most stable (or least unstable) years of the Weimar Republic coincided with the early development of mass culture, mass consumption and an intense public debate about both.83 In fact, the Weimer Republic did not provide the masses with a stable cultural environment in which they could attain individual distinction through mass culture. Democratic strivings for social integration and legitimation repeatedly foundered on the rock of the notorious, economically driven instability (or even reversibility) of consumer experience. Consumption could also be a means of exclusion and declassing; it highlighted the fact that cultural participation still depended to a great degree on class. The gap between consumer expectations and consumer opportunity yawned ever wider, until all consumer potential was annihilated by the Great Depression.84 Precisely the opposite occurred in the boom years of the Federal Republic and indeed all Western Europe. As we have said, the advent of a fully fledged consumer society was greeted with substantial, often intellectually penetrating, criticism; however, this time the new paradigm, bolstered by increased well-being and the levelling effect of mass culture alongside the possibility of individual distinction via consumption, was here to stay. Even the 1968 protests failed to shake it: the protestors’ rhetoric might be vehemently anti-consumerist, but they and their dialectic remained inextricably bound to the burgeoning West German consumer society.85 Against this background the old complaints of the cultural critics rapidly faded out. It is clear, with hindsight, that the chronological overlap between distinct concepts of selfhood was drawing to an end, as both were crowded out by a new selfhood constructed through mass culture. In the Weimer Republic it was still possible to distinguish a ‘tension between the enfeeblement of bourgeois concepts of personality

82 The term ‘experience value’ (Erlebniswert) is from Gerhard Schulze, The Experience Society (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007 [original German edn 1992]). For an overview of mass culture in the Weimar Republic, see Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany.Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 83 Cf. Confino and Koshar, ‘Régimes of Consumer Culture’, 135–36. 84 Compare Stephen N. Broadberry and Albrecht Ritschl, ‘The Iron Twenties: Real Wages, Productivity and the Lack of Prosperity in Britain and Germany Before the Great Depression’, in Christoph Buchheim, Michael Hutter and Harold James, eds., Zerrissene Zwischenkriegszeit. Wirtschaftshistorische Beiträge (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994), 15–43. More general: Claudius Torp, ‘Das Janusgesicht der Weimarer Konsumpolitik’, in Haupt and Torp, Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland, 250–67. 85 Detlef Siegfried, Time Is On My Side. Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), especially 476–520 and passim; Siegfried, ‘Protest am Markt. Gegenkultur in der Konsumgesellschaft um 1968’, in Christina von Hodenberg and Detlef Siegfried, eds., Wo “1968” liegt. Reform und Revolution in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006), 48–78; Stephan Malinowski and Alexander Sedlmaier, ‘“1968” als Katalysator der Konsumgesellschaft. Performative Regelverstöße, kommerzielle Adaptionen und ihre gegenseitige Durchdringung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 32, 2 (2006), 238–67. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 21 and a parallel upsurge in individual self-awareness’.86 Classic cultural criticism had no voice in a post-1945 world whose concept of selfhood was constructed within mass culture, because that criticism postulated the annihilation of individuality by mass culture. Its strictures were unsuited to a time when modern consumption was seen as a road to individual distinction, indeed a ‘medium of individualisation’.87 The abundance of goods and leisure, advertising and product information encouraged consumers to develop individual preferences, obtain what information they needed, and perhaps even become socially respected experts on something or other. In the midst of the ‘lonely crowd’, every individual had a chance to construct his own lifestyle, and with it his own self.88 This remains the case even if the components of an individual’s consumer identity are largely fictitious – if it can only be constructed on the mass-produced foundations of industrial society.89 For example, the 1980s saw the appearance of computer-aided design (CAD): simultaneously a breathtakingly uniform approach to mass production and an incomparable aid to individual product design.90 This ‘mass customisation’ can be applied to a vast range of products, from jeans and shoes to computers and cars.91 It gave a certain aesthetic overtone to the great surge in consumption and leisure in the 1970s–1990s, helping to forge it into a significant socio-cultural reality. A 1989 survey found that about 42 per cent of West German citizens saw consumption as a leisure experience.92 And, perhaps for the first time in German history, the masses had access to luxury goods and were inclined to admire anyone who achieved conspicuous success in this vanity fair, whether by customising his car or by fitting out his living room or kitchen.93 On both the consumer goods market and the leisure or ‘experience’ market, individuality was affirmatively constructed and perfomatively displayed. On the other hand, the proliferation of individual purchasing choice since the 1980s has been denounced both by environmentalists and by those who vaunt the superiority of individual brands over cheap goods mass-produced under poor working

86 Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, ‘Einleitung: Die Kultur der Krise in der Weimarer Republik’, in Föllmer and Graf, Die „Krise“ der Weimarer Republik, 9–44, especially 37. 87 Hannes Siegrist, ‘Regionalisierung im Medium des Konsums’, Comparativ, 11, 1 (2001), 7–26, especially 9. 88 The classic account is Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984),169–208, 260–7 and passim. 89 Cf. Hermann Glaser and Karl Heinz Stahl, Bürgerrecht Kultur, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Sachbuch, 1983), 30 and 64. 90 See Lutz Beyering, Individual Marketing. Wege zum neuen Konsumenten (Landsberg am Lech: Moderne Industrie, 1987), 36–43. 91 Georg Etscheit, ‘Maßgeschneidertes vom Fließband’, Die Zeit, 24 Jan. 2002, 24. 92 Horst W. Opaschwoski, ‘Freizeit, Konsum und Lebensstil’, in Rüdiger Szallies and Günter Wiswede, eds., Wertewandel und Konsum. Fakten, Perspektiven und Szenarien für Markt und Marketing (Landsberg am Lech: Moderne Industrie, 1990), 109–33, especially 113. 93 Horst Nowak and Ulrich Becker, ‘“Es kommt der neue Konsument”. Analysen, Thesen, Vermutun- gen, Modelle. Werte im Wandel’, form – Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, 111 (1985), 13–17; Udo Koppelmann and Erich Küthe, ‘Wohnen 90 – Designakzeptanz durch individualisierte Produktpolitik’, in Szallies and Wiswede, Wertewandel und Konsum, 377–99. 22 Contemporary European History conditions. In ‘alternative’ – intellectual and/or academic – circles this sort of ‘critical consumption’ has itself become a vehicle of individuality.94 All this goes to show that personal ownership of one’s own labour, as vaunted by Locke, has virtually ceased to serve as a basis for the construction of selfhood. In modern post-industrial societies it has largely been replaced by consumption, as value-change researchers frequently remind us. But this does not necessarily represent a shift to post-materialist values, as Robert Inglehart has argued.95 It looks much more like a shift from ‘duty and acceptance values to personal development values’.96 Value- change researchers have confirmed this empirically with respect to the attitudes of the younger generation, with its new ‘value combination, hedonism plus materialism’, its obsession with individual well-being, ‘enjoying life on a basis of well-upholstered material prosperity’.97 In this model, work no longer generates selfhood: its main function is to provide the means of acquisition and so enable the construction of selfhood in the sphere of consumption and leisure. This reversal of priorities in the work-oriented society can be directly linked to a similar reversal in consumer society as represented in the glitzy world of media consumption, where the shift of emphasis from the demand to the supply side offers yet more approaches to the construction of selfhood. Examples are the heroes and heroines of American Hero, Deutschland sucht den Superstar, Germany’s (or America’s) Next Top Model, Big Brother and similar formats.98 Common to all of them is the hope – and chance, however slight – of constructing a prominent self by flaunting one’s person in the mass media. Such media products encourage the illusion that it is possible, in fact relatively easy, to exchange the world of work for a permanent billet in the world of consumption. One could argue that the autonomy of the modern, consumption-and-mass- culture-based individual is illusory. It certainly has an element of manipulation and a tendency to uniformity. And yet any attempt to construct a contemporary self unconnected with uniform mass culture is doomed to failure. Individuality in a mass society can arise only from a dialectic equilibrium between cultural uniformity and individual distinction – a balancing act in the midst of the

94 See, e.g., GEO-Magazin 12 (December 2008), special number on ‘Saving the world through intelligent consumption’. 95 Robert Inglehart, The Silent Revolution. Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princetown University Press, 1977); Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization. Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princetown University Press, 1997), especially 130–42. 96 Helmut Klages, Wertorientierungen im Wandel. Rückblick, Gegenwartsanalyse, Prognosen, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1985), 17. Cf. Andreas Rödder, ‘Werte und Wertewandel: Historisch-politische Perspektiven’, in Andreas Rödder and Wolfgang Elz, eds., Alte Werte – Neue Werte. Schlaglichter des Wertewandels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2008), 9–29,here19–23. 97 Willi Herbert, ‘Wertwandel in den 80er Jahren: Entwicklung eines neuen Wertmusters?’, in Hein Otto Luthe and Heiner Meulemann, eds., Wertwandel – Faktum oder Fiktion? Bestandsaufnahmen und Diagnosen aus kultursoziologischer Sicht (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988), 140–60, especially 152. 98 See Udo Göttlich, ‘Individualisierung im Spannungsfeld von Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit. Kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Einflussfaktoren auf den Wandel von Medienformaten’, in Bettina Sokol, ed., Mediale (Selbst-)Darstellung und Datenschutz (Düsseldorf: Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz, 2001), 21–39, especially 33–7. From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 23 leisure-media-and-consumption market. This equilibrium has shaped the recent (post-1945) history of society and culture in the Western democracies, and is now shaping our present.

IV.

Truly has it been said that ‘the emergence of a consumer-oriented society is becoming the narrative of the age’.99 As teleology this has been disputed,100 but there is no denying that the new narrative contains a normative, historically rooted developmental trend linking it to a model of Western mass consumption society that is outwardly irenic and inwardly at peace. At a pinch this could even be used as a foundation for the construction of a ‘contrast programme’ with the hard-nosed, violently militaristic European history of the twentieth century.101 The paradigm shift that this entails has often been noted,102 but its longer-term significance cannot yet be discerned. Historians of culture have rightly claimed it as an epistemological progress, and there is no doubt that this widening of the field of study, and the way certain lines of cultural, social and economic research have converged on consumption, has a high explanatory potential. It is less clear, however, if the critical dimension of the discussion of consumption can easily be disposed of. Since 1989–90 it has been very hard indeed to maintain a historiographical standpoint that is outside the new dominant parameters: the market economy and mass consumption society. Today’s scholars themselves live and move amidst multifarious media glitz and an unprecedented abundance of consumer goods; it is scarcely surprising if their research interests are focused on aspects of their own perceived environment.103 Those methods are popular ‘that can deal analytically with the individualising fragmentation of society, with ever more rapidly changing fashions and trends, the growing demand for distinction, the overload of information, offers and images’.104 Historians are always in danger of seeing their subject from an affirmative and self-referential point of view. Scholars in the contemporary humanities and social sciences can all too easily be accused of having ‘ranged themselves almost exclusively on the winning side’.105 Upon reflection, however, one can see that the language

99 Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 269. 100 Hannes Siegrist, ‘Konsum, Kultur und Gesellschaft im modernen Europa’, in Siegrist, Kaelble and Kocka, Europäische Konsumgeschichte, 13–48, especially 29. 101 Thus Volker Berghahn, Europa im Zeitalter der Weltkriege. Die Entfesselung und Entgrenzung der Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 12 (part of the introductory chapter, which is significantly entitled ‘War and Consumption’). 102 See, e.g., Siegrist, Konsum, 25; Wyrwa, ‘Consumption’, 757–61; Prinz, ‘Die konsumgesellschaftliche Seite’, 115; Wildt, ‘Konsumbürger’. 103 For a sharply critical view of this, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte,vol.V, Bundesrepublik und DDR 1949–1990 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 117–18. 104 Alexander Sedlmaier, ‘Consumerism – cui buno? Neuere Studien zu Theorie, Geschichte und Kultur des Konsums’, Neue Politische Literatur, 50, 2 (2005), 249–73, especially 257. 105 So, pointedly, Ulf Poschardt, ‘Mensch, werde Ware!’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 284, 8 Dec. 1999,M15: ‘Culture and intelligence have swapped sides. Through the twentieth century more and more 24 Contemporary European History of scholarship occasionally approximates to marketing speak, particularly when the scholar sees the consumer as an equal participant in the discourse of advertising and market practices, or as an autonomous individual with a quasi-public function – a citizen consumer who fulfils both his personal desires and his civic obligations through consumption. That, after all, is how the market men see him: ‘the new consumer represents a new kind of citizen ... more critical, more enlightened, emancipated, mature, active, creative, but also more demanding than any of his predecessors’.106 Nevertheless scholars need to guard against the institutional tyranny and misleading language of marketing; and historians ought not to assume that ‘questions foregrounded by profit-oriented marketing strategies are genuinely central’.107 I shall conclude by summarising three arguments that indicate where the boundaries, and also the problems, of the new narrative may lie. 1. The challenge of social philosophy: this takes us back to the relationship between society and the individual. It is basically correct to see the consumerist paradigm as a variant of utilitarian thought. Having made this assumption, we must then take a number of open questions in utilitarian social philosophy and apply them to the conceptual sphere of consumer history. What, for example, is ‘happiness’, to which all people supposedly aspire?108 How much modern ‘happiness’ can be bought with the single currency of consumption? And how far can consumption guarantee the instant gratification demanded by the ‘punctual self’ of modern man?109 What quality of happiness? What sources of selfhood, what mediators of individuality? These may be the hot topics of future debates. And if historians accept that the development and

intellectuals have gone over to capitalism – cynically, ironically, falsely or out of sheer cowardice. In any case, now at the end of the century they have ranged themselves almost exclusively on the winning side. [...] It includes advertising, and all intellectuals have made their peace with that. Fashion photography and videoclips, both of which started as marketing ploys, are hailed as paradigms for the understanding of contemporary culture.’ 106 Beyering, Individual Marketing, 124. 107 Victoria de Grazia, ‘Amerikanisierung und wechselnde Leitbilder der Konsum-Moderne (consumer- modernity) in Europa’, in Siegrist, Kaelble and Kocka, Europäische Konsumgeschichte, 109–37, especially 136. 108 Jeremy Bentham himself attached a purely quantitative meaning to the central concept of happiness and did not differentiate among different kinds of pleasure. John Stuart Mill, however, refused to express happiness in terms of quantitative hedonism and rated intellectual pleasures more highly than sensual ones. See John Stuart Mill, ‘On Utilitarianism’ (1861), in J. M. Robson, ed., Collected Works, Vol.10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 212: ‘It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly- endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.’ For a sociological discussion (in a somewhat journalistic style), see the contributions in Peter Kemper and Ulrich Sonnenschein, eds., Glück und Globalisierung. Alltag in Zeiten der Weltgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). 109 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 159–76. Cf. Hartmut Rosa, Identität und kulturelle Praxis. Politische Philosophie nach Charles Taylor (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1996), 348–9 and the ensuing criticism of utilitarianism, which leads once again to a critical assessment of the consumer society (ibid., 399–407). From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 25 establishment of consumer society really are the narrative of our time, they will need to decide what forms of individualism are going to engage their attention, and how they intend to approach the absolutisation of the market. A social philosopher who contemplates consumer society must also engage with forms of political discourse and the safeguarding of individual freedom. A notorious weakness of utilitarianism, which John Stuart Mill pointed out long ago, is that it tends to lose sight of individuals and their happiness by concentrating on the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’. At worst, utilitarians may neglect everything except the crude sum total of accrued enjoyment, irrespective of who is in a position to accrue it. The narrative of consumer society follows a similar logic. Its primary subject is consumption as a lifestyle available to the masses, and the ensuing opportunities for individual distinction. It is less interested in the frustration of those who lack the means to attain such distinction, or the freedoms that are denied to them. Hence this narrative requires constant underpinning and criticism by way of concrete empirical research into material structures, economic dependencies and social inequality. 2. This brings us to the socio-economic limitations and problems of the consumer narrative: it has difficulty grappling with social inequality. The problem is that words such as ‘consumption’, ‘consumer’ and ‘consumer society’ do not refer to any social group in particular; the more such words are used, the more they grind down social oppositions and inequalities to the same cultural level, leaving only ‘fine’ or ‘slight’ distinctions.110 Like the superior category of mass culture, ‘consumer’ suggests uniformity and social levelling. As an academic paradigm for a globalised, capitalised world it may have its merits, but it may also obscure a connection that remains highly relevant to modern mass society: the connection between work and consumption. We have traced the steady retreat, through the twentieth century, of work as a cultural agency and medium for the construction of selfhood. The traditional, work-focused curriculum vitae became noticeably less popular in the last third of that century.111 This does not mean that gainful employment is no longer the high road to cultural participation. On the contrary, it is also the high road into the modern consumer society. Only those who are gainfully employed have the wherewithal to make individual purchasing choices and so affirm themselves as individuals. The economically driven relativisation of the labour factor should not blind us to the new (and old) inequalities it has produced. We need to ask whether parts of the workforce are simply dropping out of the labour market with the consequent creation of a new class of ‘supernumeraries’ or ‘benefit classes’.112 It is clear that de-industrialisation and globalisation are creating a new ‘mass vulnerability’ on the market that runs counter

110 Engelmann, Die kleinen Unterschiede. 111 See Wirsching, ‘Erwerbsbiographien’. 112 The idea was mooted by Robert Castel in From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers. Transformation of the Social Question (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003 [1st edn 1995]), 379–94. For earlier approximations, see Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Wenn der Arbeitsgesellschaft die Arbeit ausgeht’, in Joachim Matthes, ed., Krise der Arbeitsgesellschaft. Verhandlungen des 21. Deutschen Soziologentages in Bamberg 1982 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1983), 25–37;Bernd Guggenberger, Wenn uns die Arbeit ausgeht. Die aktuelle Diskussion um Arbeitszeitverkürzung, Einkommen und die Grenzen des Sozialstaats (Munich and Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1988). The term ‘benefit classes’ 26 Contemporary European History to the broadening of options in the consumer society.113 ‘Fine distinctions’ may build up again into substantial cleavages. 3. This brings me to my final consideration: method. All narratives tend to be teleological, and when we contemplate the victorious progression of the average Western consumer society, teleology can seem inescapable. It is undeniable that ‘without the history of consumption and living standards ... the second half of the twentieth century cannot be properly understood’.114 The victorious juggernaut of mass consumption had trampled over the consumer critics and brought forth new concepts of selfhood. And in the course of this transformation something quite new had emerged: the dialectic equilibrium, noted above, between cultural uniformity and individual distinction on the leisure-media-consumption market.115 This dialectic levelling between the tendency to uniformity and the new individuality has become the identifying mark of modern Western mass societies and a sine qua non of their political stability. Furthermore, it carries the seeds of transnationalism and universalisation; the post-1989–90 history, not only of Europe, but of the whole world, showcases the steady expansion and ever-increasing attractiveness of Western- style mass consumption society. Here a word of caution is needed. Over-simplified constructions often hint at the temptation of a ‘Whig’ interpretation of history in terms of continual progress. It then becomes fatally easy to lose sight of the counter-trends that we discussed above – such as the continuing importance of work as the gateway to consumerism, and the associated problem of heightened social inequality. More importantly, can we be sure that consumer society is not resting on assumptions that are being slowly but surely eroded by that very society?116 So, we have become accustomed to denunciations of the material foundations of consumerism, its environmental destructiveness and prodigal use of energy. But what is more, the modern market principle, without which consumer society could not exist, grew out of the bourgeois society and that society’s moral outlook, however energetically consumerism repudiated bourgeois values in the course of the twentieth century. Since the days of Adam Smith, the liberal project has maintained a close dependence between market and morality, freedom and discipline. The future development of a society which has uncoupled those links is hard to predict. In any case, we should not be too quick to hail contemporary consumer society as the final outcome of a historical narrative. Its durability is still under test.

(Versorgungsklassen) originated with M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Soziale Ungleichheit und Klassenstrukturen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Lebenslagen, Interessenvermittlung und Wertorientierungen’, in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Klassen in der europäischen Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Rupprecht, 1979), 166–209,here179–82. 113 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers, 140. 114 Hartmut Kaelble, Sozialgeschichte Europas 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2007), 87. 115 Ibid., 93. 116 Cf. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 339. Taylor describes modern utilitarianism – from which the concept of consumer society may be said to derive – as ‘parasitic’.