Introduction: luxury's shadow

Summary

Consumption, consumerism, consuming, price and material culture are all crucial to our understandings of twentieth-century history. They must be accorded the same historical significance as notions of production, work, the wage and perhaps all the ideologies associated with a productivist mentality. In the final analysis, they are perhaps more important: as one recent historian of twentieth-century American commercialism put it, ‘consumerism was the “ism” that won’. We are all consumers now. Yet to herald the triumph and all-pervasive nature of consumer society is not to deny the diversity of consumerist visions of society and culture, as well as of the economy, the state, politics and government. Smith's adage that ‘consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production’ is oft repeated to remind us of the centrality of the commodity to modern life, but it actually misses its true significance. Consumption has been one of the most recurring means by which citizens have moulded their political consciousness and shaped their political organisations, as well as being one of the main acts around which governments have focussed their policies and interventions. In twentieth-century Britain, the politics of consumption has offered itself as a persistent ‘middle’ or ‘third way’ solution to a party political system dominated by the interests of manufacturers and workers. This is what unites all the individuals, groups and institutions to be covered within this book, most of whom can be located under the admittedly large umbrella of social democracy and democratic socialism.