9 - Luxury, necessity and social identity

Summary

The aim of this concluding chapter is not to provide a summing-up of the various elements in the earlier chapters. Aside from the suspicion of redundant repetition attendant on that exercise, it would also run the risk of imposing an unwarranted uniformity. There is not some grand synthesising theory of luxury waiting in the wings. I remain sceptical of the possibility, or even of the desirability, of any such theory. All that I have attempted to provide in the preceding discussion is a conceptual framework to serve heuristically as a means of giving some shape to an amorphous subject.

Positively, the aim of this chapter is to highlight and develop a little further a collection of ideas that have made a merely intermittent appearance thus far. These ideas are the linked notions of social identity and social order and I am concerned, at a more general and abstract level than heretofore, with the bearing that luxury has upon them. My concern principally is with ‘luxury’ as a conceptual category.

LUXURY AS RELATIONAL

The starting point is to re-address the question posed in Chapter 8: why is it that all societies make some categorical distinction between need/necessity and luxury? The first observation concerns the distinction itself. It is not paradoxical to assert that the distinction constitutes a unity, just as it is not mysterious to talk of two gloves, a right-hand and a left-hand, constituting a pair.