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Consumer Society – RIP. A Comment1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2010

FRANK TRENTMANN
FRANK TRENTMANN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, University of London, London WC1E 7HX; [email protected]
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Extract

Andreas Wirsching has written an ambitious paper about the rise of the ‘consumer society’ in the twentieth century and its implications for historical research. I should say at the outset that I am sympathetic to his warnings against a Whig history. The career of the ‘consumer society’ needs to be historicised. My main problem is that ‘the consumer society’ is used in multiple, slippery ways in this article which moves back and forth between treating it as an ideological construct, an analytical concept and as a material reality of how people live their lives. It sometimes appears as ‘paradigm’, yet at other times it is the real thing, ‘a burgeoning consumer society’.

Type
Interpretations
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 27 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

2 Wirsching, Andreas, ‘From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society’, Contemporary European History, 20, 1 (2011), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.