During the (not so) recent financial crisis of 2007-2008, the abstract (“fictitious”) sphere of financial capital appeared for the first time to be directly linked to household consumption through certain classes of asset-based securities. In turn, the crisis exposed the business of consumer credit as a central node of many economic and social phenomena that had been overlooked by social scientists and politicians alike. Gunnar Trumbull's Consumer Lending tries to tackle this question of “credit and welfare”, using a comparative analytical framework, to understand the way consumer credit (i.e. non-mortgaged) came to be accepted as both a legitimate business and a means of upholding social welfare in America. In contrast, the French often embraced an opposite vision of credit. Adopting a long-term, century-long perspective on the matter has become quite a methodological linchpin of consumer credit analyses; and the book feeds into this industry standard, roughly set between the late 19^th century and the recent “subprime” crisis, though offering a new comparative tool to understand the staging of events. An important reason for this choice stems from the shock of the crisis itself, and the way social scientists took the hit, or the blame, for not having paid enough attention to the historical and sociological underpinnings of the evolution of household debt. Although Trumbull does not focus at all on mortgage debt, he argues that, on some deeper level, this can be traced to the way consumer credit came to be accepted as “socially progressive and economically virtuous” (p. 209) in American society. Be it installment credit, early century chattel or salary loans, or later forms of revolving credit and personal loans by banks, these practices through their regulations and the alliances they required created a spill-over narrative of “credit-as-welfare” which was, for the first time, and very abruptly challenged in 2008.

The introductory and conclusive chapters, as well as the general stake of the argument are therefore less concerned with France itself than the way in which the French experience can help reveal particular features of America's relation to consumer debt. The main paradox, according to the author, was the fact that France experienced a completely different way of dealing with consumer credit, especially after the Second World War, even though there did not seem to be any original “cultural” reluctance on the French side at that time. The empirical evidence advanced to uphold such a statement seems somehow superficial compared to the reach of the claim, as only a few excerpts of isolated French quantitative studies from the 1940s and 1950s are mentioned in the introduction. For instance, the author refers to a survey reported in l'Express in March 1968 of early French credit card users, 60% of whom “would appreciate access to credit” (p. 5). However, the idea of going beyond a simple “cultural” interpretation of cross-country differences regarding consumer credit practices is very welcome and the author provides two interesting notions to understand the way national market experiences can diverge: coalitions of institutional market actors; and the idea of social, cultural or political legitimacy.

The notion of “legitimation” was developed by Trumbull in an earlier insightful book, Strength in Numbers (2012), as an alternative way of understanding group interest representation outside of collective organization. The question of how institutional or social groups push forward their market interests is very present in Consumer Lending but, here, the author resorts to the idea of “legitimacy” to describe the way consumer credit—its providers and regulators—shaped the frontiers of a newly acceptable business in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The first two chapters more specifically focus on the question of how and why commercial banks started adopting opposite visions in France and the US, fully embracing the practice of consumer loans in the latter, and rejecting them in the former. According to the author, one needs to look at the way a specific coalition of consumer finance companies and social reformers emerged at the beginning of the 20^th century and struggled to build a legitimate (and profitable) business out of previously highly disreputable practices, hence paving the way for a take-over by banks in the 1940s. The battle of the Russell Sage Foundation against the industrial “loan sharks” and the debate around the passing of Uniform Small Loan Laws have been studied in the past, but Trumbull introduces less-documented market actors, in particular the Morris Plan Banks. Arthur Morris's patented banking scheme enabled him to offer small personal loans at 6% interest rate (or advertised as such) to industrial workers, under one specific condition which was that two “endorsers of good character” had to sign the loan contract, taking joint responsibility in case of default by the borrower. Morris Banks were very successful in meeting a certain demand, and agencies started flourishing across the country. Morris himself paid careful attention to the bank’s public image as a supplier of a respectable form of credit. For that reason, Trumbull emphasizes that both Morris Plan Banks and social reformers (in particular the Russell Sage foundation) “shared a common vision of commercial credit as a tool for self help” (p. 27), contributing to legitimize consumer credit as an ethical and welfare-enhancing business—a process that made it much easier for commercial banks to enter the field a few decades later.

Although the project of understanding how business and political actors develop similar views of morals and markets at a specific point in time seems highly desirable, this particular story does not seem to fit the case. There was no direct alliance of the Morris Plan Banks and the social reformers at the time and, despite their seemingly consistent opinion on consumer credit, it is difficult to understand the process by which this abstract congruence of interests really helped shape a newly emerging market for loans. Moreover, although Arthur Morris started as a small chattel lender in Virginia and Georgia, as soon as he designed his “Plan” he stopped offering “small” loans. His average pool of clients was much wealthier than the regular borrowers of industrial lenders—the ones targeted by the Small Loan Laws—which were set up to regulate loans of under $300. Morris's agencies never served small borrowers, and they had very few interactions with either associated small loan lenders, social reformers, or regulators at the time. Similarly, it is difficult to build up a consistent, uniform vision of credit out of discourses which had very different goals and origins. Morris's motto “Character is the basis of credit” was a marketing slogan whose first aim was to target a specific group of upper-middle-class potential borrowers who could actually comply with the restrictive terms of the plan. Even if this might hint at some narrative on credit as being “socially acceptable”, one still needs to distinguish between the commercial success of a business and the influence it might have had on the public sphere, opinion, or “moral normativity”. Trumbull puts a very strong emphasis on one voice, the Morris Banks, as a representation of consumer lending companies at the time, but there was a wide diversity of lenders fighting to shape the practices of the burgeoning business, and they had competing views of how the “legitimacy” of credit was supposed to be defined and implemented.

Even more problematic is the shift that the author makes between a sociology of morals and legitimacy, and actually acknowledging a normative progress in a specific sphere of business. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it might conceal some empirical elements from the judgment of the observer: the author for example seems to admit the separation between “abusive loan sharks” and the later more respectable lenders such as Morris Banks or regulated lenders endorsed by social reformers. As a matter of fact, Arthur Morris started his business career in the high-rate small loan field (and could qualify as a “loan shark”) before discovering a different more lucrative business niche; and on the whole “loan sharks” were not replaced by more reputable people, the typical example being the Household Finance Corporation, which was simply a reorganization of the largest high rate syndicate at the time into a licensed business in 1916. Indeed, a normative stance often seems to be taken in the book: summarizing the story told about social reformers in the early 20^th century, the author concludes “the new laws made consumer lending respectable” (p. 48). It seems risky as a sociologist or historian to define what “legitimate” or “respectable” business practices really are (or even the sphere they encompass: interest rates, debt collection processes, marketing strategies, internal organization, interactions with courts or delinquent accounts, technological or managerial innovations, etc.). All the more so without any reference to what the general social or cultural visions of the different market actors were at the time, and without a methodology to capture them. Many other examples could be provided, but this is to say that building an historical account of the legitimacy of a business such as consumer credit is a complex, ambitious and desirable goal, but it probably requires going into more depth in specific time periods, and building a pragmatic theoretical framework to analyze how moral challenges become defining social trials for economic practices.

For example, Trumbull tells a fascinating story of how banks fought reformers over the way to report interest rates: the latter wanted banks to report “simple interests”—all fees included—whereas banks supported the “discounting” method, which only told the customer the difference in dollars between the amount borrowed and what had to be paid back—a practice which was much simpler for borrowers but led to under-reporting and potential abuses in many cases. This very simple opposition was only conclusively settled in 1968 with the Truth in Lending Act which imposed the report of interest in APRs. However, through the 1940s and 1950s the discounting method prevailed. On the other hand, small loan lenders had faced the same problem only 20 years earlier, but they were forced to report the cost of loans in simple interests which could be directly compared to usury caps. It is true that banks were, de facto, given a commercial edge over consumer finance companies thanks to this double standard, as the author states. However, more than that, it would be interesting to analyze the various legitimacy challenges faced by different actors at similar points in time, as moral “tests” which often reveal and qualify objects and persons involved in them. This would probably help clarify the notion of “coalition” widely resorted to in the book and which sometimes seems to homogenize the way market institutions or actors act or position themselves, as clear single entities. Trumbull had made a strong point in his earlier book about obtaining a broader sense of interest representation. However, the “interest“ itself often identifies here with a well-defined, best interest in a narrow economic sense of the word, which “coalitions“ of actors, accidentally or not, seem to be well aware of.

This dense book raises many fascinating historical questions for sociologists, such as how the political and societal debates about credit shifted after the Second World War, from general discussions about consumer welfare in the first half on the century, to interrogations about credit as a necessary tool for macroeconomic adjustments, both in France and the United States. Or the different evolutions that occurred in the position of labor representation towards workers’ credit in the two countries. But the cross-country perspective coupled with a century-long timeline in such a short text sometimes gives the impression that the author is more concerned with looking into the idea of a new, post-crisis (and post-traumatic) “liberal consensus” (p. 216) between markets and welfare—and the role credit might or might not play in its design—rather than the numerous historical events covered throughout the book.