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.Footnote 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 livingFootnote ² in which 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 1950s and 1960s 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 1950s to the 1970s, 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴ It is also, and deservedly, gaining ever-greater significance as an element in concepts of modern Western societies.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 onwards 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁸ This established the core categories for 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote ¹³

Post-war German conservatism, while making its slow and cautious way via anti-totalitarianism to democracy,Footnote 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’.Footnote ¹⁵

After the war, Freyer did distance himself to an extent from his earlier, radical conservative views,Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote ¹⁹

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.Footnote ²⁰

At the same time, however, the conservative Zeitgeist 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;Footnote 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:

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 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 1950s and 1960s, 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ²⁴ And Adorno in the late 1950s was already evoking a ‘crisis of the individual’.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 juggernaut of modern society.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 David Riesman,Footnote ³¹ John Kenneth Galbraith,Footnote ³² Neil PostmanFootnote ³³ and Christopher Lasch.Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless the dominant American attitude towards consumerism became, and remained, optimistic,Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote ³⁷ But he claims to use ‘waste’ as a purely technical, not a condemnatory, term.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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:

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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’:

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,Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁶ Society's increasing acceptance of the right of women to make (up) their own faces widened their social options and became a vehicle for the construction of feminine identity.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁹ Though vehemently rejected by contemporary 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵¹

From this emerged the influential – and for a time all-conquering – construct of the ‘consumer citizen’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 ‘enthroned the consumer as emperor of the market’.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote ⁵⁷

The new generation in West Germany was ushered in by a profound socio-cultural liberalisation,Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

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.

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’,Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Previous critics such as Röpke had fulminated against ‘advertisements spoiling the landscape’;Footnote ⁶⁵ nowadays they are accepted as ‘everyday iconography’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Horkheimer and Adorno had located the ‘triumph of advertising’ in ‘compulsive imitation by consumers’;Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁷⁰

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 for the moral autonomy of the individual.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷⁷

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.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 and a parallel upsurge in individual self-awareness’.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁹⁰ This ‘mass customisation’ can be applied to a vast range of products, from jeans and shoes to computers and cars.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 conditions. In ‘alternative’ – intellectual and/or academic – circles this sort of ‘critical consumption’ has itself become a vehicle of individuality.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁹⁵ It looks much more like a shift from ‘duty and acceptance values to personal development values’.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As teleology this has been disputed,Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The paradigm shift that this entails has often been noted,Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Upon reflection, however, one can see that the language 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’.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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?Footnote 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?Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ¹¹² It is clear that de-industrialisation and globalisation are creating a new ‘mass vulnerability’ on the market that runs counter to the broadening of options in the consumer society.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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?Footnote 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.