Frank Trentmann is not very happy with my article,Footnote ¹ for the following three main reasons: First: the term ‘consumer society’ is applied too extensively and is not sufficiently defined. Second, my parameters of space and time are unclear, with the result that I neglect the differences in consumption and ‘consumer society’ in different parts of the world and at different periods. Furthermore, I do not establish a clear chronology with respect to the historical relationship between work and consumption. On this basis, third, Trentmann remains unconvinced by my critical remarks on the problems of individuality, citizenship and the pitfalls of historical teleology.

(1) With respect to the alleged conceptual imprecision, a glance at the subtitle of my essay might have helped: ‘Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society’. In other words, the focus of my remarks is not consumer society as such, but rather the individual's role in modern mass society, and the ways in which individuality can be constructed and experienced amidst the ever greater uniformity of mass culture. This is a classic, urgent and still-unresolved question of Western social philosophy. It is in that context that I engage with concepts of the consumer society. My object of enquiry is not the empirical history of consumption – the ‘material reality of how people live their lives’ – but rather ‘the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between labour, consumption and individuality’. In other words, I am treating the consumer society as a paradigm from which both historians and sociologists have derived, and continue to derive, generalisations about the progress of development in western societies. These generalisations about the relationship between the individual, society and consumption are not unaffected by presuppositions, however. They arise within a particular social, political and intellectual context, and for that very reason it is essential to probe their historical antecedents and subject them to critical commentary. I am interested in the question of how these generalisations developed historically, on what premises they were based and what differences can be detected between the United States and Germany in this regard. Instead of treating consumption and consumer society as autonomous concepts, I am continually asking how they relate to my main theme, which is the construction of individuality.

It is against this background that I discuss the significant differences between the American and the continental European traditions. The latter remained under the strong influence of Marxist and conservative premises right into the 1970s. At a time when the consumer society was already establishing itself dynamically in Europe, German intellectuals (to look no further) seemed incapable of finding anything positive to say about it. Their analyses were dominated by the clichés of cultural criticism: ‘alienation’, ‘manipulation’, etc. From this point of view, ‘real’ individuality was achievable only against and without consumption and mass culture. And I find it hard to deny that the American tradition – despite all the critiques of consumerism on that side of the Atlantic, which I have duly noted – was much quicker to develop an active, affirmative and positive approach. The political message was that individuality can and does flourish within and through consumption and mass culture.

When I say that this approach to the problem of individuality differed markedly from the neo-humanist and Marxist traditions in Germany and was quick to stress the individual's status as an autonomous economic actor, I was not postulating a ‘simple stand-off between dynamic and optimistic Americans and sceptical Europeans’; nor was I suggesting that the decline of German (and continental European) culture criticism was a simple process of ‘Americanisation’. It would be more accurate to say that this school of criticism foundered on the rocks of endogenous historical changes and objective material developments in Europe itself.

(2) The most important of these changes concerns the relationship between labour, consumption and individuality. In a nutshell, my argument is that at the turn of the twentieth century, people were becoming less inclined to make their work and its products into the expression and yardstick of their unique personal individuality. The spread of industrial capitalism and the standardisation of labour, which itself became a mass-produced item on the market, became less and less relevant to the construction and distinction of the self. Instead, ever-higher levels of mass welfare, advancing urbanisation and the differentiation of work in the wake of the expanding service economy offered new, consumption-based possibilities for the forging of a self, ways of standing out from the crowd and so gaining one's own identity.

Because Trentmann's exploration of the theme and approach of my essay is so peripheral, he again fails to follow my argument here. Instead he evokes the (undeniably) multifarious phenomenology of consumption, its manifold spatial and temporal divergences. Pointing to the unending variability of actual consumption in different cultures, countries and periods, he complains that I have not made it clear where my story begins and what chronology I am following. Trentmann is of course right to say that the idea of an abrupt change from a work-oriented society to a consumer society is ‘too simple’. But I am talking about a gradual historical shift, and nobody is going to dispute that history has seen many overlaps between older and more recent developments. For example, John Millar, mentioned by Trentmann as a representative of the Scottish Enlightenment, was indeed a proto-theorist of the ‘commercial society’ and its civilising refinements, which paved the way for consumption. And far be it from me to doubt that ‘American managers and top professionals now work longer hours than they did a few decades ago [. . .] in part because they derive status and distinction from busyness’. But what does that tell us about the broad lines of development of Western societies? It is a generally accepted and oft-mentioned fact that the productionist paradigm has been in retreat ever since the early twentieth century. I find Trentmann's evocation of isolated phenomena in late Ming China and Zanzibar, or of slaves in America buying mirrors and combs, rather unenlightening. I should have liked to see him engage more closely with my argument, instead of merely stating that people went on working in the twentieth century, or that they were already consuming before 1900. That is a truism, but can anyone seriously dispute that the importance of work in the average person's time budget has decreased steadily since 1945? Or that this has been accompanied by a surge in the leisure and consumption sectors? Daily, weekly and lifetime working times have decreased, weekends have become free, and paid holidays interrupt the rhythm of the working year. In a context of long-term prosperity, these advantages have become social acquis, part of people's mental horizon, offering individuals unprecedented opportunities for personal development. All this has shaped the cultural architecture of modern Western mass societies.

Hence Trentmann's complaint that I have paid too little attention to the pre-modern period is beside the point. My essay refers explicitly to the argument, advocated by John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and others, that the consumer society can be traced back to eighteenth-century England at least. It may be true that Daniel Defoe described formal structural phenomena similar to those identified by Georg Simmel. Such analogies are common in history, but they should not distract us from the specificities of each period. As stated in the title, my essay is devoted to precisely such a specificity: the signature of the mass society in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

(3) Finally, Trentmann is sceptical about my critical comments on the new ‘paradigm’ of the consumer society, taken to be an ever more important ‘key to the historical analysis of modern societies’ (p. 15). I am quite happy to find him ‘sympathetic’ to warnings against ‘Whig’ history; unfortunately he says nothing in support of that sympathy. On the contrary: ‘if there is a problem, it is too much morality, not too little’. Quite apart from the fact that the problem here is about method and not about morality, Trentmann hugely overstates the critical potential of economics, social science and historiography with regard to the paradigm of the consumer society, with the attendant risk that an empirically oriented history of the consumer society – an excellent thing in itself – may cease to be aware of its own blind spots. ‘That consumption undermined community and citizenship is a trope shared on both sides of the Atlantic,’ (p. 30) says Trentmann. That is an astonishing argument in view of the fact that economists – and, more recently, historians and social scientists as well – have been reformulating ‘citizenship’ in terms of active participation in consumption. The consumer citizen is being constructed in a more contemporary guise, as a rational type which encompasses both private interest and public responsibility. And it is no coincidence that this is happening at a time when traditional forms of political and social citizenship are clearly being subjected to erosive forces.

It is precisely here that we find the dangers of a teleological ‘Whig interpretation of history [of progress]’ – meaning ‘the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present’.Footnote ² These dangers are a constant menace to historiographers, but they do not always manifest themselves in the easily penetrated disguise of a ‘triumphant account’, as Trentmann suggests. All too often they creep in among the many underlying assumptions that derive from the socio-cultural situatedness and temporal location of historians and from the information available to them. It can scarcely be contested that our own time, dominated as it is by consumption, leisure and the media, has engendered an already firmly established historical narrative whereby the end is justified by the process that led up to it; a narrative whereby individuality finds its fulfilment in private consumption – after a fashion that I have described as utilitarian – but finds its public legitimation in the person of the consumer citizen.

It may well be that the deeper roots of Trentmann's dissension lie in the fact that I am arguing on the macro level whereas he prefers to remain on an empirically accessible micro level. This is of course legitimate for a historian. But it is only too easy to counter conclusions based on ideal types by pointing to an empirically divergent real type. There is no doubt that we need both: the search for types that leads to general conclusions, and the specific, small-scale empirical approach that describes individual instances. The two can and will never have the same scope, but historical knowledge cannot be advanced by putting them in entrenched and opposing methodological camps; it can only progress by putting them in dialogue with each other.