Conspicuous consumption is not a product of market capitalism, but a mark of civilization

See The Long History of Retail Therapy, a review of the book Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann in the WSJ. The review is by Edward Rothstein. Excerpts:

"You think that frenzied acquisition is uniquely characteristic of modernity and Western capitalism? Think again: Mr. Trentmann begins the first chapter citing a 60-year-old chronicler in 1808 bemoaning how rapidly the world around him has changed. Wealthy men parade around displaying fancy pocket watches. Ordinary citizens follow frivolous fashions and keep animals as trendy pets. But this chronicler, Mr. Trentmann tells us, “was not writing from Paris or London but from Yangzhou” in China. In this case, the fancy pets were chickens from Canton and rats from “the West.”

What about, then, the issue of “conspicuous consumption” defined in 1899 by Thorstein Veblen? Isn’t it characteristic of modern consumerism? Not at all, Mr. Trentmann says. One Chinese observer in the 1570s complained about the “young dandies” who thought “silk gauze isn’t good enough and lust for Suzhou embroideries” seeking the “look of the moment.” In 15th-century Florence, the competitive display of luxury goods was so extravagant that the Dominican friar and preacher Girolamo Savonarola reacted with his notorious “bonfire of the vanities,” sending musical instruments, books and tapestries up in flames—thereby illustrating an alternative form of consumption. In Venice during the next century, the senate passed rules against luxurious display: One 1512 law said that no more than six forks and six spoons could be given as wedding presents and banned gilded mirrors; a 1562 law limited the desserts permitted at banquets. In fact, Mr. Trentmann notes, the imposition of sumptuary laws regulating consumption accompanied the growth of material possibility throughout Europe."

"Pre-imperial Africa, he points out, was hardly a “traditional” society untouched by materialism. During the 18th century, imports in West Africa rose 10-fold. Each African region developed particular tastes in fashion and cloth. The end of the slave trade in 1807 led to the expansion of African exports of native products like palm oil and gum. “Africans,” Mr. Trentmann writes, “did not need imperial masters to teach them how to become consumers.”"

"On one side are “progressive and social democratic critics who attack the juggernaut of shopping, advertising, branding and easy credit for turning active, virtuous citizens into passive, bored consumers.” On the other are “champions of consumption, first and foremost classical liberals who cherish freedom of choice as the bedrock of democracy and prosperity.”"

"The progressive worldview, he notes, has a long and mixed pedigree. Plato described how luxuries would lead to the moral and physical dissolution of a city. Avarice was “the root of all evil,” according to the Christian apostle Paul. Dante sent usurers to hell’s seventh circle, pushed down into burning sand by the stuffed moneybags they carry.

In the modern period, Mr. Trentmann finds similar ideas in the Romanticism of Rousseau, who believed “the desire for things turned free men into slaves.” A century later, he suggests, Marx and others went much further, arguing that capitalism and modern industry had changed the ways in which people relate to objects; things had become defined solely by their economic value. Other meanings and significance were cloaked by this “modern fetishism.” The result, according to this view, has been “disenchantment, inequality and conflict” and a raging consumer culture caused by the manipulation of material desire."

"Mr. Trentmann accepts little of this, certainly not the idea that objects were transformed into fetishistic economic artifacts during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they in fact became weighted with broader significance: Think only of the labors of collectors and the development of museums. And while Galbraith’s view, which “has informed critics of ‘consumerism’ pretty steadily to this day,” included some acute observations, Mr. Trentmann argues that much of his analysis was simply wrong. Americans were saving more, not less, during the postwar years: In 1957 the personal savings rate was a phenomenal 10%. Moreover, public spending rose with affluence and did not decline the way Galbraith’s model might have suggested."

"a good deal of thinking about consumption requires re-examination. Did consumer culture really encourage passivity and an abandonment of craft and skill? How to explain, then, that men spent roughly twice as much time on domestic chores and repairs in 1945 as 1900? A large amount of spending went toward home craftsmanship and new skills. But isn’t it true that an addiction to credit is a distinctive problem of our time? Only if you ignore that in England in 1700 every second head of a household left behind unpaid debts at death. In 1925, Liverpool had 1,380 registered moneylenders. What about religion? Isn’t growing secularism a direct result of expanding consumption? Not really, Mr. Trentmann says: Eastern and Central Europe today are “not only richer in things than under Communism,” but there are “more Christian believers.” Religion, he writes, “is saturated with things.”

Is capitalism necessarily amoral? Not at all: In Mr. Trentmann’s view it has been long accompanied by efforts “to moralize the economy”—to purchase selectively or set up a boycott to encourage a particular outcome. The most recent manifestation of this impulse is “ethnical consumerism,” like the fair-trade movement, its products “assuring consumers that distant producers in the developing world receive a fair deal for their sweat and toil.”"