A Battlefield in the Making (1870–1945)

The economic debate surrounding consumer society began to take shape during the period 1870–1945. This was a time in which early forms of consumer society began to emerge in North America and Western Europe. There was also a transition from the tradition of political economy to an increasingly institutionalised discipline of economics. Yet the economics of the period remained pluralistic, and this pluralism is reflected in the diversity of perspectives that economists began to develop concerning the nascent consumer society. The marginalist school focused on the figure of the rational, utility-maximising consumer, who derived pleasure through well-informed consumption decisions—a formulation broadly aligned with the progress thesis. Complementing this, the Austrian school advanced the notion of the sovereign consumer, whose preferences served as the primum mobile of capitalism and whose freedom of choice was a cornerstone of non-authoritarian political order. In contrast, within the institutionalist tradition, Thorstein Veblen emphasised the role of consumption as a marker of social status. In doing so, he offered a powerful formulation of the deviation thesis, highlighting the socially corrosive effects of conspicuous consumption. Some economists sought a synthesis of these perspectives. Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes, in particular, intuited that the progress thesis might hold true during a long historical phase marked by material privation for most of the population, while the deviation thesis could become increasingly relevant in a later stage of affluence. The deviation thesis—and the broader synthesis view to which it could contribute—flourished within intellectual traditions that treated economics as an open discipline, receptive to insights from history, sociology, and philosophy. However, in the final decades of this period, this open conception of economics came under serious threat from the rise of the neoclassical paradigm as envisioned by Lionel Robbins. It was in this context, amidst the pluralism that still characterised the discipline, that the lines of confrontation began to take shape—lines that would later define the major clash of views on consumer society that would erupt after 1945.