The Great Clash (1945–1990)

Between 1945 and 1990, the battlefield that had begun to take shape during the period 1870–1945 became the scene of direct confrontation between rival views of consumer society. This was the period during which fully developed versions of consumer society emerged—first in the United States and later in Western Europe and Japan. It also marked the consolidation of the neoclassical school’s hegemony within the discipline of economics. Consumer society came under critical scrutiny from the institutional economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who, at this point, was joined by some Marxists as well as by internal dissenters within the mainstream. Galbraith elaborated a kind of “synthesis view” that echoed the earlier formulations of Marshall and Keynes, combining the progress and deviation theses in a diachronic manner. However, the deviation thesis was met with strong opposition from the core of the profession, increasingly united around the kind of neoclassical economics championed by the Chicago school. Under the eventual leadership of Milton Friedman, most economists aligned themselves with the progress thesis. Contributing to this alignment was their particular understanding of economics both as a theoretical framework—centred on the notions of equilibrium and scarcity—and as a social science that had little to gain from engagement with history, sociology, or philosophy. Equally significant was the fact that, in the turbulent context of the Cold War, many economists adopted a political discourse—inspired by the tradition of Austrian economics—that cast the sovereign consumer as a bulwark of democracy and a safeguard against authoritarianism. The ascendancy of these perspectives led, by the final years of the period, to the disappearance of consumer society from the analytical horizon of new generations of economists, who were educated within an intellectual milieu that left little room to explore combinations of the progress and deviation theses.