Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral. Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1982.

Abstract

Buying into Change is an aptly titled book with a simple premise: that while much has been written about the liberal political culture that fueled Spain’s democratic transition, insufficient attention has been paid to the role that mass consumption played in the liberalization of Spanish society during the Franco regime. In five clearly organized chapters, Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral explains how the rise of Spanish department stores, consumer magazines, the Spanish advertising industry, and foreign-influenced supermarkets resulted in the development of a Spanish mass consumer society that helped to pave the way for Spain’s remarkably peaceful transition from Francoism to democracy. The main contribution of the book to existing scholarship on the Spanish democratic transition is its historiography of the emergence and development of Spanish department stores and self-service supermarkets. Food and clothing are fundamental cultural elements, and the author offers a compelling argument that the adoption of new foreign ways of buying and selling unwittingly became politically subversive by undermining the Francoist notion that “Spain is different” from other Western nations.