Promoting Pleasure as Political Economy

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century merchants, shopkeepers, and commercial artists in the United States created a new genre in pictorial advertising, one that featured consumers taking pleasure in the act of shopping. These images were both an innovation in advertising and a new way for Americans to understand the role and identity of consumers in their nation. Rejecting the early republican frameworks of political and household economy, these advertisements promoted the pleasures of consumption as a positive good for the nation, an idea that ultimately underpinned a twentieth-century reorientation of the American economy around the figure of the consumer.