Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization, by Matthew Hilton

Abstract

In his new book, Matthew Hilton expands his previous search for a historical consumer movement in Britain (Consumerism in 20th-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement, 2003) to the international arena. The rich results it brings derive from Hilton's readiness to see the post-war consumer organisations as more than technical advice centres for affluent shoppers. Whereas previous research has tended to view consumer organisations as stimulating Americans and Europeans to become ever more materialistic, Hilton finds in those movements the basis of a global social movement with a radical agenda. The title ‘Prosperity for All’ captures the essence of the universal aims of this international consumer movement. The promise of a consumer democracy of goods has previously been associated with the politics of states, in particular during the period of reconstruction following the Second World War. Hilton mentions how the West German Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard, used ‘prosperity for all’ as a consumerist slogan for the ‘economic miracle’, and pays brief attention to the post-war US model for ‘a consumers’ republic’. That heading is borrowed from Lizabeth Cohen's comprehensive book A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003), but whereas Cohen associates the onset of affluence with a decline in the social and political engagement among consumers, Hilton finds new beginnings by moving the focus from nation states to the international civil society.