The Spectacle of Riches

Abstract

In Chapter 2 we contrasted differing interpretations of the contemporary meaning of poverty. In this chapter we shall discuss competing perceptions of the meaning of wealth and riches. The first of the above quotations (taken from interviews conducted in the course of the authors’ own research) illustrates, once again, an aspect of what Galbraith (1992) has characterised as the ‘culture of contentment’. Galbraith has argued that, electorally speaking, American and British society is dominated by a contented majority that is characteristically self-affirming, short-termist, sceptical of state intervention, and tolerant of substantial inequality: The plush advantage of the very rich is the price the contented electoral majority pays for being able to retain what is less but what is still very good’ (ibid: 26). The second quotation illustrates a different view. It is a view consistent with Ray Pahl’s recent characterisation of the materially successful social stratum, not as a contented majority, but as the ‘anxious class’ (1995). Though Pahl stresses that anxiety is not a peculiar symptom of late modernity, but endemic to the human condition, he draws on interviews with a small number of highly ‘successful’ people to acknowledge, like Giddens (see our discussion at pp. 18–20 above), that ‘As the language of class gives way to the language of lifestyle, so solidarity, conflict and action are replaced by self-identity, anxiety and balance for most, but certainly not all, members of society’ (ibid: 20).