Luxury Debate Research Articles

Writing about Polyphony, Talking about Civilization: Charles Burney’s Musical ‘Corns and Acorns’

Abstract In the eighteenth century polyphony—from simply being a term denoting a musical technique—became an evaluative-descriptive concept, following this path in association with the idea of civilization. Retracing Burney’s steps as a music historian and a music critic, the article shows how the Musical Doctor adopted a specific kind of narrative developed by Scottish conjectural historians that saw history as unfolding through several specific stages, progressively abandoning simplicity for the complexities of civilization. This seemingly linear narrative is complicated both by showing how making every music fit into this linear scheme was not easy, and by bringing forth the arguments developed especially by Scottish literati in order to explain why their native musical tradition could be considered equal or superior to Western art-music. The discourse, with Rousseauian echoes, that allowed the association between simplicity and positive values that were to be opposed to the excesses and depravity of civilized life, was articulated through the intellectual tools developed during the debate about luxury that raged through the eighteenth century. Nestled in the luxury debate, the non-literate music tradition that in non-Western locations had been considered as an instance of ‘barbarism’ now stood for a noble ‘simplicity’, whose value consequently reversed making artlessness a possible element of sublime beauty. The contradictions in Burney’s attitude towards non-Western musics and national European musics—on the one hand tirelessly collecting information about music-making from any corner of the world and on the other hand promoting only those values that made multi-part music the emblem of musical civilization—will serve to explain the interplay between ideas related to polyphony, civilization, and national musics in the eighteenth century.

La querelle du luxe sur les planches: Le Dissipateur de du Rivet

The French Jesuit theatre, which during the 18th century gradually opened to comedy and French-language performances, reflects social news. First performed in May 1746 at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, Le Dissipateur takes place in a luxury debate which runs from Mandeville to Mirabeau throughout the century. This comedy defends the middle ground and invites actors and spectators to settle their expenses on their social condition. It thus accomplishes its educational aim, in accordance with the spirit of Jesuit pedagogy, which consists in preparing pupils to live in society, to know its rules, so as never to be the victims of it.

Money in the German-Speaking Lands ed. by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley

Reviewed by: Money in the German-Speaking Lands ed. by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley John McCole Money in the German-Speaking Lands. Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Pp. 317. Cloth $150.00. ISBN 978-1785335884. "Money changes everything," in the simple but profound words of a pop philosopher, and this volume amply demonstrates that we keep discovering the many ways it has. Money in the German-Speaking Lands, the seventeenth volume in Berghahn's Spektrum series, assembles seventeen pithy investigations of the changes wrought by money, and how inhabitants of the German-speaking lands have come to terms with them, since the early modern period. This is not a collection of essays on economic history in the traditional sense, but rather a wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic look at the creative diversity of recent approaches to the history of money, on scales ranging from micro to macro. It provides fresh takes on venerable topics such as inflation, currency reform, and moral economy, including luxury debates; offers revisionist accounts of the genealogy of cameralism and the monetary culture of German hometowns; and supplies methodologically innovative case studies of the social and cultural imaginary of money, including its role in collective memory. Most of the essays exemplify what could by now be called the long cultural turn in historical studies. The title's term "money," as befits its protean nature, encompasses various forms of wealth ranging from currency to credit to cigarette butts (in the postwar black market economy); and money is examined, in the editors' words, sometimes as "an instrument" but more often as being "as much about culture and ideas … a psychological force-field"—and, one might add, a sociological and cultural force-field as well (2). Theory plays an important supporting role in some of the pieces; Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social and cultural capital help animate more of the essays than the volume's index would suggest. The symbolic dimensions of money come to the fore in at least two distinct ways. The first concerns what money and wealth have stood for: we encounter some surprising twists on venerable critiques of acquisitiveness and luxury, and "wealth vs. virtue" discourses, in essays by Johannes Dillinger on the selective punishment of spirit beliefs about acquisitive behavior, Benjamin Marschke on Frederick William I's ostentatious displays of austerity, Jan Carsten Schnurr on Pietist attempts to distinguish between luxury and legitimate pleasures, and Michael L. Hughes on "predatory speculators" and "honest creditors" in the Weimar Republic. Eve Rosenhaft's essay seeks out the [End Page 143] subtexts of German responses to the eighteenth-century Mississippi financial bubble and finds imagined connections to a wider, cosmopolitan geography. A different symbolic dimension of money shows itself in the ways that owners of economic capital mobilized it to forge social and cultural connections—a process that could also work in reverse. Almut Spalding's Hamburg patricians forged quasi-kin networks of reciprocal obligation across social divides; Frank Hatje depicts a lawyer of modest means who leveraged cultural capital to generate social and even economic capital in ways that enhanced Hamburg's civic integration; and Dennis Frey's Swabian hometown artisans savvily managed the remunerative, status-enhancing, and networking potentials of an emerging cash economy. A third cluster of essays, dispersed by the volume's chronological arrangement, treats theories of money and economics: Vera Keller's rich account of the interlaced roles of alchemy and "oeconomy"; Andre Wakefield's revisionist investigation of cameralism's roots in the Saxon "mining state," producing knowledge along with silver; Jonathan Sperber's demonstration of Marx's surprisingly persistent occupation with the topic of money; and Elizabeth S. Goodstein's striking rereading of Simmel's Philosophy of Money as modernist philosophy. Taken as a whole, the volume subtly undercuts a durable, but simplistic distinction between positive and negative evaluations of money, where proponents champion the benefits of wealth and circulation and critics lament the costs. In these essays, we see how "money" has stood on both sides of the ledger: it has been the object of anxieties about transitions, corruption, decline, alienation, and the erosion of authenticity; but it has also been symbolically enabling and...

Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion ed. by Aaron Garrett, and James A. Harris

Reviewed by: Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion ed. by Aaron Garrett, and James A. Harris Simon Grote Aaron Garrett, and James A. Harris, editors. Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 482. Cloth, $99.00. Together with Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Gordon Graham, this volume inaugurates the series A History of Scottish Philosophy, published by Oxford University Press under Graham's general editorship. A collection of "collaborative studies by expert authors," the series is projected to "provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition" (ii). In their introduction to this particular volume, however, editors Aaron Garrett and James A. Harris propose a more modest purpose. "It will be plain to the reader," they acknowledge, "that we are not presenting here a comprehensive account of the philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland" (13). Leaving psychology and the natural sciences for treatment in a separate volume, they offer here an account of "themes in the moral and political thought of the period" (13), consisting of four chapters devoted to individual luminaries—Francis Hutcheson (by Daniel Carey), David Hume (by James A. Harris and Mikko Tolonen), Adam Smith (by Aaron Garrett and Ryan Hanley), and Thomas Reid (by Paul Wood)—interspersed among six other chapters that incorporate briefer treatment of other canonical authors (such as Adam Ferguson) into surveys of Scottish discussions of particular issues. In doing so, the editors hope to provide "new perspectives" on well-known themes, enabled by the contributors' special attention to the specifically Scottish contexts of canonical philosophical texts (2). As the editors acknowledge, the volume is entering a crowded field, populated by a plethora of other handbooks on eighteenth-century philosophy, many of which address Scottish texts, survey similar issues, and boast some of the same—or equally formidable—contributors and editors. These now include the Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy (2014, edited by Garrett) and the Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (2014, edited by Harris). This volume nonetheless breaks new ground, even while drawing upon the similarly context-aware research that has dominated Scottish Enlightenment studies for many years. In general, the most explicitly innovative chapters are those devoted to a single author; instead of aiming at comprehensiveness, they survey multiple works from a perspective that allows them at least gently to push the boundaries of existing scholarship. So, for example, Carey paints an unusually differentiated picture of Hutcheson's development into a "canonized figure" by attending to the often critical reception of his ideas and to the various modes of their dissemination. Harris and Tolonen survey the Scottish and international contexts of several major texts by Hume, in order to specify the extent to which Hume's Scottishness affected what he wrote. Garrett and Hanley's innovation consists in their use of the concepts "history" and "impartiality" to highlight the unity of Smith's philosophical corpus. And in perhaps the most arrestingly original, manuscript-rich chapter of all, Wood traces the impact of Newton on, and more generally the importance of the natural sciences for, Reid, in order to "put the science back into the Scottish Enlightenment's 'science of man'" (405). Other chapters derive novelty from treating conventional handbook topics under somewhat less conventional headings—the luxury debate in a chapter on "barbarism and republicanism" (by Silvia Sebastiani), for example. Although the chapters, independently readable but linked by cross-references, tend to enhance rather than duplicate one another, they are unlikely to be equally accessible to non-experts unfamiliar with the surveyed texts. Some lean toward the introductory mode, leading the reader slowly through a series of contextualized quotations, whereas others more frequently employ rapid series of sparsely documented generalizations—the author's mature reflections on a corpus of texts he or she knows well. The portrait of the Scottish Enlightenment that emerges from the volume as a whole is, by design, Scotland-centric. International contacts are occasionally thematized (as in Roger Emerson's chapter, reprinted from a 2009 collection of his essays), and there is no shortage of references to such non...

The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750 ed. by Ros Ballaster

Reviewed by: The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750 ed. by Ros Ballaster Isobel Grundy The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750, ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 282. $67. The first question about a volume designed to cover sixty years in the history [End Page 151] of women’s writing must be how to arrange or structure it. These years, after the ebbing of seventeenth-century sectarian debates and before the high tide of the new novel, saw a flourishing of female playwrights on the London stage, a crescendo of proto-feminist debate, unusual variety and versatility in both fiction and poetry, and much more. It takes in the writing careers of Finch, Astell, Pope, Montagu, and most of Haywood. How can such a multiplicity of stories be ordered or told? This volume in the Palgrave Macmillan History of British Women’s Writing largely eschews storytelling as such. Each contributor considers a topic, under which each was invited to address the careers of two or more authors and not to shy away from judgments on texts. The topics come in groups (mostly) of three: three kinds of debate (on women, on luxury, on urban versus rural values), three kinds of transformation, four writing modes (with Kathryn R. King on “Scribal and Print Publication” preceding essays on drama, periodicals, and scholarly enquiry), three kinds of love-relationship (religious, erotic, and friendly). Ms. Ballaster provides an introduction and closing critical overview. The result might be called a mosaic composed of small-sized tesserae, but the picture built up is far livelier, offering views and glimpses of a complex subject that changes according to the viewpoint taken. Disadvantages of this method are that no text or issue or oeuvre is considered in very great depth, that chronology has little purchase as a mode of understanding (though a useful chronology preceding the essays does some of this work), and that some small components of the whole may escape notice. If any aspect of women’s writing gets short shrift, it is probably life-writing: no mention is made of the diaries of Celia Fiennes, Elizabeth Freke, Sarah or Mary Cowper, Elizabeth Wast, or Elizabeth Cairns. If any individual author gets less than her due it is Mary Pix; Jane Spencer quotes other critics finding her inadequate as a proto-feminist, but her virtues go unmentioned. Advantages of the method include interesting juxtapositions, the revealing of unexpected relationships, a letting-in of light from unusual angles: altogether a thought-provoking volume, mostly resistant to the orthodoxies into which the history of women’s writing is in danger of settling now that it is no longer largely unknown. Contributors have, of course, approached their brief very differently. Some (like Karen O’Brien opening the volume with an essay on the debate around women’s place, and Kathryn King writing in a pivotal position on manuscript and print) have dealt with the rich array of authors available by touching to good effect on far more than three. These two essays and others in the volume are history at its best, drawing effortlessly on a wide field to create a single complicated picture. Each is relevant to almost every feature of women’s writing during this period. Some authors benefit from reappearing in different lights and different surroundings, like Finch (in contexts of the city and the country, the Scriblerians, and friendship: Moyra Haslett judges her friendship poems the most interesting and inventive in the Wellesley manuscript), Haywood (in contexts of the luxury debate, the novel, periodicals, the erotic, and friendship), and Montagu (city and country, the Scriblerians, periodicals). Astell appears not only in the context of women’s place but also in those of luxury and of friendship. Jane Shaw considers her, in relation to religion, alongside writers whose views she would have deplored: Jane Lead, Anne Dutton, and M. Marsin. [End Page 152] Some male writers too, notably Pope and Richardson, register their importance by frequent appearance. On the other hand, it is pleasing to see discussion of some seldom-broached names, like Dutton, Marsin, Mary Chandler, and Mary Mollineux. Several essays include useful surveys...

Between Words and Things: “La Querelle du luxe” in the Eighteenth Century

Between Words and Things:“La Querelle du luxe” in the Eighteenth Century Michael Kwass (bio) Historians understand the importance of language. In the 1980s, the discipline took a sharp linguistic turn, as many social historians trained in the 1960s and 1970s renounced cherished ideas about social class and material life, and moved boldly toward a language-centered cultural history. This shift toward linguistic analysis was particularly notable in my own field—the French Revolution—where self-described “revisionist” historians abandoned Marxian social interpretations of the Revolution to pursue the study of political culture. The result was a highly creative body of work, which claimed that what was modern about the French Revolution was not the seizure of power by a rising capitalist bourgeoisie (this was the old Marxian interpretation) but, rather, the dynamic ways in which revolutionaries constructed a radically new political culture. Much of that culture was the product of novel discourse, as words like “la nation,” “le citoyen,” and “la révolution” took on new, highly charged political meanings. As Roger Chartier argued at the time, the systematic redefinition of such words reflected an intellectual process by which revolution became thinkable and therefore possible.1 [End Page 771] Today, the pendulum of French revolutionary historiography is swinging back to social and economic history—back to questions of capitalism, trade, property, and finance.2 The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession, I would argue, have encouraged historians to return to concrete economic problems. This apparent return to the socio-economic has not, however, heralded the end of the linguistic turn. To the contrary, a new generation of economic historians are adopting the linguistic methods of intellectual and cultural historians to chart a methodological route forward. It is now widely understood that the study of the economic past must encompass the language historical actors used to talk about and classify the material world in which they found themselves. Today, all but the most unreconstructed social historians acknowledge the extent to which language mediates thought and behavior. Words and things, therefore, must be studied together. One of the most notable examples of this methodological transformation comes from the literature on the so-called consumer revolution of the eighteenth century. Building on the work of British historians, Daniel Roche and others have claimed that well before the age of the Industrial Revolution France experienced a “revolution” (small “r”) in consumption that fundamentally altered material culture.3 From 1650 to 1800, elites, the middling sort, and, to some degree, the laboring classes began to consume goods on a previously unthinkable scale, particularly clothing, home furnishings, and exotic colonial products. Everything from kitchenware to underwear, tables to tea sets, and wigs to watches began to circulate as never before, irrevocably changing the relationship between people and things. The economic question of how this happened before the advent of industrialization continues to be debated. But of equal interest is the cultural question of how people came to understand this expanding world of goods, and it is here where the exploration of the French language has proven to be extremely useful. For if the consumer revolution was part of a larger [End Page 772] cultural transformation whereby the traditional values of a stationary economy gradually ceded to a modern culture of commodification, as Roche has claimed, that transition must have been reflected in, and shaped by, linguistic change. To illustrate how historians have turned to French to gain insight into the cultural and intellectual ramifications of the consumer revolution, I’ll discuss an example that comes from my own research on the eighteenth-century luxury debate. The proliferation of goods during the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century prompted a furious debate about the meanings of the French word “le luxe.” Alarmed by the spectacular growth of the world of goods, many writers, including two of the most widely read authors of the eighteenth century, François Fénelon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sharply criticized luxury consumption as inherently excessive and morally dangerous. Drawing on centuries-old moral critiques, they lamented the rise of luxury and the corruption that inevitably followed in its wake. Proponents of luxury, on the other hand, attempted to...

Du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Transformation of Mandeville's Fable

Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ‘translation’ and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘progress’.

Luxury, Crisis and Consumption: Sir James Steuart and the Eighteenth-Century Luxury Debate

The paper examines the contributions made by Sir James Steuart in his Principles of Political Economy (1767) to the debates about luxury consumption in the eighteenth century. The paper begins by highlighting the main contemporary arguments both for and against luxury in France and Scotland, and why the consumption of luxury goods was a contentious issue. In the next section, Steuart’s positive views on luxury are examined and located within his theory of growth. Steuart presents luxury goods as a necessary by-product of the movement from an agricultural society to an expanding manufacturing society. Unlike other contributors to the debate, such as Marquis de Mirabeau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith and David Hume, Steuart purposely avoids talking about luxury as a means to refine or corrupt society. By instead focusing on the workers’ role in innovation and creating desirable luxury goods, Steuart contributes a unique view of luxury not only as a generator of economic growth and increased living standards, but also as both an incentive mechanism for all economic sectors and a buffer against economic crisis. The continual creation of new luxury goods is shown to benefit society by ensuring an ongoing flow of payments, goods, and services among landlords, farmers, and manufacturers.

Vattel's theory of the international order: Commerce and the balance of power in the Law of Nations

Vattel's Law of Nations (1758) claimed that a system of independent states could maintain the liberty of each without undermining the ideal of an international society. The chief institution serving this purpose was the balance of power. In Vattel's account, the balance of power could be stabilized if it operated primarily through a process of commercial preferences and restrictions. These limits on how states ought to defend themselves were grounded in Vattel's thoroughly forgotten writings on the mid-eighteenth-century luxury debates, which addressed the political economy of reforming the state and pacifying the international order. An examination of Vattel's Law of Nations in this context shows that his approach to the law of nations should not be dismissed as a capitulation to the harsh reality of international politics.

From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England

This article explores the Georgian interior as represented in conversation piece portraits. It discusses the relationship between real and depicted rooms and furnishings and considers the meanings and values conveyed by painted interiors. The article begins by examining the relatively bare settings of Arthur Devis, which emphasized restrained good taste, in contrast to William Hogarth's more lavish scenes of refined consumption. It then discusses the implications of Devis's reuse of the same interiors for different patrons. Such settings were not intended to represent specific spaces. Rather, like the interiors of Hogarth's modern moral subject paintings, they were to be understood as signifiers of abstract virtues—their generic quality enhancing their legibility. Moving on to the 1760s, the article considers Johan Zoffany's revitalization of the conversation piece, combining lavish description of things with a new sense of intimacy and affect. In contrast to Devis, Zoffany notably depicted rooms and objects owned by his patrons, albeit combined in invented ways and with fictive possessions in order to strengthen their iconographic power. The article ends by speculating about some of the reasons for this distinction, including the social status of their patrons, the changing nature of the art world and developments in the luxury debate.

Hume's Nuanced Defense of Luxury

The significance of Hume's positive attitude towards luxury might have been overemphasized by his commentators. In fact, arguments in favor of "moderate" luxury had already been entertained before the emergence of Hume's position. Therefore to argue that Hume's argument entailed the defense of moderate luxury is not to identify in it anything particularly unique. Thus, the first aim of this paper is to clarify the nature of Hume's contribution to the ongoing luxury debates. This does not consist merely of an assertion of the compatibility of moral virtue with the enjoyment of luxury, but lies rather in Hume's emphasis on two aspects of the beneficial interaction between morality and luxury. First, the historical process of the introduction of luxury is regarded by Hume as fostering new morals peculiar to the commercial age; and secondly, the enjoyment of luxury is seen as a condition favorable to the maintenance of morals. The second aim of this paper is to shed some new light on an aspect of Hume's thought that, so far, has been relatively neglected, namely, his distinction between "innocent" and "vicious" forms of luxury, as well as his acknowledgement of the possibility of the emergence of the latter, as well as the former, in the modern commercial world. However, this does not necessarily lead us to a more pessimistic interpretation of Hume's view of luxury than those accepted thus far; only to the awareness of how difficult and delicate, in Hume's view, is the maintenance of the balance between the interlinked concepts of industry, knowledge, and humanity.

The Legacy of Luxury

This article argues that the luxury debates of the 18th century left a legacy for discussions of consumption up to the present day. First, the vices and virtues of moral discourse became the use and abuse, productive and unproductive, of 19th-century liberalism; second, in the early 20th century, these dichotomies were applied to the new mass market, as cheap standardized goods were alleged to destroy the liberal individuality of the consumer; third, in the late 20th century, economics, politics and even the modern consumer movement have seemingly abstracted consumption from such moral categories, leaving only a morality of reaction as specific goods are seen to infringe societal norms. However, in recent years, consumption has become increasingly remoralized, posing important challenges for the academic and critical discussion of ethics and current consumer society.

Consumption and the World of Ideas: Consumer Revolution and the Moral Economy of the Marquis de Mirabeau

This article explores the intellectual transformations that accompanied the rise of consumption in eighteenth-century France by examining a best-seller, L'Ami des hommes (1756), by the marquis de Mirabeau. The most popular work of political economy of its time, L'Ami des hommes made a particularly important intervention in the luxury debate. Straddling two seemingly contradictory strains of eighteenth-century political and social thought—a classical republicanism that looked backward to ancient civic virtue and an economic liberalism that looked forward to material progress—the book offered readers the best of both worlds: a moral economy of prosperity. This article analyzes Mirabeau's pathology of consumption and places his moral economy of prosperity in the broader context of Enlightenment thought.

Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, and: Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, and: Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 Peter Earle Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts, eds. Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1996). Pp. 273. $37.50 cloth. James Walvin. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Pp. 219. $45.00 cloth. Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century is a promising title, but this book of essays does not really satisfy that promise and one wonders just how and why the editors decided to put it together. The book starts with two essays by Roy Porter, one summarizing the eighteenth-century luxury debate and the other reviewing the consumer revolution and the commercialization of leisure. As one would expect, this is competently done and, although he says nothing very new, it is obviously useful to be reminded that the eighteenth century developed “a faith that the pursuit of pleasure would advance the general good” and that in turn the entrepreneurs of the day were eager to develop new and profitable ways for people to pursue pleasure. One would expect the remaining essays to develop the themes surveyed by Porter by examining the various pleasures available to the men and women of the eighteenth century. This in fact is what we get in the next two essays by Simon Varey and Marie Mulvey Roberts, who examine in turn the pleasures of the table and the strange proliferation of clubs, although Varey’s essay is rather too thin to provide a satisfactory meal and Roberts spends too much time in listing real and imaginary clubs and too little in explaining why people were so fond of them, beyond the rather obvious point that the pleasure principle common to all of them was conviviality. The rest of the essays seem too specialized and remote from the general theme to belong to the book. The best of these is Carolyn D. Williams’s essay on the “luxury of doing good,” which analyzes the relationship between charity and the development of ideas about sensibility, sympathy, and the pleasures of benevolence, her themes being well illustrated by a case-study of the Royal Humane Society, which was founded in 1774 to promote the rescue and resuscitation of people, mainly from drowning. Vivien Jones then uses the concept of the “resisting reader” to suggest that female readers of conduct-books, far from being molded or repressed by them, got pleasure from the fact that they stimulated the very desires they sought to repress. This is an interesting thesis, though obviously one that is virtually impossible to establish. The book ends with three very detailed pieces of musical, aesthetic, and literary criticism by Derek Alsop, E. J. Clery, and Susan Manning. These are interesting enough, especially Alsop’s critical examination of the pleasures given by Handel and the Italian opera in the years 1711–28, but seem too dependent on specialist knowledge of contemporary literature and music and the contemporary critical debate to be easily accessible to the general reader envisaged by the tone and content of the introductory chapters. Fruits of Empire is also about pleasure or rather the astonishing global impact of the simple pleasures of the British people, their love of sweet tea and, to a lesser extent, sweet coffee and chocolate and the addiction of the male half of the population to tobacco. James Walvin examines each of these exotic imports in turn, discussing their cultural functions in their native habitats and then showing how, tentatively at first, and in the face of medical and social criticism, they were adopted and their original functions modified until they had become a fundamental part of British domestic consumption. No one could possibly have predicted in the sixteenth century that British taste would change in such ways but the fact that it did, combined with the development of [End Page 154] imperialism, naval power and the worldwide search of merchants for profit was to transform the face of the globe. Clearing land for the tropical staples completely changed the appearance and flora of many parts of the world, while that accidental European...

Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle‐Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France

Next article No AccessLuxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle‐Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France*Sarah MazaSarah MazaNorthwestern University Search for more articles by this author Northwestern UniversityPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 69, Number 2June 1997 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/245486 Views: 459Total views on this site Citations: 32Citations are reported from Crossref © 1997 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Matthew D'Auria The Shaping of French National Identity, 42 (Dec 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316423189Chetan Sinha Mood of the Consumer, (Jan 2019): 267–279.https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5690-9.ch012Elizabeth Heath Sugarcoated Slavery: Colonial Commodities and the Education of the Senses in Early Modern France, Critical Historical Studies 5, no.22 (Nov 2018): 169–207.https://doi.org/10.1086/699684Charles Walton Capitalism’s Alter Ego: The Birth of Reciprocity in Eighteenth-Century France, Critical Historical Studies 5, no.11 (Apr 2018): 1–43.https://doi.org/10.1086/697032 Bibliographie, (Sep 2014): 203–215.https://doi.org/10.3917/arco.legay.2014.01.0203Erika Vause Disciplining the Market: Debt Imprisonment, Public Credit, and the Construction of Commercial Personhood in Revolutionary France, Law and History Review 32, no.33 (Jun 2014): 647–682.https://doi.org/10.1017/S073824801400025X Credit and Old Regime Economies of Regard, (Jan 2013): 21–55.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-002 Critiques and Crises of the Credit System, (Jan 2013): 56–95.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-003 Incredible Style, (Jan 2013): 96–138.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-004 Credit in the Female Fashion Trades of Eighteenth-Century Paris, (Jan 2013): 139–194.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-005 Fashion Merchants, (Jan 2013): 195–245.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-006 Madame Déficit and Her Minister of Fashion, (Jan 2013): 246–282.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-007 Family Affairs, (Jan 2013): 283–315.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-008 Conclusion, (Jan 2013): 316–328.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-009 Notes, (Jan 2013): 329–382.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-010 Bibliography, (Jan 2013): 383–406.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-011Martin Hájek Morální normalita a sociální struktura současné společnosti, Sociální studia / Social Studies 9, no.44 (Oct 2012): 67.https://doi.org/10.5817/SOC2012-4-67Celso M. Villegas Revolution “from the middle”: historical events, narrative, and the making of the middle class in the contemporary developing world, (Mar 2015): 299–312.https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-8719(2010)0000021017 Varieties of European Experience, II, (Oct 2009): 271–370.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816000.004John Berdell Interdependence and independence in Cantillon's Essai, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 16, no.22 (Jun 2009): 221–249.https://doi.org/10.1080/09672560902890988Luis M. Pozo The roots of hegemony: The mechanisms of class accommodation and the emergence of the nation-people, Capital & Class 31, no.11 (Sep 2016): 55–88.https://doi.org/10.1177/030981680709100104Clare Haru Crowston La reine et sa “ministre des modes”, Travail, genre et sociétés N° 13, no.11 (Apr 2005): 75–94.https://doi.org/10.3917/tgs.013.0075 Henry Clark Grain Trade Information: Economic Conflict and Political Culture under Terray, 1770–1774 Clark, The Journal of Modern History 76, no.44 (Jul 2015): 793–834.https://doi.org/10.1086/427569David A. Bell Class, consciousness, and the fall of the bourgeois revolution, Critical Review 16, no.2-32-3 (Jan 2004): 323–351.https://doi.org/10.1080/08913810408443613Maxine Berg, Elizabeth Eger The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates, (Jan 2003): 7–27.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508279_2Dena Goodman Furnishing Discourses: Readings of a Writing Desk in Eighteenth-Century France, (Jan 2003): 71–88.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508279_6Alan M. Kraut Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible . By Joseph A. Amato (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 250 pp. $22.50, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no.44 (Apr 2001): 613–614.https://doi.org/10.1162/00221950151115106Sharon Kettering A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France . By Christine Adams (University Park, Penn State University Press, 2000) 292 pp. $65.00 cloth $19.95 paper, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no.44 (Apr 2001): 632–634.https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2001.31.4.632 George S. Williamson What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819 Williamson, The Journal of Modern History 72, no.44 (Jul 2015): 890–943.https://doi.org/10.1086/318549 William M. Reddy Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution Reddy, The Journal of Modern History 72, no.11 (Jul 2015): 109–152.https://doi.org/10.1086/315931David Andress Representing the Sovereign People in the Terror, (Jan 2000): 28–41.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932747_3Jerrold Seigel Notes, (): 541–610.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087377.020

The tyranny of taste: the politics of architecture and design in Britain, 1550-1960

Introduction PART 1 - THE CONSUMER SOCIETY: London - The First Modem City Portrait of an Economy A New Economic Theory. PART 11 - THE STABLE SOCIETY: Preface The Control of London's Expansion Seating the Gentry: Competing Motives - Competitive Consumption or Noblesse Oblige?, A Common Task: What was the Function of Gentry Residence?, Both Ruler and Ruled Projects and Manufactures: Nifles, Trifles, Design Manufactures. PART III - THE LUXURY DEBATE: Preface: History and Ideas The Luxury Debate, 1559 - 1660 Competitive Consumption: Barbon: The Infinitive Wants of the Mind, Mandeville The Spectator David Hume Adam Smith: Beauty and Economic Growth, Improvements in Production, The Progress of Opulence. PART IV - STYLE AND ECONOMICS - 17th & 18th CENTURIES: Preface The Early Stuarts: Penshurst and the Old Fashion of England, The Meaning of Classicism, Arbiter Elegantiarum The Spectator and Pope Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty. PART V - DESIGNER REFORM: Preface The Encouragement of the Arts of Design in the Eighteenth Century The Condition of England Pugin The Schools of Design and the Great Exhibition The Opponents of Design Reform Ruskin. PART VI - MODERN MOVEMENT AND WELFARE STATE: Preface Design, Interiors and Personal Consumption: The Modem Style: Loos and Le Corbusier, British Design Debates in the '30s and '40s Architecture: The Interior, The Struggle for Light, Free Love and Free Planning Town Planning: Modernist Painting, Depressed Areas and Land Use Planning, Town Planning 1906-1947, Framing the 1947 Act Modernist Ideas into Action: Daylighting and Density Control, Architect Planners. PART VII - CONCLUSION: PLATO'S CONUNDRUM.