The Politics of Everyday Life

Bibliographic Data

ID23201951
AuthorsFrank Trentmann (Birkbeck, University of London, corresponding author)
Year2012
Pages521-547
Publication date2012-09-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueThe Oxford Handbook Of The History Of Consumption (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199561216.013.0027
OpenAlexW2626014138
ISBN9780199561216
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited4

As recently as 1985, the doyen of social science history in Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, said the study of everyday life added little more than a bit of ‘gruel’ to the main course of history. Since then, the turf wars between social history, history from below, and cultural history have themselves become a thing of the past. It was during the 1950s–1970s that first sociologists, and then ‘new social’ historians, embraced the everyday. The flowering of consumption studies since would be unthinkable without the recognition that everyday life is an important – perhaps the most important – place people find meaning, develop habits, and acquire a sense of themselves and their world. This article offers an historical account of the changing scope and politics of everyday life. In contrast to recent discussions that have made the everyday appear the product of Western Europe after World War II, it traces the longer history of the everyday and the different politics of modernity which it has inspired.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Everyday life · Meaning (existential) · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Social history (medicine) · Social science · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy