Engineered to Sell

In Engineered to Sell Jan L. Logemann extends a critique of the “Americanization” of consumer capitalism thesis that he first ventured in Trams or Tailfins? (Jan L. Logemann, Trams or Tailfins?, 2012, p. 2). In that book Logemann argued that the West German “economic miracle” of the late 1950s resulted in a uniquely German approach toward the built environment (p. 8). Far from submitting to “Coca-colonization,” West Germans created housing and municipal transportation systems according to their own vision of the public good. In his new book, Logemann goes much further. Following the transatlantic careers of dozens of mid-twentieth-century European-born social scientists and commercial designers, Logemann contends that the intellectual infrastructure of the consumers' republic was not American, even if was largely U.S. made. Rather, his émigrés took emerging European research methods or modernist aesthetics with them when they relocated to the United States and insinuated those tools into

Americanization · Archaeology · Capitalism · Economic history · Economic miracle · Economics · Economy · German · Miracle · Political science · Sociology · European history and politics · History · Law