Joanna Cohen. Luxurious Citizens

In the weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush famously urged Americans to consume as a means to oppose terrorism and to strengthen the country. The terrorist attacks illuminated a deeply held but seemingly arbitrary belief in the connection between patriotism, citizenship, and consumption. When did Americans decide that they could create a stronger nation through their purchases, and how did the ability to consume freely become a fundamental right of the American citizen? Joanna Cohen’s Luxurious Citizens tackles these questions. Cohen argues that in the decades between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, a group of competing interest groups came together to radically redefine citizenship and political economy by embracing the middle-class white consumer as a positive figure who contributed to the national good and deserved the opportunity to seek out the lowest price. Cohen demonstrates that the conflict between protection of American manufacturers and the consumer’s right to buy goods (frequently those produced in Great Britain) fundamentally shaped American foreign policy and its domestic economy and became one of the major issues of sectional debate between North and South. She thus recovers the nineteenth century as a “crucial formative period” (12) for consumption, one that, she contends, has been overlooked in favor of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution and the emergence of mass consumer culture in the twentieth century.

Citizenship · Consumption (sociology) · Democracy · Economic history · Economics · Patriotism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Terrorism · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies