Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption: Contributions from Economics and Social Sciences 3658420499, 9783658420499

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Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky · Karl Kollmann   Editors

Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption Contributions from Economics and Social Sciences

Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption

Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky • Karl Kollmann Editors

Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption Contributions from Economics and Social Sciences

Editors Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky Universität Bonn Bonn, Germany

Karl Kollmann Österreichischer Verbraucherrat Wien, Austria

ISBN 978-3-658-42050-5 ISBN 978-3-658-42049-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5

(eBook)

This book is a translation of the original German edition "Eigensinnige und unorthodoxe Vordenker für eine Kritische Konsumtheorie“ by Piorkowsky, Michael-Burkhard, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. # The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

Introduction: Consumer Theory Today Is Unthinkable Without Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky

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Part I In Search of Individual Satisfaction Bell, Campbell and the Soul of Modern Consumerism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kai-Uwe Hellmann

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Of Markets and People: Tibor Scitovsky’s Joyless Economy . . . . . . . . Günther Rosenberger

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Albert O. Hirschman: Pioneer of an Action-Oriented Consumption Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christian Bala

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Part II In Search of Environmental Sustainability Kenneth Ewart Boulding: Economics and Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky Sustainable Development Is the Alternative to Capitalism: Memories of Gerhard Scherhorn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Johannes Hoffmann and Gerhard Hofmann

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Georg Simmel: Fashion and Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Rainer Hufnagel Review and Outlook: “Rethinking Consumer Theory!” Suggestions at the Founding Workshop of the Bamberg Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Karl Kollmann

Introduction: Consumer Theory Today Is Unthinkable Without Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky Abstract

The contributions to this volume recall authors who have been wayward and unorthodox scholars in their field, that is, who have not worked in accordance with the tenets of their professional community. Thorstein Bunde Veblen with his famous book The Theory of the Leisure Class is an example of the outstanding importance of scientific dissenters in the development of consumer theory. The authors selected here have chosen alternative approaches, in particular approaches that transcend disciplines, by delimiting the subject area and approaching the object of knowledge, by rejecting axioms or parts of the system of propositions as well as justifications and methods of gaining knowledge, and have thus made contributions to a Critical Consumer Theory as suggested by this series of publications. In part, the approaches have gained attention, recognition, and even entry into consumer theory, so that their fruitfulness no longer needs to be demonstrated, but precisely because of this, it also proves the importance of unorthodox thought leaders. In part, however, the contributions have gone unnoticed. They could still prove fruitful if they were made known or remembered. The aim of this volume is to provide a further impetus for engagement with the history of the discipline and the related range of subjects as a basis for the development of a consumer theory that is not too narrowly conceived and that could point the way to appropriate consumer research, policy and education.

M.-B. Piorkowsky (✉) Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_1

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Science Lives Precisely Also from Deviants

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (n.d. [1899]) with his famous book The Theory of the Leisure Class is an example of the outstanding importance of scientific dissenters in the development of consumer theory. It is true that – contrary to what is expressed in the title of this introductory chapter – a consumer theory is conceivable today even without the impulses and exemplary works of unorthodox authors, but it would certainly look very different, as a glance at the neoclassical theory of demand shows. However, it is still the case – in the opinion of the authors involved here – that too little of what has been developed and offered in the way of trend-setting contributions by pioneering thinkers is perceived in the specialist community. Many things that should be considered outdated are still cited and thus seem to indicate the direction of thought of the authors. And some insights often take a long time, sometimes too long, to become part of current self-evidence, such as the degradation of the homo economicus model, giving consumer theory a new self-confidence. What would consumer theory be today without Behavioral Economics, whose critique of orthodox economic theory with the development of counter-positions was anticipated over 60 years ago by the unorthodox social scientists George Katona, Herbert Simon, and Günter Schmölders (see Press and Information Office of the Free University of Berlin 1982; Selten 1999; Rippe and Haarland 1980). Other models and dogmas, on the other hand, are held on to, such as the theorycentral notion of a fundamental opposition between consumption and production and the specific function and role of consumers as buyers and final consumers, even if doubts occasionally arise and corrections are considered or hinted at. In a foundational work on consumer science (Kenning et al. 2017), Kenning (2017, pp. 3–17) addresses problems of conceptualisations and definitions in his contribution on Consumer Science – Conceptual Foundations and Status Quo, and in particular considers definitions that are stable over time to be almost impossible. Nevertheless, he wants to undertake this with his contribution, starting with the concept of consumer. As a result of the literature review, Kenning first presents two views, according to which all economic subjects (institutions, organizations, individuals) would come into consideration as consumers, which – as a primarily economic function – consume goods (including services) or – as an institution – predominantly perform consumption functions, namely natural persons, private households and commercial enterprises, such as “large kitchens in a university canteen” (Kenning 2017, p. 5). This sounds interesting and even unorthodox (see the article on Kenneth Ewart Boulding in this volume). Kenning, however, leaves open whether these views take into account all derived businesses in addition to

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private households, or only those that organize household-related care, and does not want to delve into this aspect. Instead, he analyses definitions of the term “consumer sciences” in which the idea of the consumer as a partial role of natural persons in the function as buyers and users in the household and family context and in interaction with quite a few organisations is expressed, and argues for the institutional view (Kenning 2017, p. 7). However, it is not really clear here – as it is in the following remarks on demand fields – what “consuming” actually is apart from “using products” and “satisfying needs”. This can only be deduced intuitively from the list of demand areas, especially with regard to the “demand area of nutrition” and the “large kitchens” mentioned as examples. With this understanding of the consumer, the article written by Schreiner and Kenning (2017, pp. 81–102) on Historical Frameworks of Consumer-Relevant Data Collections is prefaced by the famous consumption dogma of Adam Smith in his main economic work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in German translation (Schreiner and Kenning 2017, p. 82; transl.): Consumption alone is the aim and purpose of all production; therefore the interest of the producer should really be considered only so far as it may be necessary to promote the good of the consumer. The maxim is obvious, so that it would be foolish to try to prove it. In the mercantilist economic system the welfare of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to the interest of the producer, and production and not consumption is evidently regarded as the ultimate aim or object of all economic activity and action.

The authors reinforce the quoted statement by stating: “Even Adam Smith, founder of classical economics, knew about the position of consumers in the economy” (Schreiner and Kenning 2017, p. 82; transl.). But why would Smith’s 1776 consumption dogma still apply? And if it did, how would the interests of the commercial kitchen as a commercial consumer and those of the dining hall’s patrons as consumers be balanced? There would be much to say about all this, for which there is not the space here (see Piorkowsky 2017, 2019). It should only be noted that the statement that consumption – conventionally thought of as the opposite of production – alone is the aim and purpose of all production is to be questioned in this absoluteness, at least from today’s perspective. The fact that work can cause not only burden, but also pleasure, has often been argued, for example by the behavioral economist Tibor Scitovsky (1976, pp. 89–101), who is honored here in one of the contributions, in his book The Joyless Economy. Neuroscientific findings support the thesis of self-stimulation through work (Lallement et al. 2014 [2013]). However, this has not been reflected in conventional consumer theory with the consumer role aligned with the market-purchase paradigm. The fact that Schmölders (1969, p. 50)

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recommended that gainful employment and income generation be included to some extent in consumer research should be mentioned here as a further indication of the usefulness of engaging with unorthodox authors. What is meant by unorthodox thought leaders can be explained using the example of economics. In order to distinguish between orthodox and unorthodox approaches in the field of economics and economic consumer theory, microeconomics and macroeconomics in their conventional form, as found in textbooks for economics studies, can be contrasted as pure doctrine on the one hand with approaches that are also not entirely new, such as evolutionary economics, household and family economics, (new) institutional economics, ecological economics and behavioural economics, on the other hand as unorthodox or heterodox approaches. In particular, the behavioral, environmental, and modeling assumptions of microeconomic theorizing, simplified for purposes of mathematization but unrealistic, have provided points of attack for critiques and justifications of alternative designs to attack the main enemy, homo economicus. Among the assumptions criticized are, as is well known, above all the following: strong rational behavior, egoism, non-saturation of needs, maximizing behavior, atemporality, complete market transparency and foresight, given initial endowment of economic agents, free market access, an infinite number of market participants, homogeneity and complete divisibility of goods, given technology, neutrality of money, absence of transaction costs and external effects, and constancy of production and consumption functions (Kade 1962; Holleis 1985, pp. 28f.; cf. Piorkowsky 2011, pp. 80–83). Unorthodox economists have criticized the irrelevance of the assumptions for the analysis of the real world and the solution of pressing social problems (see, e.g., Veblen 1998 [1898]; Schmölders 1966; Boulding 1986) and developed their own approaches. In an analysis of the approaches of selected unorthodox economists, Bruno S. Frey (1977) has worked out basic convictions of the authors which, more or less combined, characterize their work in the sense of conceptual elements. Included in the analysis were publications by Thorstein Bunde Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Albert Otto Hirschman, Kenneth Ewart Boulding and Gunnar Myrdal. There are also contributions on Boulding and Hirschman in this volume. Frey (1977, p. 50) has highlighted the following commonalities in the views and approaches of the unorthodox: • The economy is part of an overall socio-cultural system. The economy and politics are interconnected. In this interconnectedness, the economy must be analysed in a transdisciplinary way.

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• Institutions play an important role in economic life. Powerful institutions or organizations include large corporations. • Power and conflict are defining realities in business life. • Economic development takes place evolutionarily in time and this is not reversible. • Imbalances can release creative forces. Decisive factors of development are changes in technology, knowledge and preferences. • The economic imbalances in the world, especially the problems of developing countries and the disadvantaged in affluent societies, must be addressed. • In analysis, more emphasis is placed on practical relevance than on methodological rigour. Qualitative research, especially empirical analyses, are preferred to mathematical models when problems cannot be quantified in a structurally identical way by their very nature; mathematics, however, is also used as a supplement. Unorthodox economists are thus characterized above all by the transdisciplinary integration of findings from political science, sociology, psychology and ecology and aim with their work – beyond pure theory – at solving social problems, especially with a view to disadvantaged people and regions. The economists, Frey (1977) included in his analysis were trained in at least one of the other disciplines mentioned or were active through self-study and research, especially in conflict and peace studies; and they were also recognized outside the field of economics. They probably saw themselves as economists, but they were “lone wolves”, did not form a scientific community in the narrow sense and – apart from the economists working in the field of behavioural science – did not encourage the formation of scientific schools until late. The same applies to the New Institutional Economics and the New Political Economy, which, however, are no longer regarded as unorthodox throughout, but gradually complement micro- and macroeconomics in parts. In contrast to the authors and schools of thought listed so far, Frederic Lee (2009, pp. 4–18) refers exclusively to the representatives of Marxism and neo-Marxism as heterodox economists, because with their fundamental opposition to bourgeois economics, like “theological heretics”, they have long since formed a specialist community delimited in terms of content and methodology. Alongside economic Marxism, Warren Joseph Samuels (1987) sees American institutional economics as a heterodox economic school. But – it should be said once again – today the boundaries are more fluid than during the active time of the unorthodox already mentioned and those raised to consciousness in this volume. With regard to sociology, the history of sociology from its beginnings to the present day might appear to an economist to be largely a history of unorthodox

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thinkers (cf. Maus 1956). In a personal communication to the author of this introduction, Kai-Uwe Hellmann has thankfully mentioned the following authors as examples of older-aged unorthodox sociologists: Dirk Baecker, Peter Fuchs, Roland Girtler, Alois Hahn, Karl Otto Hondrich, Niklas Luhmann, Charles Wright Mills, Rolf Schwendter and Harrison White. It is not uncommon for sociologists to classify even unorthodox economists, at least economic chairholders and academic teachers, such as Max Weber and Thorstein Bunde Veblen, as economic sociologists (see Kraemer and Brugger 2017); and I once referred to Gerhard Scherhorn as a sociologist (Piorkowsky 2017, p. 92). But this is at least in line with the inter- or transdisciplinarily oriented conviction and working methods of unorthodox economists, some of whom are acknowledged in this volume, including Gerhard Scherhorn, that important, indeed indispensable, contributions to the explanation of consumer behavior can be expected from sociological and psychological research in particular (see, e.g., Boulding 1950, p. 147; Scherhorn 1977, 1986, 2001).

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What Is Critical Consumer Theory?

Critical consumer theory, as fundamentally outlined in the Bamberg Manifesto (Fridrich et al. 2014), is oriented across academic disciplines and also includes the history of theory, which is closely linked to real experiences and traditions of thought (cf. Piorkowsky 2017). The historical change in the prevailing basic ideas and paradigms alone makes it clear that consumption and consumers have not always been thought of in the same way as they are at present, and suggests that a change in basic views can also be expected in the future. That this has consequences for consumer policy and consumer education does not really need to be mentioned, but it does underline the need for critical analysis (cf. Kollmann 2015, 2017). The authors of the Bamberg Manifesto are particularly disturbed by the roletheoretical narrowing of the concept of consumer, with the role concept remaining very poor, and by the dominance of the market-purchase paradigm. They are oriented towards a multidimensional and more holistic understanding of the consumer, as well as towards the household and lifestyle context and the irrevocable embedding of activities and organisations in the socio-economic and ecological environment. This leads to an expansion of the conventional concept of consumer and consumption, which has been developed in the history of theory in close orientation to the model of the economic system as a monetary and equivalent goods cycle, i.e. the circular flow model, and in distinction to the concept of

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production according to an understanding shaped by agriculture and crafts or industry (cf. on this Streissler and Streissler 1966). The key points of the criticism are briefly – and only slightly sharpened – mentioned (cf. in detail Piorkowsky and Kollmann 2019, pp. 5–10). • The prevailing consumer theory is one-dimensional. At the centre of the analysis – not only among economists – is the human being as a buyer of market goods (see e.g. Nessel 2017, pp. 37f.). Already purchasing is conceptually largely equated with consumption. Consumption per se is hardly considered. Everyday purchasing and the further processing and use of intermediate products are not considered to be the production of personal goods, let alone rarer activities such as purchasing or renting and furnishing the home. • The fact that household members also sell discarded household goods or services, e.g. electricity and housing use, on specialised markets is referred to as ‘prosumption’, or even as the ‘delimitation of the consumer role’ (see BlättelMink 2010; Kenning and Lamla 2018; Piorkowsky 2018). • Complementary supply systems besides the market, such as neighbourhood help and associations, are largely overlooked. • When the role of consumer-citizen is brought into focus, it is mainly with an orientation towards socially and ecologically correct purchasing behaviour (see e.g. Nessel 2017, pp. 49f.), less often with a view to publicly provided and used goods as well as collective actions. • The occupational roles of household members and the regular acquisition of money through gainful employment as well as the interdependencies of money and time budgets are neglected due to consumer theory and policy (see Stauss 1982). • Consumer education broadly follows the conventional theoretical guidelines and the corresponding policy recommendations (see in this regard Secretariat of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Federal States of the Federal Republic of Germany 2013). The generalised and integrative consideration of production and consumption as well as of interwoven personal role bundles and the embedding of economic activity in basic social and ecological structures are a fundamental concern of critical consumer theory. A new orientation in consumer theory and consumer policy would be desirable, one that focuses on the lifeworld of people as actors in the household and family context as well as in other forms of life and on the participation aspirations of modern man, the citizen in particular in the sense of citoyen or citizen (instead of bourgeois), in civil society. It is only with such a focus and

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perspective – founded on interdisciplinary research – that circles of questions such as the possibilities of satisfactory lifestyles and sufficiency, sustainable lifestyles and sustainable climate policy can be brought together with questions of consumption. This also means that consumer policy must learn to extricate itself from the colonisation of daily economic policy, from dogmatic economic growth mantras and from ritualised institutional structures of action in politics. People prefer manageable structures that they can shape productively and participatively – but these must first be largely established. This includes fostering conditions for the emergence and spread of new social norms and economic institutions, such as selfhelp and sharing systems. The authors honoured in this volume have developed independent and unorthodox positions vis-à-vis the prevailing doctrine on one or more of the abovementioned points of criticism and/or have suggested further considerations that have consciously or unconsciously been incorporated into the basic conception of Critical Consumer Theory. This volume thus follows on from the volume on Forgotten and Misunderstood Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption – also published in the Critical Consumer Research series (Piorkowsky and Kollmann 2019).

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Overview of the Contributions

The following contributions focus on the scholars listed in Table 1, who are acknowledged for their work and suggestions in the sense of Critical Consumption Theory. For the most part, these personalities are recognized in their respective professional communities and beyond; in some cases, however, they have not been adequately acknowledged in the consumption theory-oriented literature, or not at all with the achievements highlighted here. All were headstrong and unorthodox thought leaders, active mainly beyond the mainstream of the scholarly communities – primarily in small groups and circles of thought. Their insight and foresight in their analyses of the economy and society, and the associated development of questions and answers, offers inspiration in the current discussion of basic questions of consumption and the consumer role. The designation of the profession in Table 1 does not correspond to the official denomination of the respective professorship at the university, but to a designation chosen here for the work in science and partly also beyond. In the contributions, the selected authors or the contributors address in particular ambivalences, options and future modes in consumption in the search for

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Table 1 Biographical information on the selected authors. Source: Own compilation

Name and profession Georg Simmel, Cultural Philosophical Sociologist Kenneth Ewart Boulding, Ecological Economist Tibor Scitovsky, Behavioral Economist Albert Otto Hirschman, Political Development Economist Daniel Bell, Cultural Critic Sociologist Gerhard Scherhorn, Political Consumer Economist

Year of birth and death 1858–1918 1910–1993 1910–2002 1915–2012

1919–2011 1930–2018

Place of the last university examination University of Berlin University of Oxford London School of Economics University of Trieste Columbia University University of Cologne

Last full-time position Professor, University of Strasbourg Professor, University of Colorado Professor, Stanford University Professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Professor, Harvard University Professor, University of Hohenheim

satisfaction. This is something like the proverbial red thread in this volume. On the one hand, it is about the pursuit of satisfaction in consumption through the act of consumption itself, and on the other hand, it is about the pursuit of satisfaction through increasing “peace with nature”. The volume begins in Part I of the main section with three contributions setting out insights into the quest for individual satisfaction in consumption in the narrow sense. This is followed in Part II of the main section by three contributions on the search for ecological sustainability. It is clear that such considerations arise from dissatisfaction with the current situation, on the one hand with consumption in the strict sense, and on the other hand with the natural-environmental effects of consumption and – logically – of production, i.e. the transformation of input into output and outcome. At the core of the contributions are the questions of whether and how satisfaction or sustainability can be achieved, whether and what obstacles stand in the way of this at present or in the future, whether and how these can be overcome at present or in the future, and what, if anything, one gets in return. Very briefly, Kai-Uwe Hellmann’s contribution dedicated to Daniel Bell shows that satisfaction and frustration are inextricably linked. In the contribution by Günther Rosenberger on Tibor Scitovsky, there is more frustration than joy. Albert Otto Hirschman has very profoundly described the ambivalent options of consumers: loyalty, voice, and exit, as Christian Bala points out. Kenneth Ewart Boulding has developed the vision of a more sustainable spaceship economy for the earth on the basis of his Ecological

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Economics, on which Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky reports. According to Johannes Hoffmann and Gerhard Hofmann, Gerhard Scherhorn has promoted democratically legitimized sustainability as an alternative to capitalism. And Rainer Hufnagel shows in his contribution on Georg Simmel that beauty in product design could make a contribution to ecological sustainability. The volume concludes with questions and suggestions presented by Karl Kollmann at the founding workshop of the Bamberg Group in 2013. This statement was also motivated by dissatisfaction: Dissatisfaction with the state of consumer theory, policy and education. Daniel Bell, sociologist and visionary of post-industrial society, was also an early non-Marxist critic of modern consumer society and hedonism, as Kai-Uwe Hellmann explains in his contribution on Bell’s definition of modern consumption. Bell evaluated the development as a cultural revolution in the sense of a decline of the elevated culture of the educated bourgeoisie. He considered the North American consumer culture of his time to be shallow and vulgar. Hellmann criticizes Bell’s critique, which is characterized by arrogance and clouded by a lack of sociological standards of analysis. However, Hellmann recognizes in Bell’s critically instrumentalized focus on hedonism a crucial early indication for sociological research on consumption of the guiding attitude of modern consumer society with consumption as its guiding sphere. In order to bring more depth into the analysis, Hellmann draws in particular on amounts by Colin Campbell and Tibor Scitovsky and elaborates that desire and reality, dissatisfaction and satisfaction – like a pendulum – are alternating phases in the process of shaping one’s life and that the intensive search for personal satisfaction in consumption is the soul of modern consumption. Tibor Scitovsky has analysed consumers not only as buyers and users, but also as sellers of their discarded household goods (Scitovsky 1994) and has worked out the connections between consumption, gainful employment and the foundation of satisfaction. He is best known for his analysis of the joyless economy. In his book The Joyless Economy, Scitovsky (1976) brought into focus the individual and structural problems that, for an increasing number of people, lead to a rather joyless, unfulfilling life in the supposedly affluent society. Scitovsky, like Bell, also has in mind living conditions in the United States. The unfulfilling “American Dream” for too many is his paradigm. Scitovsky combines personality psychology and cultural criticism to produce a profound analysis of the – almost pathological – social malaise, as Günther Rosenberger explains in detail. Lack of education, gainful employment and infrastructure prevent the development of curiosity and creativity to build up good tensions, which are necessary for a pleasurable life. Uniform mass products and undemanding leisure activities lead to “downward conformity” and pseudo-satisfaction. When almost everything is missing, only violence, crime and

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drugs remain to create a tension that is falsely perceived as positive. The fact that it is precisely unfulfilled expectations that can lead to a successful search for a fulfilling life is an experience denied to many. Scitovsky has justified this psychologically and Rosenberger conveys it in a catchy way in his contribution. Albert Otto Hirschman was not only a scientist, but also a practitioner in the implementation of his scientific and political ideals and ideas. He emphasized the role of consumer-citizens, especially in the forms of resistant individual and collective actions (Hirschman 1970). This is to be understood as “consumer politics from below” and thus also as the production of collective or public goods. But not only churn and dissent, but also loyalty to a provider and – in addition to the options – the ambivalences that can be associated with the possibilities of action, and in any case should be considered, are what characterize Hischman’s main work in a special way. And Christian Bala has worked out precisely this and presents it in a differentiated way in his contribution. This includes, for example, Hirschman’s considerations that with the migration of critical consumers from a market, the potential for dissent would also be reduced and the less active demanders would be left “to their fate” and their supply situation could even worsen; or that – in the case of weak competition and a lack of product alternatives – loyalty to a supplier would also result in the possibility of discovering and testing corrective reactions up to dissent and migration in the first instance. Kenneth Ewart Boulding was at first a fairly regular economist, as he once said, and as his early published introductions to economics under the title Economic Analysis also attest. Only a close reading could reveal a hint of reorientation even in those introductions, which had the status of standard reading for economics students. In his Reconstruction of Economics, he then presented a theory in which the economic system is consistently linked to the ecological environment and was the first economist to introduce thermodynamics into economic analysis. This enabled him to show that the whole economic process is an irreversible transformation process of natural goods into investment and consumption goods, as well as residual and pollutants. This led him to reason that consumption and production were bad rather than good, and found a brilliant conclusion in the famous article The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth and the follow-up Spaceship Earth Revisited. In addition, Boulding, among other things, added a theory of non-market economics to the prevailing market-centered view in economics and highlighted the basal role of private households. This earned him the reproach of a famous colleague that he was an institutional economist – unorthodox and obstinate. This and more is described in detail in the article by Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky. Gerhard Scherhorn was an economist, equipped with the basic socio-economic orientation from Günter Schmölders’ Research Unit for Empirical Social

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Economics. His preoccupation with consumer theory, consumer issues and economic policy, in particular also with consumer education and consumer policy, led him early on to questions about the foundations and ways of socio-economically and ecologically responsible action, about a “peace with nature” (Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich) and a balance of prosperity in the world. Among other things, he was a founding member of the Association of Ecological Economists and the Network Ecological Economics and directed the research on “New Models of Prosperity” and “Sustainable Production and Consumption” at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Johannes Hoffmann and Gerhard Hofmann recall these focal points of his work, in particular the work of the project group “Ethical-Ecological Rating”, in their article on Gerhard Scherhorn. Georg Simmel is one of the co-founders of German sociology and published at a time when there could be no orthodoxy. He omitted almost no topic. The label chosen here as “cultural-philosophical sociologist” was inspired by the portrait of Simmel written by Ingo Meyer (2018). That Simmel would have written about sustainability is probably not claimed in the literature. And yet, Rainer Hufnagel has found an interesting detail in Simmel’s Philosophy of Fashion for this purpose and creatively incorporated it into a constructively critical consideration of sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns. Hufnagel takes up Simmel’s consideration of fashion waves and explores analogies to the fading of sensations of utility and the dynamics of pendulum movements. The significance and perception of beauty could – according to the result – play a key role in the more or less sustainable use of utility objects. This analysis complements the discussion of the question raised by Boulding and dealt with in Piorkowsky’s contribution as to whether it is rather the result or the process of consumption that is decisive for the welfare foundation, i.e., for example, being well dressed or being able to dress in a varied way. The volume concludes with Karl Kollmann’s paper on his lecture in Bamberg. In July 2013, on the initiative of the two editors of this volume of the publication series Critical Consumer Research, scholars from Germany, the Netherlands and Austria met in Bamberg, which is geographically centrally located between Holland and Austria, to discuss the state of consumer theory and consumer research under the motto “Rethinking Consumer Theory!”. The participants were Christian Fridrich, Renate Hübner, Rainer Hufnagel, Mirjam Jaquemoth, Karl Kollmann, MichaelBurkhard Piorkowsky, Norbert F. Schneider, Nina Tröger and Stefan Wahlen. An initial result of the exchange was the desire to constitute themselves as a group and to stimulate a discourse in the professional public with the Bamberg Manifesto for a New Consumer Understanding (Fridrich et al. 2014). The points listed by Kollmann in the document accompanying his presentation at the founding workshop

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exemplify the critical and questioning approach of the workshop participants. In the meantime, contributions to some of the points of criticism can be found in the literature also outside the Critical Consumer Research series, in particular in the volumes of Contributions to Consumer Research edited by Christian Bala and Wolfgang Schuldzinski (2016, 2018) from the Competence Center Consumer Research North Rhine-Westphalia. However, the focus of consumer theory remains unchanged on the market-purchase paradigm of consumer behavior. The contribution thus not only has contemporary historical-documentary significance, but should still be read as a stimulus for consumer research, consumer policy and consumer work.

References Bala, C., & Schuldzinski, W. (Eds.). (2016). Prosuming und Sharing – neuer sozialer Konsum: Aspekte kollaborativer Formen von Konsumtion und Produktion. Beiträge zur Verbraucherforschung (Vol. 4). Verbraucherzentrale NRW. Bala, C., & Schuldzinski, W. (Eds.). (2018). Jenseits des Otto Normalverbrauchers. Verbraucherpolitik in Zeiten des “unmanageable consumer” Beiträge zur Verbraucherforschung (Vol. 8). Verbraucherzentrale NRW. Blättel-Mink, B. (2010). Prosuming im online-gestützten Gebrauchtwarenhandel und Nachhaltigkeit. Das Beispiel eBay. In B. Blättel-Mink & K.-U. Hellmann (Eds.), Prosumer Revisited. Zur Aktualität einer Debatte (pp. 117–130). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Boulding, K. E. (1950). A reconstruction of economics. John Wiley & Sons/Chapman & Hall. Boulding, K. E. (1986). What went wrong with economics? The American Economist, 30(1), 5–12. Frey, B. S. (1977). Unorthodoxe Ökonomen. WiSt, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliches Studium, 6, 49–54. Fridrich, C., Hübner, R., Hufnagel, R., Jaquemoth, M., Kollmann, K., Piorkowsky, M.-B., Schneider, N. F., Tröger, N., & Wahlen, S. (2014). Bamberger Manifest für ein neues Verbraucherverständnis. Journal für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00003-014-0880-1 Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice and loyalty. Responses to decline in firms, organizations and states. Harvard University Press. Holleis, W. (1985). Das Ungleichgewicht der Gleichgewichtstheorie. Zur Diskussion um die neoklassische Wirtschaftstheorie. Campus. Kade, G. (1962). Die Grundannahmen der Preistheorie. Eine Kritik an den Ausgangssätzen der mikroökonomischen Modellbildung. Franz Vahlen. Kenning, P. (2017). Verbraucherwissenschaften – Begriffliche Grundlagen und Status-Quo. In P. Kenning, A. Oehler, L. A. Reisch, & C. Grugel (Eds.), Verbraucherwissenschaften. Rahmenbedingungen, Forschungsfelder und Institutionen (pp. 3–17). Springer Gabler.

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Kenning, P., & Lamla, J. (Eds.). (2018). Entgrenzungen des Konsums. Dokumentation der Jahreskonferenz des Netzwerks Verbraucherforschung. Unter Mitarbeit von Nadine Schreiner. Springer Gabler. Kenning, P., Oehler, A., Reisch, L. A., & Grugel, C. (Eds.). (2017). Verbraucherwissenschaften. Rahmenbedingungen, Forschungsfelder und Institutionen. Springer Gabler. Kollmann, K. (2015). Verbraucherpolitik – nur Reparaturbetrieb oder Motor für gesellschaftspolitischen Fortschritt? In WISO direkt. Analysen und Konzepte zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik (pp. 1–4). Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Kollmann, K. (2017). Menschen in der Arbeits-, Konsum- und Mediengesellschaft. Zur Vermachtung und Verschränkung der Lebensfelder bzw. Teilmärkte moderner Gesellschaften. In C. Fridrich, R. Hübner, K. Kollmann, M.-B. Piorkowsky, & N. Tröger (Eds.), Abschied vom eindimensionalen Verbraucher. Reihe Kritische Verbraucherforschung (pp. 23–46). Springer VS. Kraemer, K., & Brugger, F. (Eds.). (2017). Schlüsselwerke der Wirtschaftssoziologie. Springer VS. Lallement, J. H., Kuss, K., Trautner, P., Weber, B., Falk, A., & Fliessbach, K. (2014 [2013]). Effort increases sensitivity to reward and loss magnitude in the human brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss147 Lee, F. (2009). A history of heterodox economics. Challenging the mainstream in the twentieth century. Routledge. Maus, H. (1956). Geschichte der Soziologie. In W. Ziegenfuss (Ed.), Handbuch der Soziologie (pp. 1–120). Ferdinand Enke. Meyer, I. (2018). Georg Simmel. Die Formen der Vergesellschaftung und die Kunst der Unterscheidung. Soziopolis. Gesellschaft beobachten. Online-Publikation: 20. Sept. 2018. https://www.soziopolis.de/erinnern/jubilaeen/artikel/georg-simmel/. Accessed on 28. Apr 2020. Nessel, S. (2017). Was macht Menschen zu Konsumenten? Dimensionen und Voraussetzungen der Konsumentenrolle in Geschichte und Gegenwart. In C. Bala, C. Kleinschmidt, K. Rick, & W. Schuldzinski (Eds.), Verbraucher in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Wandel und Konfliktfelder in der Verbraucherpolitik. Beiträge zur Verbraucherforschung (Vol. 7, pp. 35–54). Verbraucherzentrale NRW. Piorkowsky, M.-B. (2011). Alltags- und Lebensökonomie. Erweiterte mikroökonomische Grundlagen für finanzwirtschaftliche und sozioökonomisch-ökologische Basiskompetenzen. Bonn University Press, V&R Unipress. Piorkowsky, M.-B. (2017). Konsum im Fokus der Alltags- und Lebensökonomie. In C. Fridrich, R. Hübner, K. Kollmann, M.-B. Piorkowsky, & N. Tröger (Eds.), Abschied vom eindimensionalen Verbraucher (Reihe Kritische Verbraucherforschung) (pp. 73–112). Springer VS. Piorkowsky, M.-B. (2018). Konsumenten, Prosumenten oder Conpreneure? Wenn Konsumgüter auch unternehmerisch genutzt werden. In S. Nessel, N. Tröger, C. Fridrich, & R. Hübner (Eds.), Multiperspektivische Verbraucherforschung. Ansätze und Perspektiven (Reihe Kritische Verbraucherforschung) (pp. 83–109). Springer VS. Piorkowsky, M.-B. (2019). Konsum. I. Wirtschaftswissenschaft. In Görres-Gesellschaft & Verlag Herder (Eds.), Staatslexikon. Recht – Wirtschaft – Gesellschaf in 5 Bänden, 8., völlig neu bearb. Aufl. Bd. 3 (pp. 1027–1031). Herder.

Introduction: Consumer Theory Today Is Unthinkable Without Headstrong and. . .

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Piorkowsky, M.-B., & Kollmann, K. (2019). Einführung: Warum wir zurückblicken. In M.-B. Piorkowsky & K. Kollmann (Eds.), Vergessene und verkannte Vordenker für eine Kritische Konsumtheorie. Beiträge aus Ökonomik, Soziologie und Philosophie (Reihe Kritische Verbraucherforschung) (pp. 1–18). Springer VS. Presse- und Informationsstelle der Freien Universität Berlin (Eds.). (1982). Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin. Ehrenpromotion von Prof. Dr. George Katona, Ann Arbor, Michigan, am 15. Juni 1981 (Gedenkschrift. Informationen aus Lehre und Forschung, Vol. 1/1982). Presse- und Informationsstelle der Freien Universität Berlin. Rippe, W., & Haarland, H.-P. (Eds.). (1980). Wirtschaftstheorie als Verhaltenstheorie. Beiträge zu einem Symposion der Forschungsstelle für empirische Sozialökonomik (Prof. Dr. G. Schmölders) e.V. am 28. und 29. September 1978. Duncker und Humblot. Samuels, W. J. (1987). Institutional economics. The new Palgrave. A dictionary of economics 4 (pp. 864–866). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Scherhorn, G. (1977). Konsum. In R. König (Ed.), Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung, 2, völlig neu bearbeitete Aufl, (Bd 11): Freizeit und Konsum (pp. 193–265). Ferdinand Enke. Scherhorn, G. (1986). Der Wandel der Präferenzen und die “New Home Economics”. Hauswirtschaft und Wissenschaft, 34, 226–231. Scherhorn, G. (2001). Ökonomie. In H. Keupp & K. Weber (Eds.), Psychologie. Ein Grundkurs (pp. 441–450). Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Schmölders, G. (1966). Sozialökonomische Verhaltensforschung am Menschen. In R. Keiter (Ed.), Verhaltensforschung im Rahmen der Wissenschaften vom Menschen (pp. 185–201). Musterschmitt. Schmölders, G. (1969). Der private Haushalt als Gegenstand der Verhaltensforschung. In F. Schneider (Ed.), Die Finanzen des privaten Haushalts. Festschrift für Walter Kaminsky (pp. 45–56). Fritz Knapp. Schreiner, N., & Kenning, P. (2017). Historische Rahmenbedingungen verbraucherrelevanter Datensammlungen. In P. Kenning, A. Oehler, L. A. Reisch, & C. Grugel (Eds.), Verbraucherwissenschaften. Rahmenbedingungen, Forschungsfelder und Institutionen (pp. 81–102). Springer Gabler. Scitovsky, T. (1976). The joyless economy. An inquiry into human satisfaction and consumer dissatisfaction. Oxford University Press. Scitovsky, T. (1994). Towards a theory of second-hand-markets. Kyklos, 47, 33–52. Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Eds.). (2013). Verbraucherbildung an Schulen. Beschluss der Kultusministerkonferenz vom 12.09.2013. https://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/Dateien/pdf/ PresseUndAktuelles/2013/Verbraucherbildung.pdf. Accessed on 2. Feb 2020. Selten, R. (1999). What is bounded rationality? Paper prepared for the Dahlem conference 1999. Sonderforschungsbereich 303 “Information und die Koordination wirtschaftlicher Aktivitäten”, Projektbereich B. Discussion Paper B-454. Bonn: Rheinische FriedrichWilhelms-Universität Bonn. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=182776 Stauss, B. (1982). Verbraucherbegriff und Verbraucherpolitik. Mitteilungsdienst der Verbraucher-Zentrale Nordrhein-Westfalen – Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbände e.V.,4(3), 66–70.

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Streissler, E., & Streissler, M. (1966). Einleitung. In E. Streissler & M. Streissler (Eds.), Konsum und Nachfrage (pp. 13–147). Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Veblen, T. B. (n.d. [1899]). The theory of the leisure class. Amazon Distribution. Veblen, T. B. (1998 [1898]). Why is economics not an evolutionary science? In Cambridge Journal of Economics 22, 403–414. Nachdruck aus The Quarterly Journal of Economics, July 1898, No. 4, 373–397.

Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky Dipl.-Kfm., Dipl.-Volksw., Dr. rer. pol., Professor emeritus of Household and Consumption Economics at the University of Bonn. Main research interests: Life design in the household context, socio-economic hybrids, micro-macro transitions in the economic system, production and consumption theory.

Part I In Search of Individual Satisfaction

Bell, Campbell and the Soul of Modern Consumerism Kai-Uwe Hellmann

Abstract

Daniel Bell was one of the first social scientists to deal offensively with the hedonistic-mental dimension of modern consumption, albeit extremely critically, even dismissively. The analysis will show that he had thus hit a neuralgic point. This was also noticed and acknowledged in subsequent consumer research. However, his dismissive attitude coloured his findings in an extremely negative-pessimistic way, which tended to obscure the relevance of this dimension for modern consumption. For this reason, what follows is a dense exposition of an essay by Colin Campbell on the same subject matter, published 11 years later, as one might almost say, in order to show that the hedonistic-mental dimension of modern consumption can indeed be viewed in a quite positive, perspectival and, above all, value-judgement-neutral way, thus opening up a view of the modernity of modern consumption.

1

The Modernity of Modern Consumption

In 1990, Niklas Luhmann spoke at the annual Conference of German Sociology in Frankfurt about the modernity of modern society (Luhmann 1991). He defined the modernity of modern society by its primary form of organization, i.e. functional differentiation by which the contemporary developed societies can be distinguished from earlier forms of society (Durkheim 2014; Luhmann 2012; Schimank 2007). K.-U. Hellmann (✉) Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_2

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According to this, there are no longer families or classes that determine the social structure of this society, but abstract1 subsystems, each of which performs specific, universally competent functions, some of which are even relevant to world society, such as satisfying needs, gaining knowledge, the task of education, providing health care, imparting (new) information, physical high performance training, regulating conflict, experiencing contingency, ultimate certainty, macro-obligation, and so on. Each of these functional systems, mainly visible by their central organizations, whether companies, universities, schools, hospitals, mass media houses, sport clubs, courts, galleries, churches, or governments, has its own operating programme, as it were, which runs largely autonomously and is left to its own devices, under the premise that all the other functional systems fulfil their own tasks accurately. This makes these systems both independent and interdependent. Moreover, this form of social division of labor at the macro level allows each functional system – under the condition of autonomy – significant increases in performance. However, precisely because of the operational and functional autonomies of the functional systems, this form of division of labour also harbours considerable risks. For example, the integration of society and, even more so, solidarity in society are by no means assured, rather the opposite. It is not without reason that the question ‘What holds society together’, which was already the basis of Émile Durkheim’s primary interest in knowledge, is still virulent.2 If we transfer this perspective of Luhmann to consumption and consumer research, the question would be: What is the modernity of modern consumption? And one answer could be: the autonomy of consumption. Admittedly, it is completely unclear whether consumption is a social or even a functional system in its own right, an indispensable prerequisite for the capacity for autonomy as far as systems theory is concerned. The concept of culture, which is predominantly used for this purpose, does not provide any precise information on this (Wiswede 1972, pp. 252ff.; Featherstone 1991; Lury 1996; Slater 1997; Goodman and Cohen 2004; Sassatelli 2007; König 2009; Firat et al. 2013; Wiedenhoft Croft 2017; Kravets et al. 2018; Hohnsträter and Krankenhagen 2019). In Anglo-Saxon consumption and consumer research, there are, notwithstanding, numerous statements that are at least explicitly inclined towards the assumption of autonomy (Hellmann 2019, pp. 295ff.). And if we take our cue from Jean

The adjective ‘abstract’ is taken from Giddens (1990). Incidentally, this question also appears in Bell (1978, p. 84): “What, then, can hold the society together?”. Cf. also Touraine (1977, pp. 470f.); Gilbert (2013, pp. 88f.); Pooley (2007, p. 404). 1 2

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Baudrillard’s classic consumer society – Zygmunt Bauman (2007) would probably have agreed unreservedly – it seems indisputable that consumption today even belongs to cultural hegemony (Baudrillard 1998). However, it remains unclear what exactly this hegemony is empirically based on. If one shifts down a gear at this point, the question of the modernity of modern consumption leads straight to the relationship between consumption and modern society. There are certainly contributions in the relevant research literature that have at least begun to address this relationship (Wiswede 1972; Goodwin et al. 1997; Baudrillard 1998; Purvis 1998; Schneider 2000; Jäckel 2008; Firat et al. 2013; Wiedenhoft Croft 2017). Most of them, however, have no or no contemporary social theory, while on the other hand, the epistemological interest in consumption on the part of such social theories is hardly pronounced, if it has been expressed at all (Hellmann 2019, pp. 287ff.). Against this background, if one asks who has ever attempted to analyze the relationship between consumption and modern society in terms of social theory, one encounters, proceeding genealogically, the essay volume The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell, an undoubtedly obstinate pioneer of a critical theory of consumption, to whom this contribution is essentially dedicated. From the point of view of consumption and consumer research, it is not only remarkable how early Bell referred to the hedonistic-mental dimension of modern consumption, but even more so how critically, even dismissively, he did so. Later, this very evaluation of Bell was repeatedly taken up by researchers (Featherstone 1983, 1991; Shapiro 1983; Campbell 1987; Illouz 1997; Slater 1997; Buchholz 1998; Pendergast 1998; Goodman 2003; Goodman and Cohen 2004; Horowitz 2004, p. 206; Korczynski and Ott 2004; Featherstone and Tamari 2007, p. 8; Sassatelli 2007; Bozkurt et al. 2010; Dahrendorf 2010; Southerton 2011; Deutschmann 2012; Bozkurt and Yeşilada 2017).3 However, the subsequent analysis will show that Bell did not have a viable social theory, nor was his relationship to modern consumption sufficiently value-judgment neutral in the sense of Max Weber, i.e. predominantly scientific in nature. For this reason, the second part of this contribution will deal with Colin Campbell’s essay The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, which starts at the same interface as Bell, and although it also does not presuppose a contemporary social theory, it is able to adopt a fundamentally unencumbered, above all open-

3 Surprisingly, Edwards (2000), although the title Contradictions of Consumption suggests it, makes little reference to Bell’s 1976 paper.

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mindedly curious attitude towards modern consumption and this hedonistic-mental dimension. The article is rounded off by a concluding review.

2

Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

Daniel Bell, Professor of Sociology for a good three decades, occupied a special position in the discipline in several respects. He stayed away from fundamental theoretical work, for which the name Talcott Parsons stood in those years, as well as from method-driven empirical research, the two dominant paradigms of that era. Symbolic interactionism was also out of the question for him. Bell instead proposed a fourth way. In an interview, in which he also commented on Parsons’ project at the time of developing a ‘general theory’ of modern society, which, despite all its differentiation, undauntedly sought to grasp the unity of this society, an undertaking that Bell considered futile, he said: “So if you can’t have a general theory and you can’t have sociology as a system, sociology has to go back to historical grounding” (Beilharz 2006, p. 97). He did not, by the way, give any good reasons for this. Now it would hardly be appropriate to classify Bell merely as a historical sociologist (Waters 2003, p. 154). After all, he himself made use of a rudimentarily developed theory of modern society of his own making. But this declared abstinence from thorough theoretical work was not without consequences. For anyone who takes a closer look at Bell’s writings will inevitably notice that they are texts that are exceedingly rich in associations and testify to a stupendous erudition that reached far beyond the discipline of sociology, but that these texts argue very erratically, are rarely structured systematically, and hardly exhibit strict definitions (Fox 1982). It would surely be going too far to dismiss them merely as the personal views of one Daniel Bell. Nonetheless, Bell often preferred to unfold very subjectively coloured perspectives in a confined space without any discernible integration of relevant research stands, permissive in his choice of means and sometimes strange in the pursuit of particular ends (Touraine 1977). This brief preliminary remark is intended to prepare the reader for the fact that the following explanations will continuously struggle to spin a reasonably consistent thread out of Bell’s flood of associations, which has certainly not always been satisfactorily achieved. At the heart of the matter is Bell’s very personal attitude to the ‘cultural’ development of modern, especially US, society in the twentieth century (Bell 1978, p. xxx, p. 74).

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But I write not of the events of the decade but of the deeper cultural crises which beset bourgeois societies and which, in the longer run, devitalize a country, confuse the motivations of individuals, instill a sense of carpe diem, and undercut its civic will. The problems are less those of the adequacy of institutions than of the kinds of meanings that sustain a society. (Bell 1978, p. 28)

2.1

Biography and Books

Daniel Bell, birth name Bolotsky, born in 1919 to Polish-Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side in New York City, grew up in poor circumstances. His native language was Yiddish (Bell and Lepenies 2006, p. 121). His father died young; guardian later became his brother, Bell’s uncle. Bell studied “classics” at City College in New York from 1935 to 1938,4 from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He then went to Columbia University, also in New York, but left after only one year, without a degree. From 1940 to 1945 Bell worked as a journalist for the magazine The New Leader in New York, which saw itself as ‘social democratic’ and which he even edited at the end of these years. In 1945 he moved with his small family to the University of Chicago to teach social science. From 1946 to 1958 he worked again as a journalist for Fortune magazine in Chicago, with special responsibility for labour and trade union issues, and later rose again to become one of its editors. From 1959 to 1969 he moved back to the University of Columbia, having received his doctorate there with the edited volume The End of Ideology, and was appointed Full Professor there in 1962. In 1969 Bell moved once more to Harvard University, where he taught as Professor of Sociology until retiring in 1990. Daniel Bell died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 (Waters 1996, pp. 13ff.; Neun 2012, pp. 57ff.). Three books by Bell have become world-famous, at least in academicintellectual circles: First, his dissertation The End of Ideology, published in 1960, in which he propagated – pointedly formulated – that the ideologies of the 1950s, such as communism and liberalism, were no longer opportune in the USA; then The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, published in 1973, a comparatively consistently structured, monographic5 study, which dealt with a fundamental structural change

4

Cf. Waters (1996, p. 14). See also Neun (2012) on the particular importance of City College New York at the time. 5 Cf. Rahe (2009): “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which is a genuine monograph dedicated to a single subject, is ponderous and labored”.

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in the US national economy and was supported by a predominantly optimistictechnocratic basic attitude6; and finally Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, published in 1976, an anthology which is the focus of this contribution and which conveyed a distinctly culturally critical, in parts even culturally pessimistic mood.7 Otherwise Bell has published numerous essays, though hardly in sociological journals, but rather in popular science and political newspapers and magazines.8 In addition, he was co-editor of the journal The Public Interest.9 In general, Bell has had less of an active impact on the discipline of sociology; he seemed much more likely to have taken a transdisciplinary stand at best, often rather journalistically, at the interface between science and mass media, with as broad an impact as possible, as a public intellectual (Levi 1972, p. 69; Wade 1975, p. 35; Klein 1976; Fox 1982, p. 71; Bell 1992; Chase 1996; Waters 1996, pp. 23ff., p. 45; Bell and Lepenies 2006, p. 122; Neun 2012, pp. 17f.).

2.2

Origin and Structure

If we thus turn directly to Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, in the 1978 edition,10 it should be noted at the outset that it is a collection of older, already published essays and lectures11 on quite different topics, which Bell (1978, p. xxxi) had revised again for this book version. Because of this diversity of topics, the

The authorship of the title ‘post-industrial society’, however, belongs to Alain Touraine, who published the book La société post-industrielle in 1969. 7 Regarding this mood, he even once claimed of himself: “My characteristic trait is pessimistic” (Bell and Lepenies 2006, p. 123). There have been repeated comments in the secondary literature to the effect that Bell’s assessments were perceived as particularly culturally pessimistic, cf. Abrahams (1977, p. 468); Veysey (1982, p. 59); Featherstone (1991, p. 118); Galbo (2004, p. 72); Gauthier et al. (2011, p. 291); Deutschmann (2012, p. 521); Roberts (2012, p. 91). 8 Thus, according to the list in Waters (1996, pp. 187f.), Bell has frequently published in non-sociological journals such as Daedalus, to a greater extent in non-scientific journals such as Commentary, Dissent, Partisan Review, and above all in his own journal The Public Interest. Cf. on this also Chase (1996). 9 Daniel Bell co-founded the journal The Public Interest in 1965, but resigned as editor in 1973, though he continued to publish there thereafter. 10 This edition is brought forward here because of the additional 1978 preface. 11 Cf. the ‘Acknowledgments’ in Bell (1978, pp. xxxiiif.). See also Rahe’s (2009) assessment: ‘He was at his best as an essayist’. Similarly Waters (1996, p. 24): “Bell writes in a fluid, limpid prose style. [. . .] Bell is an essayist, the master of the pithy argument, full of punch and 6

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volume sometimes seems somewhat disjointed (Veysey 1982; Rahe 2009).12 Whereas Bell was generally said to have a rather unsystematic, at times vagabond style of argumentation (Crittenden 1972; Levi 1972; Fox 1982; Pooley 2007, p. 405). “To grapple with the Bell corpus is a bit like dancing a tango with an octopus” (Chernow 1979, p. 13). The book’s title Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, for example, refers to an essay of the same title, first published in 1970, which, after the 1976 introduction, is the first chapter of this anthology and, as it were, the overture. The subsequent chapters, on the other hand, only deal to a limited extent with ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’ in the strict sense (Rahe 2009). Just as it seems questionable to what extent it is a matter of ‘contradictions’ whenever Bell used this word (Crittenden 1972, p. 142; Levi 1972, pp. 77f.; Marx 1976, p. 43; Waters 1996, pp. 47f.; Ci 1999; Galbo 2004, pp. 68f.; Pooley 2007, p. 402).13 The main structure of this volume is composed of two parts. The first part comprises four chapters in which, for the United States, to put it briefly, a burgeoning tension between economic concerns (work ethic, economic order, etc.) and an avant-garde modernist zeitgeist (youth culture, art, mass media, advertising, etc.) was addressed. The second part, which contains two chapters after a separate introduction, deals with the significance of the North American welfare state (‘public household’). In the further course of this contribution, this second part will no longer play a significant role, and the contributions in the first part will also only be taken into account to the extent that it appears necessary for the actual question.

challenge. The essay, he says, is his natural métier [. . .] However, this essayistic style is not without its unsatisfactory aspects”. 12 And this seems to be true of all Bell’s volumes. Thus Waters (1996, p. 24) states: “Essays, especially if they are published in friendly non-refereed journals, are not always subjected to highest levels of rigorous social-scientific criticism. They do not, therefore, always meet conventional standards of precision and logic. Bell’s essays are therefore mixtures of good social science, anecdote, personal philosophy and exegesis. Moreover, because they are written as ends in themselves they are often mutually inconsistent. This is not always problematic because every scholar’s oeuvre evolves, but in Bell’s case it presents special difficulties because his major books are collections of unreconstructed essays”. 13 Bell (1978, pp. 55ff.) himself also made several contradictions, for example when he warmed to the ‘small town’ culture, a primeval American idyll, but at the same time raised his own metropolitan high culture with New York as its home to the standard, which certainly cannot be easily reconciled. See also Averitt (1976); Chernow (1979, p. 17); Pooley (2007, p. 404, p. 406).

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2.3

An Unholy Trinity14

Already in the first introduction of 1976, preceding the two main parts, presumably written especially for this purpose and entitled “The Disjunction of Realms: A Statement of Themes” Bell presented the main features of his social theory, including the exposition of his disjunction thesis. According to this, Bell differentiated his own society at that time, i.e. the United States – exemplary for highly industrialised economies in general – into three areas (‘realms’), namely economy (often he also called it ‘technical-economic order’, ‘technical-economic structure’ (TES) or simply ‘social structure’), politics and culture.15 His rationale for this was as follows: Against the holistic view of society, I find it more useful to think of contemporary society (I leave aside the question of whether this can be applied generally to the inherent character of society) as three distinct realms, each of which is obedient to a different axial principle. I divide society, analytically, into the techno-economic structure, the polity, and the culture. (Bell 1978, p. 9)

Bell understood ‘economy’ as a “system”,16 which has to do with the “organization of production and the allocation of goods and services. It frames the occupation and stratification system of the society and involves the use of technology for instrumental ends” (Bell 1978, p. 11). Bell saw the central principle of economics in its efficiency.17 By ‘politics’, on the other hand, Bell was thinking of the “arena of

14

The Trinity concept is borrowed from Waters (1996, p. 32) and Galbo (2004, p. 66), respectively. 15 Although Bell (1978, pp. 92ff.) spoke of “functional specialization” with regard to scientific disciplines, but also for the division of labor within organizations or with regard to the diversity of occupations/professions, he did not use this so sociologically central term for the internal differentiation of modern society, although his remarks on the three ‘realms’ suggest precisely this. Moreover, Bell referred to Durkheim repeatedly. However, Bell’s form of internal differentiation proves to be so insufficiently justified that again no reflected theory can be assumed behind it. 16 In an interview conducted in 2006, Bell described the “technical and economic realm”, i.e. economy, as “more or less [. . .] a system”, denied this, on the other hand, for “polity”, but again allowed the system status for “culture” to apply, cf. Beilharz (2006, pp. 97f.). How Bell arrived at this assessment remains unclear; it has something essayistic about it. 17 Cf. Bell (1978, p. 11): “In modern society, the axial principle [of economy] is functional rationality, and the regulative mode is economizing. Essentially, economizing means efficiency, least cost, greatest return, maximization, optimization, and similar measures of judgment about the employment and mix of resources. The contrast is one of costs and

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social justice and power: the control of the legitimate use of force and the regulation of conflict (in libertarian societies within the rule of law), in order to achieve the particular conceptions of justice embodied in a society’s traditions or in its constitution, written or unwritten” (Bell 1978, p. 11). Here the central principle was equality.18 And by ‘culture’ Bell meant the “realm of symbolic forms and, in the context of the argument in this book, more narrowly the arena of expressive symbolism: those efforts, in painting, poetry, and fiction, or within the religious forms of litany, liturgy, and ritual, which seek to explore and express the meanings of human existence in some imaginative form” (Bell 1978, p. 12). According to him, the central principle of this ‘modernist’ form of culture, as Bell repeatedly called it, was self-realization, self-gratification, or self-fulfillment (pp. 13f.). However, as Bell repeatedly emphasized explicitly, this was a very specific understanding of culture, highly restricted in terms of both subject matter and time, without any anthropological-holistic-cosmological connotation – an interpretation of culture that was ultimately only to claim validity for the twentieth century (Crittenden 1972, p. 140; Waters 2003, p. 156).19 Besides this, and especially before

benefits, and these are usually expressed in monetary terms. The axial structure is bureaucracy and hierarchy, since these derive from the specialization and segmentation of functions and the need to coordinate activities. [. . .] Since the tasks are functional and instrumental, the management of enterprise is primarily technocratic in character”. 18 Cf. Bell (1978, p. 11): “The implicit contradiction is the idea of equality, that all men are to have an equal voice in this consensus. But the idea of citizenship which embodies this conception has in the past 100 years been expanded to include equality not only in the public sphere, but in all other dimensions of social life as well – equality before the law, equality of civil rights, equality of opportunity, even equality of results – so that a person is able to participate fully, as a citizen, in the society”. 19 Bell definitely thought of culture dichotomously, namely as pre-modern culture on the one hand, and as modern(istic) culture on the other, which have something in common only in name. Thus culture in its pre-modern form, according to Bell, apparently entered into an alliance in principle with religion (viewed historically), which was only broken off in modernity: “The modalities of culture are few, and they derive from the existential situations which confront all human beings, through all times, in the nature of consciousness: how one meets death, the nature of tragedy and the character of heroism, the definition of loyalty and obligation, the redemption of the soul, the meaning of love and of sacrifice, the understanding of compassion, the tension between an animal and a human nature, the claims of instinct and restraint. Historically, therefore, culture has been fused with religion” (Bell 1978, p. 12). Moreover, for Bell, culture in its pre-modern form was consistently past-oriented: “But in culture there is always a ricorso, a return to the concerns and questions that are the existential agonies of human beings” (p. 13). Neither of these is compatible with Bell’s understanding of modern(istic) culture, which he based his diagnosis of society on, since the modern(istic) version of culture not only abandoned its relationship to (clerically organized) religion, but

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it, historically speaking, that is, for the period before the twentieth century and possibly going back to the beginnings of human history, Bell mostly made use of an understanding of culture that was much more comprehensive in nature and primarily past-oriented. Moreover, Bell saw (pre)modern cultures as having always been intimately connected with religion, in some cases even as a direct outgrowth of it.20 “Historically, therefore, culture has been fused with religion” (Bell 1978, p. 121). Moreover, for Bell – almost in the sense of Parsons’ understanding of culture, according to which culture was supposed to perform the function of ‘latent pattern maintenance’ – culture as well as religion ensured from the very beginning of human history that (pre-)modern societies had sufficient unity, identity, continuity, tradition and were thus sufficiently integrated – exactly that which was to be so radically lost in the course of the twentieth century and finally became the breeding ground for ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’, as Bell perceived them.21 These three areas were in any case constitutive for Bell in terms of social theory, conceived as relatively homogeneous units without ever having differentiated them further in terms of substance and system (Waters 1996, p. 46). However, it remained unclear whether he perceived only modern society in this way, taking into account certain contemporary national variants, or human societies in general, whether Bell thus thought of this form of differentiation ahistorically (Waters 2003, p. 155).22

also radically changed its time orientation from the past to the future. One is thus dealing with two qualitatively different concepts of culture, which posed considerable problems for Bell’s argumentation. 20 Thus Bell (1987, p. 129) formulated that “culture derived from religion”, culture (formerly) was thus derived from religion. 21 For him, the serious contradictions that worried Bell so much primarily concerned motivational differences between production and consumption: while production relied on the staff’s sense of work, consumption counted on the consumer’s sense of pleasure. Or in the words of Bell (1978, p. 15): “the contradictions of capitalism of which I speak in these pages have to do with the disjunction between the kind of organization and the norms demanded in the economic realm, and the norms of self-realization that are now central in the culture. The two realms which had historically been joined to produce a single character structure – that of the Puritan and of his calling – have now become unjoined”. This explains Bell’s (1978, p. xxv) metaphor, which was later frequently taken up: “a corporation finds its people being straight by day and swingers by night”. Moreover, on the macro level there would be contradictions between the role expectations in the economy and the personality cult of modern(istic) culture: “between a social structure that is fundamentally organized in terms of roles and specialization, and a culture which is concerned with the enhancement and fulfillment of the self and the ‘whole’ person” (Bell 1978, pp. 14f.). 22 See the first quotation, in which Bell (1978, p. 10) formulated this indecision as follows: “(I leave aside the question of whether this can be applied generally to the inherent character

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For the most part, these three areas functioned independently of each other and on their own, i.e. largely autonomously.23 At the same time, these areas should continuously refer to each other, Bell then spoke of ‘crossovers’,24 in a mutually affirmative as well as critical manner. Moreover, there are evolutionary periods that are characterized by a high degree of convergence and a certain coordination among each other or division of labor between the areas, and those for which rather the opposite is true.25 of society)”, i.e. should apply to all forms of society. It also remains unclear whether, insofar as this tripartite differentiation – “societal trinity”, as Waters (1996, p. 32) aptly puts it – should apply to all forms of society, its autonomy potential would only come to fruition in modern society, or whether pre-modern societies exhibited this tripartite differentiation at best in rudiments or not at all. On this point Waters (1996, p. 32) speaks again of a ‘second confusion’: “We can take the second confusion to mean that the three realms are universal aspects of all societies but become separate and autonomous only in modern society”. 23 Bell remained terminologically ambiguous on this central aspect as well. Thus he wrote in the introduction: “In modern society, the political order increasingly becomes autonomous, and the management of the techno-economic order, or the democratic planning, or the management of the economy, becomes ever more independent of capitalism” (Bell 1978, pp. 14f.). Furthermore, he spoke of “an effort by anti-bourgeois culture to achieve autonomy from the social structure” (Bell 1978, p. 53) or that “the autonomy of the aesthetic from moral norms” (Bell 1978, p. xxi) would have resulted. And in a later essay, with reference to Adam Smith, it is again said for economics that it possesses “an autonomous activity”; likewise there is “the autonomy of law from morality” as well as “the autonomy of the aesthetic from all constraints so that art exists for art’s sake alone” (Bell 1987, pp. 122f.). But this feature remained unmentioned in the central determination: “And society, I would say, is not integral, but disjunctive; the different realms respond to different norms, have different rhythms of change, and are regulated by different, even contrary, axial principles” (Bell 1978, p. 10). See likewise Robbins (1999, p. 35). This ambiguity is crucial, for if Bell seemed to conceive of every society as fundamentally differentiated and granted autonomy to each sphere, then it is highly inconsistent if he at the same time quibbled with the fact that autonomy in principle carries with it the potential (risk) of self-development, which can result in increased internal differentiation and structural decoupling at the expense of integration – incidentally Durkheim’s core problem, but for which Bell proposed a rather anachronistic solution, namely the renaissance of religion, rather than deliberation as Durkheim did, cf. Bell (1978, pp. xxviiif.); Hellmann (2004). 24 Cf. Bell (1978, pp. 18ff., pp. 156f., p. 213, p. 275); Waters (1996, p. 38). 25 Of course, Bell gave the impression in several places that the convergence thesis was true for (all) earlier forms of society. For example, Bell (1978, p. 8) wrote: “Within each period, every phase of a culture, from its morals and art, through its political form, to its philosophy, is shaped by this single spirit (leading to the idea, in cultural history, of the ‘style’ of a period); or every aspect of a society is determined, directly or indirectly, by the prevailing economic mode, whether the hierarchical relation of feudal baron and serf, or the formally free commodity exchanges between individuals whose relations are mediated by the monetary

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For example, periods of high convergence and congruence26 are characterized by the fact that only one singular social character, integrating all areas, is available in the sense of David Riesman, while in phases of divergence and deviance each area generates its own social character, which are then less compatible with each other. Precisely from this, in turn, socially relevant contradictions and disjunctions could arise.27

2.4

The Bourgeois Society as an Ideal Type

Bell now regarded the ‘bourgeois society’ as the ideal type of a largely harmonious, highly integrated, internally well-coordinated social order, although it remained unclear for which period Bell saw this unity as most likely to be fulfilled. Thus at one point he wrote: “With the rise of the bourgeoisie, there may have been a single societal mode threaded through all realms from economic relations to moral conduct to cultural conceptions to character structure” (Bell 1978, p. 10). Shortly afterwards he repeated this periodization: “In early modern times, bourgeois culture and bourgeois social structure fused a distinct unity with a specific character structure around the theme of order and work” (Bell 1978, p. 36). But there are also statements to the contrary, which focus on the middle or the last third of the nineteenth century.28 As a central source of reference Bell, on the other hand, sale of everything, from goods to culture”. Whether this was just lecture or reflected his own assessment is unclear. But there is clearly a tendency for him to attest unity to earlier societies, while diagnosing a profound dichotomy for his own. 26 However, the concept of congruence is difficult at this point (although the assumption of congruence was significant for Bell in terms of argumentation), since he explicitly spoke of the areas not being congruent: “These are not congruent with one another and have different rhythms of change; they follow different norms which legitimate different, and even contrasting, types of behavior” (Bell 1978, p. 10). He oriented himself precisely to such developmental phases determined by congruence, in order to problematize precisely the disintegration of his contemporary society as a symptom of anomie. 27 Bell was not unambiguous on this point either: on the one hand, he stated that the tripartite differentiation fundamentally produced ‘discordances’ and thus ‘contradictions’: “It is the discordances between these realms which are responsible for the various contradictions within society” (Bell 1978, p. 10). On the other hand, there are periods in which this has not become a problem, and others in which such ‘contradictions’ acutely endanger the cohesion of society. 28 Thus, in the above quotation, Bell spoke of the ascendant phase of the bourgeoisie, which had been characterized by this unity and which went back to the eighteenth century, cf. also Bell (1978, p. 65). Four years earlier, on the other hand, Bell (1970, p. 35) was still of the

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referred very loyally to the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber from 1904, just as this essay was a basic reference for Bell’s approach (Bell 1996).29 For example, Bell assumed for bourgeois society during a peak phase, which is still to be defined in more detail, that the economy and culture complemented and supported each other in central aspects. Accordingly, he even stated a bourgeois culture for this phase, which was generally predominant and largely in line with the bourgeois social structure (Bell 1978, p. 53, 1992, p. 79). As he put it, with reference to Weber: Culture as ideology reflected a substructure and could not have an autonomy of its own. Moreover, in bourgeois society, culture was tied to the economy because culture, too, had become a commodity, to be evaluated by the market and bought and sold through the exchange process. Max Weber argued that thought, conduct, and societal structure were highly integrated, in that all its branches – science, economy, law, and culture – were predominantly rationalistic. Even the modes of art were predominantly rationalistic. (Bell 1978, p. 36)

Social-psychologically, this convergence found expression in particular in an apparently generally accepted social character (‘character structure’) focused on work and industriousness, which was for the majority determinant for this period and virtually embodied the Protestant ethic, entirely in accordance with the economic requirements of the time – a pattern of behaviour that seemed to be completely fulfilled by ascetic Protestant-oriented values, such as those derived by Bell (1978, p. 58) adopted from Benjamin Franklin (who was also so significant for Weber), namely “temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility”.

opinion that the heyday of bourgeois culture was in “the mid-nineteenth century”. Waters (1996, p. 37) sees the last third of the nineteenth century as more relevant for Bell: “In certain periods of time the particular formations apparent in each of the realms will be synchronized and there will be an accidental unity between them. Bell identifies twelfth-century Europe and the ‘apogee’ of bourgeois society in the last third of nineteenth century as examples of such periods”. Moreover, the exact length of this period of stability cannot be determined with certainty. Bell (1978, p. 7), for example, mentions 200 years during which the ‘bourgeois idea’ would have shaped the modern era, but does not specify exactly when the peak phase occurred and ended. And he dated the origins of modernism once back 125 years, but shortly afterwards to the sixteenth century (Bell 1978, p. 7, p. 16). 29 Another important reference for Bell was Werner Sombart and his idea that the acquisitiveness was particularly important for the emergence of capitalism, cf. Bell (1978, p. xviii, p. xx, p. 82, p. 248, p. 254; 1996, p. 36).

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There may well have been other inclinations, other options as to how one could behave at that time, how one should live, indeed how society could be fundamentally constituted. Bell, however, did not elaborate on this. Historically, these different-thinking, anti-bourgeois circles, strongly concentrated on art, were in any case in the minority, trying out, imposing, struggling on the periphery of bourgeois society (Bell 1978, pp. 38f.). Buzzwords are avant-garde, bohemian, romantic (Bell 1978, p. xxiv, p. 17, pp. 35ff.). But this happened without much effect, it seems: the unity of bourgeois culture remained largely untouched. In this respect, the impression could be created that bourgeois society was a superbly integrated society geared solely to work and activity, in which the clear majority of the population completely filled the centre, set the tone and quasi habitually pulled in the same direction, at least according to Bell’s (idealising) account.30 If one looks more closely at Bell’s understanding of this bourgeois culture, he understood it to mean the excellence of a “high culture” (Bell 1978, p. 102), which ensured unity, hierarchy, order and overview and, with regard to the arts, a field in which Bell liked to distinguish himself, introduced clear distinctions between valuable and worthless, classically based – naturally referring back to the ancient Greeks (Homer, Plato, Aristotle) (Bell 1978, p. 8, p. 97 et seq, p. 105, p. 124, pp. 150f., p. 162) – and defining for cultural high conjunctures an iron canon, which was generally unchallengeable for the better-off and educated, ultimately even only a small elite,31 which communicated purely internally.32 It will now hardly come as a surprise to find out, piece by piece, that Bell not only felt himself to belong to precisely this ‘high culture’, but also believed himself to represent it excellently (Crittenden 1972, p. 141; Kramer 1979; Veysey 1982, p. 59). Almost in the sense of Hegel, a culmination of cultural development thus seemed to have been achieved; whatever deviated from it was the devil’s work (Bell 1970, pp. 33f.; Chernow 1979, p. 15; Veysey 1982, p. 55; Waters 1996, p. 124; Arens 2000; Pooley 2007, p. 406). And it was precisely in this attitude that Bell

30 Bensman and Vidich (1972, pp. 55f.) took a critical view of this because they assumed that these anti-bourgeois circles were themselves often of bourgeois origin, often the children of bourgeois parents, because they had the necessary resources to educate themselves accordingly and to join such circles. 31 It can be assumed, as has been repeatedly colocated for the ‘New York Intellectuals’ (Jumonville 1989; Neun 2012), that in terms of Bourdieu’s (1992) analysis the distinction between an ‘inner circle’ of intellectuals (in Bourdieu’s case, artists) and their audience is applicable here. 32 On the tricky relationship of intellectuals of the time to the tension between high and popular culture, see Jumonville (1989); Riccio (1993).

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passed scathing judgement on further cultural development in the twentieth century, insofar as it departed radically from it. He seemed to perceive an attack on this supposed ‘high culture’ as an attack on his own way of life (Touraine 1977, p. 470).33 Accordingly, he spoke out categorically and uncompromisingly against all these innovations. Incidentally, Bell held ‘modern(istic) culture’ responsible for this attack (Bell 1978, pp. 73f.).34

2.5

The Modern(istic) Culture

The exact dating and periodization of this new culture is not entirely easy.35 Especially since Bell made use of several terms, such as ‘modernity’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’, without the boundaries of meaning always becoming entirely clear (Bell 1987, 1990; Singal 1987; critically Crittenden 1972, p. 143).36 In essence, Bell understood this new culture, usually referred to as ‘modernist’, as a strengthening of the former periphery, i.e. those other-thinking, anti-bourgeois cultural experiments and art movements on the fringes of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century. Bell’s perception is that this new form of culture then claimed and achieved cultural hegemony,37 and did so consistently at the expense of the

Thus Bell speaks of the “very attack on Puritanism” (Bell 1978, p. 63) or the “attack on the canon” (Bell 1992, p. 97) on the part of the avant-garde, which sums up the radical nature of this cultural struggle very well: for Bell it was not merely a matter of marginalia, but of the whole. 34 Moreover, Bell repeatedly turned out to be a very polemical reviewer and replicator, cf. for example Bell (1967, 1974, 1982). 35 Without it being quite clear with him when this development was historically reversed, Bell assumed several thrusts, once from 1895 to 1914, then the 1930s and again the 1960s, whereby he traced this development back to Rousseau, among others, cf. Bell (1978, p. 132). 36 There is also criticism regarding the periodization, cf. Bensman and Vidich (1972, p. 54). Moreover, for Bell there was still a ‘cultural modernism’, not only a ‘modernist culture’: “Cultural modernism, though it still calls itself subversive, finds a home largely in bourgeois, capitalist society. That society, lacking a culture derived from its empty beliefs and desiccated religions, in turn, adopts as its norm the life-style of a cultural mass that wants to be ‘emancipated’ or ‘liberated’, yet lacks any sure moral or cultural guides as to what worthwhile experiences may be” (Bell 1978, p. 145). 37 Cf. Bell (1978), p. xxi (“gaining hegemony in the culture”), p. xxiii, p. 75 (“reign supreme”). See further Bell (1970, p. 23): “The adversary culture has come to dominate the social order”, the reversal of values was thus complete in Bell’s eyes. Kavolis (1972, p. 126) is critical of this. 33

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formerly dominant bourgeois high culture and its representatives. The earlier asymmetry of power had thus been completely reversed: what was avant-garde became mainstream, and whoever was considered elite was put on the defensive (Bell 1970, p. 35, 1979, p. 23, 1987, p. 126).38 As we have seen, the last 100 years have witnessed an effort by anti-bourgeois culture to achieve autonomy from the social structure, first by denying bourgeois values in the realm of art, and second by carving out enclaves where the bohemian and the avantgardist could live a contrary style of life. By the turn of the century the avant-garde had succeeded in establishing a ‘life-space’ of its own, and by 1910–1930 it was on the offensive against traditional culture. [. . .] In both doctrine and life-style, the antibourgeois won out. This triumph meant that in the culture antinomianism and antiinstitutionalism ruled. (Bell 1978, p. 53)

Bell’s judgments were correspondingly critical of everything he associated with this modern(istic) culture, especially the rampant individualism and hedonism.39 For everything he considered good and held dear was fundamentally questioned and deconstructed by this culture in his eyes.40 What remained from his point of view was therefore disorder, confusion, the loss of distance (‘eclipse of distance’) and unity (‘lack of a center’), sensationalism, distraction, emptiness, nothing (‘nothing’). Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the

Thus Bell (1978, p. 35) once succinctly formulated: “the avant-garde has won its victory”. Moreover, one headline even read “Death of the Bourgeois” (Bell 1970, p. 35) or “Death of the Bourgeois World-View” (Bell 1978, p. 53). 39 A much more neutral, positively open-minded treatment of pop culture can be found in Andreas Reckwitz (2006, pp. 441ff.). And from there, Bell’s indignation resembles the logic of a ‘character mask’ that peu à peu notices that the once effective cultural hegemony of its ‘subject form’ is radically eroding (cf. Reckwitz 2006, pp. 68ff.). 40 In much of what Bell diagnosed as a problem, one is also dealing with supposed de-differentiation effects, for example when he spoke of the loss of distance, of levelling out, dissolution of boundaries, egalitarianism, appropriation contrary to the classical understanding, immediacy, suddenness, nowness, mixing, erasing, crossing or denying boundaries, a collapse of the difference between high culture and popular culture, reversal, inadmissible asymmetry or at least resymmetrisation, cf. Bell (1978, 1987). That such de-differentiation effects might also only indicate social change, so that Bell’s rumblings could be unmasked with Karl Mannheim (1991) as the ideology of a ‘perceived’ modernization loser, apparently did not occur to the author of The End of Ideology, cf. Levi (1972, p. 76); Abrahams (1977, p. 468); Touraine (1977, pp. 470ff.). 38

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fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the ‘self’ in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored. (Bell 1978, p. 13f.)

He could even become particularly venomous when it came to the ‘new sensibility’, which certainly has historical antecedents, especially in Romanticism, but in its youth-cultural and all art-border-crossing manifestations of the 1960s found no mercy before Bell’s eyes (Gilbert 2013, p. 89).41 Bell’s assessments of this speak volumes.42 This becomes very clear when Bell compares the ‘sensibility’ of the 1950s – his own central intellectual formation phase (Neun 2012, pp. 57ff.) – with that of the 1960s43: The sensibility of the 1950s was largely a literary one. In the writings of such representative critics of the period as Lionel Trilling, Yvor Winters, and John Crowe Ransom, the emphasis was on complexity, irony, ambiguity, and paradox. These are properties peculiar to the mind. They foster a critical attitude, a detachment and distance which guard one against any overwhelming involvement, absorption, immolation in a creed or an experience. At worst a form of quietism, at best a mode of selfconsciousness, this attitude is essentially moderate in tone. The sensibility of the 1960s rejected that mood in savage, even mindless fashion. In its fury with the times, the new sensibility was loud, imprecatory, prone to obscenity, and given to posing every issue, political or otherwise, in disjunctive correlatives. (Bell 1978, pp. 120f.)

There was almost a kind of friend/foe conflict going on here, and Bell was downright ruthless in this matter, feeling personally attacked and pilloried.44 In

41

At the same time, there were also opinions at the time that were very positive about this ‘new sensibility’, not to begin with Susan Sontag (1961, pp. 293ff.), for example by Herbert Marcuse (1969, pp. 23ff.). 42 Cf. Bell (1978, p. 121): “Yet to all this, the sensibility of the 1960s added something distinctly its own: a concern with violence and cruelty; a preoccupation with the sexually perverse; a desire to make noise; an anticognitive and anti-intellectual mood; an effort once and for all to erase the boundary between ‘art’ and ‘life’; and a fusion of art and politics”. 43 Bell’s (1978, p. 122) assessment at this point was similarly biased: “The 1950s, one could almost say of its sensibility, had been a period of silence. The plays of Samuel Beckett tried to achieve a sense of silence, and the music of John Cage even attempted an aesthetic of silence. But the 1960s was preeminently a period of noise. Beginning with the ‘new sound’ of the Beatles in 1964, rock reached such soaring crescendos that it was impossible to hear oneself think, and that may indeed have been its intention”. 44 This becomes particularly clear when one looks at his invectives against Susan Sontag and her comrades-in-arms from other art fields, cf. Bell (1978, pp. 122f., pp. 129f.).

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the face of this threatening scenario, he could not find anything positive in this modern(istic) culture, which seemed to be able to captivate everything and dominate the public consciousness to a large extent.

2.6

Hedonism and Consumption

Without being able to go into further detail here, which is also somewhat difficult in view of Bell’s polemical evaluations, he broke down the conflict situation at the time to the value antagonism of asceticism versus hedonism (Bell 1978, p. 69, p. 82; Gilbert 2013, p. 86).45 While high culture, i.e. its own inner philosophy of life, still paid homage to the ideal of ascetic living, placing the bibliophile, the intellectual, the cognitive-controlled above all else, and, in the spirit of Freud’s cultural thesis, was enthusiastic about deferred satisfaction of needs (‘deferred gratification’), modern(istic) culture was driven by an all-encompassing tendency towards hedonism, in which the visual, the physical-immediate, the sensual-intoxicating predominated and the satisfaction of needs was to take place on principle without delay (‘instant gratification’). Whereby hedonism had long since won this cultural struggle in Bell’s eyes: “The contradictions I see in contemporary capitalism derive from the unraveling of the threads which had once held the culture and the economy together, and from the influence of the hedonism which has become the prevailing value in our society” (Bell 1978, p. xxx). Fittingly, he therefore also spoke of a “consumption ethic” (Bell 1978, p. 63), which had in the meantime become institutionalized.46 Moreover, capitalism had of its own accord, not without selfinterest, completely switched to this hedonism.47 “The cultural, if not moral, justification of capitalism has become hedonism, the idea of pleasure as a way of life” (Bell 1978, pp. 21f.). Thus marketing and advertising would have played a large part in the hypertrophy of this consumer hedonism, since the aim was to

Elsewhere, Bell (1978, p. 79) referred to “a struggle between tradition and modernity” as the central line of conflict. 46 For Bell (1978, pp. 82f.), however, the decay of society was also anticipated, as he explained with reference to Ibn Khaldūn, according to whom hedonism marked the last period before the (inevitable) decline of a culture: “In the scheme of Khaldun, reflecting in the fourteenth century the vicissitudes of Berber and Arabic civilizations, the sequences of transformation went from the Bedouin to the sedentary to the hedonistic life, and from there, in three generations, to the decline of the society”. 47 Incidentally, Bell already made this assessment in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (cf. Bell 1973, p. 477). 45

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ensure that the ramping up of mass production in Galbraith’s sense was constantly supplied with enough mass consumption to be able to maintain continuous operation. In this respect, many advertising campaigns actively contributed to feeding such boundless hedonism. “Yet, on the marketing side, the sale of goods, packaged in the glossy images of glamour and sex, promotes a hedonistic way of life whose promise is the voluptuous gratification of the lineaments of desire” (Bell 1978, p. xxv). The introduction of consumer credit in the 1920s also had a special leverage effect.48 The greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the invention of the installment plan, or instant credit. Previously one had to save in order to buy. But with credit cards one could indulge in instant gratification. The system was transformed by mass production and mass consumption, by the creation of new wants and new means of gratifying those wants. (Bell 1978, p. 21)

In this way, the sphere of consumption, which in Bell’s impression far overshadowed the sphere of production, is finally touched upon, a sphere that was largely determined by this hedonistic attitude towards consumption and life. The culture was no longer concerned with how to work and achieve, but with how to spend and enjoy. Despite some continuing use of the language of the Protestant ethic, the fact was that by the 1950s American culture had become primarily hedonistic, concerned with play, fun, display, and pleasure – and, typical of things in America, in a compulsive way. (Bell 1978, p. 70)

In addition, factors such as feelings, imagination, sensuality, spontaneity, and subjectivity were added, which for Bell formed an overall syndrome, so to speak. But the new sensibility that emerged in the 1960s scorned such definitions completely. Authenticity in a work of art was defined almost exclusively in terms of the quality of immediacy, both the immediacy of the artist’s intention and the immediacy of his effect upon the viewer. In the theatre, for example, spontaneity was all; the text was virtually eliminated and the reigning form became improvisation – exalting the

Cf. Bell (1978, p. 66): “Mass consumption, which began in the 1920s, was made possible by revolutions in technology, principally the application of electrical energy to household tasks (washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and the like), and by three social inventions: mass production on an assembly line, which made a cheap automobile possible; the development of marketing, which rationalized the art of identifying different kinds of buying groups and whetting consumer appetites; and the spread of installment buying, which, more than any other social device, broke down the old Protestant fear of debt”. 48

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In this respect, the term ‘hedonism’ is a little too short for this modernist culture. And yet it essentially expresses what Bell saw as increasingly determining the destiny of North American society since the 1920s, with hedonism as the guiding attitude and consumption as the guiding sphere. Through this focus, Bell now anticipated what would receive increasing attention in consumption and consumer research years later: the relevance of hedonistic consumption in determining what might be the modernity of modern consumption (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982; Sassatelli 2001; O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2002; Migone 2007; Alba and Williams 2013). Not that other motivational layers may not have become equally significant and effective. But it is the hedonistic parts in modern mass consumption that stand out particularly strikingly and were later to prove highly significant. In this respect, Bell distinguished himself as a trend researcher with this focus, even though he strongly opposed this hedonistic consumer behaviour, and set a beginning that may have acted as a beacon for later consumption and consumer research. This certainly justifies claiming him here as a very stubborn pioneer for a critical theory of consumption.

3

Interim Review

Of course, it should also have become apparent that Bell’s contribution poses serious difficulties. These concern on the one hand his social theory, and on the other his understanding of consumption. In his social theory of his own making there are even several weak points, Waters has already pointed them out (Levi 1972, p. 68; Thompson 1976; Touraine 1977).49 Thus, the first question to ask is why Bell differentiated (modern) society into only three ‘domains’, especially since these domains were assigned different statuses. Moreover, Bell has endowed each of these areas with important sub-areas, for which it would have been obvious to treat them separately. In the case of the economy, for example, this applies to technology and administration, in the case

Thus Waters (1996, pp. 45ff.) posed the following four questions: ‘Is society really divided into realms?’, ‘How many realms are there?’, ‘Are the axes identified appropriately?’ and ‘Are the realms disjunctive?’, and none of them could be answered to Bell’s complete relief.

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of politics to law, and in the case of culture to education, the arts, religion and the sciences, while other areas such as the family, health, the mass media, medicine, the military or sport hardly appear at all. Finally, it remains to be questioned whether the field of culture has not generally been assigned a strange isolation and reification, since culture undoubtedly also occurs in politics and economics, while culture in turn is inconceivable without politics and economics (Bensman and Vidich 1972, p. 59; Abrahams 1977). Here, rather analytical-artificial distinctions and emphases were made, which are neither in line with social reality nor confirmed by contemporary social theories.50 In this respect, Bell would have done well to take Parsons’ project as an example rather than simply declaring it unrealizable.51 Bell’s understanding of consumption and culture, on the other hand, is incomparably more problematic. Because of his polemic way of looking at things, which was not able to concede anything good to all cultural innovations of this time, but disparaged everything in all its glory, his style of criticism shows a particularly dogged bunker mentality and stubbornness, or formulated differently, Bell’s explanations lack any open-mindedness, curiosity, sensitivity, tolerance (Wiswede 1972, pp. 277ff.). Thereby much would have been gained, if he had only kept a sufficient scientific neutrality in his treatment. For much of what Bell subjected to the sharpest criticism can be understood, for example with Ronald Inglehart (1977), as a change in education, generations and values, with which many positive impulses and developments are connected (Bensman and Vidich 1972, p. 60f.; Schaffer 1973). A Susan Sontag, even a Michel Foucault or Marshall McLuhan are also not so lightly dismissed (Bell 1978, p. 34, pp. 51f., p. 122, p. 129, 1992, p. 98). And that representatives of high culture should always justify their claim to be special can only be advocated. It also remains questionable whether modern(istic) culture, not even questioning its hypostasized homogeneity, has actually won the day in these ‘cultural wars’ (Bell 1992). After all, a sociologist is in principle not entitled to throw his personal preferences so far into the balance; this violates Weber’s dictum of freedom of value judgement in the most sensitive way (Touraine 1977, pp. 469f.; Waters 2003, p. 174). Albert William Levi (1972, p. 68) ridiculed Bell for this: “The sociologist as social governess. Custodian of the authentic mores. Lawgiver to the world”. In this respect, Bell’s preoccupation with modern, in

50 Except for Parsons’ social theory, this was mentioned because Parsons assigned culture a special function and thus autonomy, but systematically-systemically embedded in a genuine social theory, which was completely absent in Bell. 51 Cf. Bell (1979), an obituary on Parsons’ death in 1979, which makes clear how little Bell understood of this grand theory.

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particular hedonistic, consumption proves to have a tendency to be poisoned, even if it is to be credited to him that he drew attention to it at an early stage. In view of this situation, the question arises as to whether one could not gain considerably more from hedonism for the determination of modern consumption if one were to encounter this motivational situation without such reservations. And the answer to this is succinctly: one can! This assessment will be substantiated by means of an essay published 11 years after Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which allows for a far more fruitful, historically insightful, eye-opening understanding of modern consumption.

4

Colin Campbell: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987)

Almost every social scientist is familiar with Max Weber’s 1904 essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and basically knows what its core thesis was: Can ideas influence social change? In Weber’s case (2002), that meant at the time: on the development of modern capitalism. Perhaps even stimulate, promote, motivate it? In any case, the impact of this essay can be called epoch-making and its relevance unbroken to this day. In some respects, this study even triggered a social change in the social sciences itself and has become a model. Bell is a case in point. Admittedly, Weber’s interest in knowledge lay essentially on the production side, while the consumption side hardly received his attention – at best indirectly, for example, when he explained that the early capitalist entrepreneur lived like an ascetic and did not care much for consumption. Nowadays, this view has almost turned into its opposite. Consumption is often in the foreground, and there is only talk of asceticism for a minority of minimalists at most, while a universal hedonism is allowed to claim almost cultural hegemony, and the production side for this means at most the procurement of resources – this is primarily the Anglo-Saxon understanding of research. However, a contemporary theory of modern consumption was missing for a long time. There were the writings of Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen and Werner Sombart, published between 1895 and 1912. This was followed in 1923 by Hazel Kyrk’s almost forgotten study A Theory of Consumption. In 1960, Ernest Zahn’s Sociology of Prosperity appeared. And in 1970 Jean Baudrillard published the first systematic sociology of consumption, along with similar studies in the same period.

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But there was still no overview that sought to describe both the emergence and the basis of modern consumption in a theoretically comprehensive way. In 1987, the English sociologist Colin Campbell presented such a study of this claim, modestly called an ‘essay’ by the author, at least according to his assessment at the time. And he took Weber’s essay as his model, including its method and title (Campbell 1983, 1997, p. 168). Campbell thus basically completed Weber’s analysis with a second half, just as production and consumption had always been conceived as a pair by neoclassics – admittedly without ever having paid consumption the attention it probably deserved. Today we know better. Colin Campbell’s study – now based on the 2018 ‘extended edition’ – has two parts. In the first part, entitled “The Spirit of Modern Consumerism”, Campbell, after a first, original introduction (which was preceded by a second new one for the 2018 edition in order to review 30 years of reception history), dealt in four chapters with the peculiarities of modern consumption in contrast to traditional consumption. The second part then deals again in four chapters with ‘The Romantic Ethic’, and much like Weber – the new introduction even flirtatiously states that this essay is little more than ‘A Footnote to Weber’ (Campbell 2018, p. 23) – Campbell made an attempt first to determine the nature of modern consumption, and then to show how it could come about. A final reflection rounds off Campbell’s essay. Campbell’s approach is unusually elaborate for an essay. In the first part, he first took up several approaches that were significant for consumer research at the time, especially Veblen and the work of McKendrick et al. (1982), in order to show that the emulation or imitation thesis, according to which the lower classes would imitate the upper classes in their consumption behaviour, was not empirically wrong, but theoretically problematic, especially if one followed Weber in that the bourgeoisie of the time was by no means trying to emulate the aristocracy, but rather wanted to set itself apart from it, not least in its consumption behaviour. However, it is historically proven that it was the rising bourgeoisie that actively contributed in large numbers to the development of modern consumption. In fact, it was the actual supporting class. How can this paradox be resolved: Demarcation on the one hand, imitation on the other? Without immediately resolving this paradox, Campbell next turned to a first definition of modern consumption. According to this, one could perhaps assume that needs are limited and finite, but not at all that wants or desires are (Campbell 2018, pp. 84ff.). On the contrary, desires behave almost infinitely, almost insatiable and inexhaustible (Campbell 1997, p. 166), an assumption that Baudrillard (1981) had already vehemently advocated. If one then looks at the special features of modern consumption, it is distinguished by the fact that, in contrast to traditional patterns of consumption, which are strictly embedded in the respective social

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structure, it can, in contrast, be assessed as largely autonomous, develops largely detached from its social environment, is primarily guided by desires and no longer clings to the traditional, but is enthusiastic about everything new, i.e. represents a complete departure from the previous era of consumption. In addition, emotions and imaginations play a major role (Campbell 2004).52 In the first place, pleasure is sought via emotional and not merely sensory stimulation, whilst, secondly, the images which fulfil this function are either imaginatively created or modified by the individual for self-consumption, there being little reliance upon the presence of ‘real’ stimuli. These two facts mean that modern hedonism tends to be covert and self-illusory; that is to say, individuals employ their imaginative and creative powers to construct mental images which they consume for the intrinsic pleasure they provide, a practice best described as day-dreaming or fantasizing. (Campbell 2018, p. 131)

Against this background, Campbell then further sharpened the definition of modern consumption by pointing out that, in contrast to traditional consumption, in which individual pleasures (‘pleasures’, always in the plural), albeit limited to certain sensory experiences (eating, drinking, etc.), were indeed valued recurrently and intensively, in modern consumption all sorts of things could become important from the point of view of pleasure (‘pleasure’ in the singular, quasi as a central value), almost without distinction. “Traditional hedonism involves a concern with ‘pleasures’ rather than with ‘pleasure’, there being a world of difference between valuing an experience because (among other things) it yields pleasure, and valuing the pleasure which experiences can bring” (Campbell 2018, p. 118). In this context, everything that offers itself and is suitable is used to obtain particularly intense inner-psychic feelings. “Very simply put, we live in a culture in which reality is equated with intensity of experience, and is hence accorded both to the source of intense stimuli and to the aspect of our being that responds to them” (Campbell 2004, p. 36).

52

These two dimensions, feelings and imaginations, already played a role for Bell as well, albeit pejoratively valued. Thus Bell (1978, pp. xxiif.) wrote: “when the distinction between art and life became blurred so that what was once permitted in the imagination (the novels of murder, lust, perversity) has often passed over into fantasy, and is acted out by individuals who want to make their ‘lives’ a work of art, and when, with the ‘democratization’ of criticism, the touchstone of judgment is no longer some consensual agreement on standards, but each ‘self’s’ judgment as to how art enhances that ‘self’”, then this was a high price to pay for this ‘blurring’. Campbell, on the other hand, recognizes precisely this as the special feature of modern consumption.

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It does not even matter that it has to be external stimuli experienced in real life; pure simulations, experienced as fantasy or daydreaming, are quite sufficient, and they would even make up the greater part of our consumption. The central insight required is the realization that individuals do not so much seek satisfaction from products as pleasure from the self-illusory experiences that they construct from their associated meanings. The essential activity of consumption is thus not the actual selection, purchase or use of products, but the imaginative pleasureseeking to which the product image lends itself, ‘real’ consumption being largely a resultant of this ‘mentalistic’ hedonism. (Campbell 2018, p. 144)

In any case, what happens internally is of primary relevance, and the individual consumer acts like a ‘despot’, who freely switches and acts according to individual pleasure needs: “Modern hedonism presents all individuals with the possibility of being their own despot, exercising total control over the stimuli they experience, and hence the pleasure they receive” (Campbell 2018, p. 126). This is where the actual special feature of modern consumption comes to light. For Campbell, “day dreaming”53 was the all-embracing central competence of modern consumption, and the modern consumer behaved like a true “dream artist”54 – a self-manipulator and self-stager before the Lord, a true sovereign master over himself, as it were, because what each individual dreams for himself cannot be interfered with from the outside: Thoughts are free! Campbell illustrated this with fictions such as The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber and ‘Billy Liar’ by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse, which focus on people who live primarily in their daydreams rather than in harsh reality, and even want to escape from it. This heightened imaginative competence, which relies on powerful inner images and feelings to create a “perfect vision of life” (Campbell 2018, p. 139), represents the ‘spirit of modern consumerism’ in the main, a form of Cf. Campbell (2018, p. 137): “The category of most interest in this discussion is that which has been designated here as ‘day-dreaming’, and this is taken to be that form of mental activity in which fairly vivid future images are brought to mind (either deliberately or not in the first instance) and are either found to be pleasant or elaborated in a way which renders them so”. 54 Cf. Campbell (2018, p. 132): “In this sense the contemporary hedonist is a dream artist, the special psychic skills possessed by modern man making this possible. Crucial to this process is the ability to gain pleasure from the emotions so aroused, for when the images are adjusted, so too are the emotions. As a direct consequence, convincing day-dreams are created, such that individuals react subjectively to them as if they were real. This is the distinctively modern faculty, the ability to create an illusion that is known to be false but felt to be true. The individual is both actor and audience in his own drama, ‘his own’ in the sense that he constructed it, stars in it, and constitutes the sum total of the audience”. 53

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experiential rationality that we already know to some extent from Gerhard Schulze (1992), except that here it is about strategically targeted hedonism (Hellmann 2018). Of course, there are often deep gaps between desire and reality. This is why the modern consumer constantly oscillates between excessive expectation and realityrelated disappointment, an almost closed “cycle of desire-acquisition-usedesillusionment-renewed desire” (Campbell 2018, pp. 145f.), as already modelled by Tibor Scitovsky (1976), as well as Gerhard Schulze (1992, pp. 63ff.). After this run-through of the first part, which was somewhat smaller in scope than the second, Campbell took up again in principle the paradox of demarcation and imitation and tackled the quite difficult task of showing how both are possible. The solution lies in the passage of time and the concomitant change in ideas and ways of life. For while Weber’s study ended at the close of the seventeenth century, the development of Protestantism was by no means complete. Rather, in reaction to Calvinism, but also due to the problem of theodicy, there were several religionspecific, also sectarian currents, which referred to certain one-sidednesses, hardships and inconsistencies in this approach and incorporated numerous innovations. In sum, not only did this give greater consideration to feelings and desires, but – wonderfully illustrated by ‘Sense and Sensibility’ by Jane Austen – a veritable ‘cult of sensibility’ developed, which was supported by aristocratic antecedents such as the ‘cavalier effect’, but also by post-aristocratic phenomena such as the ‘dandy’, until finally Romanticism and not least the special form of the Bohemian movement took hold and formed a strong counterweight in relation to the strict Calvinist work ethic, which admittedly also became increasingly exhausted and lost influence over the decades. Moreover, this should hardly come as a surprise, it was mainly bourgeois women who participated in this trend, since they were rarely allowed to work, i.e. to perform wage labour, but had to present the household, as Veblen so astutely analysed, so that a resolution of the paradox was achieved by the gender separation alone (Campbell 2018, p. 325; Wagner 2020, pp. 46ff.). In the final result, Campbell succeeded, quite in the spirit of his role model Weber, in tracing through this approach a parallel line of development to the emergence of the capitalist spirit for modern consumption, which is characterized by an imaginatively highly productive hedonism and feeds on very similar sources, namely semantics of Romanticism, supported by religious inclinations, i.e. initiated and institutionalized by ideas. And similar to the spirit of capitalism, for which the religious starting conditions have meanwhile become completely insignificant, the literary precursors, the emotional-symbolic charge of classics such as ‘Sense and Sensibility’, had also long since been forgotten for contemporary consumerism. What has remained is this heightened imaginative competence and a persistent

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longing for a happy, even perfect life, largely profaned and devoid of content, but all the more insatiable and powerful for it, left entirely to its own devices, completely liberated from historical guidelines and constraints (Campbell 2018, pp. 140ff.). In retrospect, and here it is important to note a considerable increase in complexity within consumption and consumer research over the last 36 years, Campbell’s study from 1987, presented again in an expanded version in 2018 after several reprints, undoubtedly deserves classic status, similar to the works of Baudrillard or Scitovsky. Yet it feels as if the basic ideas in this essay, no matter how much academic research on consumption and consumerism has now dealt extensively with the connection between hedonism, imagination and consumption, have still not been fully discussed and received. This book does exist; but its contents remain partially unacknowledged.

5

Final Consideration

The original problem of this article culminated in the question of what is modern about modern consumption. Ultimately, this question can only be answered by considering the relationship between modern consumption and modern society. This brought Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism into view, a collection of essays documenting a comparatively early, albeit exceedingly critically dismissive, preoccupation with hedonism as a central motif of consumption. Subsequent analysis has then revealed that Bell’s social theory has very fundamental weaknesses, and that his understanding of culture and consumption was extremely biased. Moreover, it remained unclear in Bell’s work until the very end where the appeal of the hedonism motif actually stemmed from. What was basically missing was a specific derivation for its contemporary relevance. For this reason, the major essay The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism by Colin Campbell was subsequently set against it, in order to preserve the thoroughly significant diagnostic value of Bell’s interpretations at the time. For despite Bell’s categorical rejection of this consumption motif – and not least because of it – it undoubtedly received remarkable attention and was even held in special esteem by Campbell. And quite rightly so, since this “cultural revolution” (Bell 1978, p. 30) was by no means merely about the “death of the bourgeois worldview”, as Bell (1978, p. 53) so melodramatically and lachrymose put it, but about a fundamental social change, for which hedonism as a central consumption motif may have become symptomatic. The work of Inglehart and Jumonville makes it very clear why this was so at the time. And Campbell’s contribution reconstructs

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historically, but also socio-psychologically adeptly, especially through his inclusion of the imagination dimension, where the modern hedonism motif has its roots and why it later experienced such great acceptance and demand (Hellmann 2018). So how can the question of what the modernity of modern consumption is now be answered in view of this interpretative situation? Crucial to this is how the modern of modern society is understood. In a later text, entitled Modernism Mummified, Bell (1987, p. 123) presented a relatively dense and neutral description for what he associated with ‘the modern’: What is clear, out of all these variegated elements, is that what defines the modern is a sense of openness to change, of detachment from place and time, of social and geographical mobility, and a readiness, if not eagerness, to welcome the new, even at the expense of tradition and the past. It is the proposition that there are no ends or purposes given ‘in nature’, that the individual, and his or her self-realization, is the new ideal and imago of life, and that one can remake one’s self and remake society in the effort to achieve those individual goals. Revolution, which had once been a ricorso in an endless cycle, now becomes a rupture with the endless wheel, and is the impulse to destroy old worlds, and for new worlds to create.

According to Bell, modernity was characterized by openness to change, the detachment of space and time, social and geographical mobility, neophilia, the dissociation of purpose from traditional guidelines, and individualism and self-realization as new ideals of life. If we look at this list from the back, the individual obviously moved to the centre of events, and as he was increasingly freed from external restrictions, his own well-being – and not only marketing and advertising were responsible for this, but also the “revolution of rising entitlements” through the welfare state, as Bell (1978, p. 233) explained – advanced to the central value of his self-assessment. In the course of this, hedonism was given the highest social legitimacy. And what was best able to convey this sense of well-being in everyday practice? First and foremost, consumption – at least that was the core message to American consumers at the time, according to Christopher Lasch (1979), and domestic perceptions among consumers seemed to correspond perfectly with this (Lebergott 1993; Migone 2007; Liverant 2018). Finally, it can be noted with Campbell that the combination of emotions, imaginative capacity, and hedonism represents a special constellation that, when applied to consumption in this way, lends it something immensely modern (Illouz 2009). Incidentally, this definition of modern consumption is quite consistent with the one that was expressed at the beginning: Autonomy. For autonomy means that selfreference becomes the predominant standard for how one wants to experience and act oneself. External limitations still exist. But how one behaves towards them is left

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up to oneself: One revolves primarily around oneself; self-reference determines one’s private consumption agenda. Moreover, autonomy tends to test boundaries, putting one’s own concerns first (Roubal and Wawrosz 2020). Personal well-being and the choice of appropriate means thus primarily determine one’s own experience and actions (Reckwitz 2020, pp. 273ff.). Modern consumption, especially its hedonistic manifestation, enriched with intense feelings and driven by daydreams, and should this only become fully visible in extreme form, is calibrated precisely to this. Bell sensed this very early on, but as a convinced ‘bourgeois’ he spoke out vehemently against it.

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Kramer, B. (1979). Daniel Bell, the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 3, 201–203. Kravets, O., MacLaren, P., Miles, S., & Venkatesh, A. (Eds.). (2018). The SAGE handbook of consumer culture. Sage. Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism. American life in an age of diminishing expectations. Norton. Lebergott, S. (1993). Pursuing happiness. American consumers in the twentieth century. Princeton University Press. Levi, A. W. (1972). Psychedelic science. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 6, 67–81. Liverant, B. (2018). Buying happiness. The emergence of consumer consciousness in English Canada. UBC Press. Luhmann, N. (1991). Das Moderne der modernen Gesellschaft. In W. Zapf (Ed.), Die Modernisierung moderner Gesellschaft. Verhandlungen des 25. Deutschen Soziologentages in Frankfurt am Main 1990 (pp. 87–108). Campus. Luhmann, N. (2012). The theory of society. Volume 1 and 2. Stanford University Press. Lury, C. (1996). Consumer culture. Polity Press. Mannheim, K. (1991). Ideology and utopia. Routledge. Marcuse, H. (1969). An essay on liberation. Beacon Press. Marx, L. (1976). The cultural contradictions of capitalism. Challenge, 19, 43–44. McKendrick, N., Brewer, J., & Plumb, J. H. (1982). The birth of a consumer society. Commercialization of eighteenth century. Indiana University Press. Migone, A. (2007). Hedonistic consumption: Patterns of consumption in contemporary capitalism. Review of Radical Political Economics, 39, 173–200. Neun, O. (2012). Daniel Bell und der Kreis der New York Intellectuals. Frühe amerikanische öffentliche Soziologie. Springer VS. O’Shaughnessy, J., & O’Shaughnessy, N. J. (2002). Marketing, the consumer society and hedonism. European Journal of Marketing, 36, 524–547. Pendergast, T. (1998). Consuming questions: Scholarship on consumerism in America to 1940. American Studies International, 36, 23–43. Pooley, J. (2007). Straight by day, swingers by night: Re-reading Daniel Bell on capitalism and its culture. The Review of Communication, 7, 401–410. Purvis, M. (1998). Societies of consumers and consumer societies: Co-operation, consumption and politics in Britain and continental Europe. Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 147–169. Rahe, P. A. (2009). Retroview: The contradictions of Daniel Bell. The American Interest. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2009/11/01/retroview-the-contradictions-of-dan iel-bell/. Accessed on 19. Juni 2020. Reckwitz, A. (2006). Das hybride Subjekt. Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne. Velbrück. Reckwitz, A. (2020). The society of singularities. Polity. Riccio, B. D. (1993). Popular culture and high culture: Dwight MacDonald, his critics and the ideal of cultural hierarchy in modern America. Journal of American Culture, 16, 7–18. Robbins, B. (1999). Disjoining the left: Cultural contradictions of Anticapitalism. Boundary, 2(26), 29–38. Roberts, D. (2012). From the cultural contradictions of capitalism to the creative economy: Reflections on the new spirit of art and capitalism. Thesis Eleven, 110, 83–97.

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Roubal, O., & Wawrosz, P. (2020). Predatory and alternative hedonism – Better later than now? ACTA VSFS, University of Finance and Administration, 14, 166–179. Sassatelli, R. (2001). Tamed hedonism: Choice, desires and deviant pleasures. In J. Gronow & A. Warde (Eds.), Ordinary consumption (Studies in consumption and market series) (pp. 93–106). Routledge. Sassatelli, R. (2007). Consumer culture. History, theory and politics. Sage. Schaffer, E. (1973). Academic milieu, social structure, and student cultures. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 7, 79–90. Schimank, U. (2007). Theorien gesellschaftlicher Differenzierung. Springer Fachmedien. Schneider, N. (2000). Konsum und Gesellschaft. In D. Rosenkranz & N. F. Schneider (Eds.), Konsum. Soziologische, ökonomische und psychologische Perspektiven (pp. 9–22). Leske und Budrich. Schulze, G. (1992). Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart. Campus. Scitovsky, T. (1976). The joyless economy. An inquiry into human satisfaction and consumer dissatisfaction. Oxford University Press. Shapiro, H. S. (1983). Schools, work and consumption: Education and the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The Journal of Educational Thought, 17, 209–220. Singal, D. J. (1987). Towards a definition of American modernism. American Quarterly, 39, 7–26. Slater, D. (1997). Consumer culture and modernity. Polity. Sontag, S. (1961). Against interpretation and other essays. Penguin Books. Southerton, D. (Ed.). (2011). Encyclopedia of consumer culture. 3 Bände. 3 Bände. Sage. Thompson, J. (1976). Two hundred years is enough. The American Scholar, 45, 604–606. Touraine, A. (1977). What is Daniel Bell afraid of? American Journal of Sociology, 83, 469–473. Veysey, L. (1982). A postmortem on Daniel Bell’s postindustrialism. American Quarterly, 34, 49–69. Wade, N. (1975). Daniel Bell: Science as the imago of the future society. Science, 188, 35–37. Wagner, A. (2020). Feminismus und Konsum. arthistoricum.net. Waters, M. (1996). Daniel Bell. Routledge. Waters, M. (2003). Daniel Bell. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to major contemporary social theorists (pp. 154–177). Blackwell. Weber, M. (2002). The protestant ehtic and the spirit of capitalism and other writings. Penguin Books. Wiedenhoft Croft, W. (2017). Consumer culture and society. Sage. Wiswede, G. (1972). Soziologie des Verbraucherverhaltens. Ferdinand Enke.

Kai-Uwe Hellmann Dr. habil., adjunct professor of consumer and economic sociology at the TU Berlin. Research focus: Sociology of consumption. Co-director of the AG Konsumsoziologie. Co-editor of the book series “Konsumsoziologie und Massenkultur”, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden.

Of Markets and People: Tibor Scitovsky’s Joyless Economy Günther Rosenberger

Abstract

Tibor Scitovsky has incorporated insights from empirical behavioral psychology into traditional neoclassical economics to show why affluent consumption alone cannot make people happy. Rather, Americans suffer from a deficit of satisfying stimulation, making many stimulating experiences unavailable to them. This would require the learning of consumption skills that would first make possible an attention to more demanding means of gratification. Otherwise, one remains in the comfort of immediate need satisfaction through banal consumption practices that quickly lose their appeal. Both the book and its author were late in gaining some recognition. Scitovsky’s importance lies in his role as a pioneer of Behavioural Economics and in the explanatory power of his approach for understanding current undesirable developments in civil society. Yet he has been unrecognized to this day. Why?

1

Preliminary Remark

Some dreams do not want to end. According to Siegmund Freud, great desires have a compensatory effect in them and, if they are dreamed by many together, they persistently assert themselves. Like the American Dream of increasing prosperity, of advancement and satisfaction through one’s own achievement. Equal opportunity and competition as prerequisites, a right to arms as an encore, distrust of all G. Rosenberger (✉) Institut für Verbraucherjournalismus ifv, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_3

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government as a condition. “The ‘dream’ must simply persist, how else would people in the richest and most powerful country in the world, blessed with so many advantages, come to terms with the reality around them?” (Chomsky 2017, p. 10). Especially as American presidents sought to combine the American Dream with neoliberal ideology, portraying the citizen consumer as a hero responsible for the dream in their moral myth (Coskuner-Balli 2020). “The notion of the citizen consumer transferred the notion of political formal equality of citizens in democracy to consumer participation in the consumer market” (Rödder 2016, p. 146). Admittedly, the inequalities in income, education, health care, and social security that are particularly glaring in the United States provide a bleak picture: “This is a depressing picture, and the American Dream is clearly tattered” (Graham 2017, p. 148). The American dream nevertheless knew how to hold its own against wake-up calls. In 1937, for example, it was confronted with the novella “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck. It describes the fate of two migrant worker friends who cling to the dream of owning their own farm and fail miserably in their search for a job. Steinbeck shows how the illusions of the self-made dream are shattered under adverse, unjust circumstances, but how the American Dream acts as a sedative for the underprivileged who unsuccessfully chase happiness. Steinbeck had been a migrant worker himself and knew what he was writing about: helplessly hoping as a seeming assignment of fate. Forty years later, a Steinbeck kindred spirit attacked the dream of happiness in the affluent society. Tibor Scitovsky sent his The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (in thoughtless translation Psychology of Prosperity. The Needs of Man and the Needs of Consumers, 1977, 1989) a publication into the scientific arena in which he picked apart the illusions of American consumer society. With his unsparing analysis of reality, he tattered the American Dream, imposing a “more is not necessarily better” on daydreaming consumers. The book was a milestone from which traditional economic science had to see itself challenged to broaden its methodological perspective. The proponents of neoclassicism found this less than appealing, for Scitovsky challenged their key concept: individual preferences, which seem to reflect true desires and needs and, as they saw it, condition meaningful decisions. Who was this scientist who accused his colleagues of remaining clueless in their disciplinary lockdown, of not trusting preferences, of taking into account the findings of behavioral psychology? Who was this consumer citizen, not averse to everyday pleasures, who knew why venal gratifiers alone do not make one happy? Who’s dunnit? The answer: he was an intellectual free spirit, field-independent and interdisciplinarily open-minded, moreover a dyed-in-the-wool European who remained so even after he became an American. For it is his socialization in

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educated bourgeois Europe that must be counted among the decisive prerequisites of his thinking. “Scitovsky’s eventful life was a rich source of inspiration for The Joyless Economy, as he himself said on several occasions” (Pugno 2018, p. 44).

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Vita Activa Between Old Europe and the New World

2.1

The Out-Migrant

Scitovsky was born in Budapest in 1910, the son of a cultured and wealthy aristocratic family named de Scitovsky (de Haan 2016, pp. 201ff.; Pugno 2018, pp. 45ff.). Both parents were art-loving, taking the adolescent on trips, taking him to museums, exhibitions, galleries, theaters. “As a child, dragged along to innumerable antique shops, picture galleries and museums of decorative arts in Paris, Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden, etc. I was bored at first but then became interested and quite knowledgeable about French and other European artistic styles. I retained an interest in antique furniture and interior decoration to this day” (Scitovsky 1999a, p. 50). His mother took care of the furnishing of the aristocratic home with antiques, paintings, sculptures, organized the glamorous receptions and entertainments of political and cultural celebrities. Tibor was introduced to John Galsworthy, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Salvador de Madariaga, Colette and other prominent figures of Budapest’s high society (Scitovsky 1999a, p. 50). Scitovsky described his mother as impressive, worldly and generous, with a strong will and many idiosyncrasies. “To me, my mother’s generosity took the unfortunate form of never letting me go to school, arguing that two hours of private tutoring accomplishes as much as five hours of school, making the time so saved available for individual lessons in French, English, German, fencing, dancing and piano playing” (Scitovsky 1999a, p. 43). On the one hand this was beneficial for his academic career, but on the other hand it had a long-term downside: “A further cost of private tutoring and the language skills it gave me was my lack of contact with others of my age, which I badly missed and which set back by many years my learning the social skills, the facts of life, and the art of fending for myself” (Scitovsky 1999a, p. 43). These must have been formative experiences. The initial resistance to The Joyless Economy may also have had to do with a certain rejection of the author, for whom much respect but apparently only moderate affection was later felt. And not entirely without reason: My resentment of possessive mother-love and isolation from contemporaries affected me for life. The former sensitized me to the implications of one person’s power over

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The father, with the same first name, was not unlike his son. He found him “conservative, compassionate, honest, fair, invariably polite and kind, but also lonely, remote and unapproachable” (Scitovsky 1999a, p. 44). He admired him, no doubt in part because of the professional successes that established the family’s wealth. For Tibor de Scitovsky Sr had come a long way, from diplomat to banker, then foreign minister, and finally president of Hungary’s largest bank. Thus the young Scitovsky learned what prosperity could mean, but was also confronted with social and economic inequalities, experienced educated bourgeois self-evidence and national peculiarities. “This mix of experiences would help him to conceive a source of enjoyment different from material comfort” (Pugno 2018, p. 45). Scitovsky often formulated “we Americans” and arguably defined himself as one. Yet much that was constitutive in his arguments remained indebted to his origins in the European educated middle class. “The kind of economist that he became and, indeed, the fact that he became an economist both owe much to his lifestyle in childhood and adolescence” (Earl 2010, p. 1). His sceptical attitude towards the American way of life is conspicuous in many of his opinions, just as his favourable judgements on European countries are irritating, for example on France, Germany or the United Kingdom (judgements that today, after aligned developments, seem flattering). His criticism of the consumerism of the US majority society, which – despite emerging environmental protection movements or student protests against “consumer terror” – hoped for a further increase in prosperity, was obviously fed by the cultural traditions of Old Europe that shaped him. The following can be assumed. Scitovsky endured the tension between European skepticism of Western civilization and the American Dream, and sublimated this dialectic into his interpretation of American consumer culture. He had remained European at his core. How did this come about? From the founding period of the nineteenth century, possibly even earlier, cultural elites in Germany felt a critical attitude towards the rational and calculating of modernity, towards economics, the pursuit of profit, and money (Schreiber 1990). Culture, inwardness, and romantic rapture were considered higher than Western civilization. “One has civilization – as a semblance, as an externality – or one does not have it. Where there is a bitter lack of having, one rises above it to true being: to culture. It is identical with the actual, the real” (von Krockow 1990, p. 63). And Gordon A. Craig on the Germans: ‘But in

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general there was the deepest distrust of financiers, and always had been’ (Craig 1983, p. 130). Therefore: until recently, ‘market economy’ was considered a rather trivial concept, hostile to the spirit, to art, and even to nature [. . .] Of the historically absurd reification thesis [. . .] the assertion that the market economy is cold, egoistic, and no longer inspires people for a common goal, but merely for isolated ‘consumption’, has remained alive to this day. [. . .] The twofold thesis that money makes people unfree and unhappy, that the lonely soul far removed from money is truly human because it is united with itself, has remained the central topos of German market criticism to this day. (Schreiber 1990, n. p.; transl.)

During Scitovsky’s childhood and youth, a comparable way of thinking was probably also widespread in the upper middle-class and aristocratic circles of Budapest. The scion of a family associated with high culture could not have evaded such thinking: “Scitovsky’s beliefs were deeply influenced by his early life” (Trei 2002, p. 1). The influence of European mentality can be seen in Scitovsky’s reception of the “normative humanism” of Erich Fromm. Fromm was also German-American and exposed to the socio-cultural impacts of his time during the first half of his life in Germany. In a clear-eyed analysis, Di Giovinazzo (2019) shows that Fromm’s critique of the United States provided important building blocks for Scitovsky’s thought: a puritan culture that praises money-making instead of cultivating leisure; the production of mass-produced goods that signify comfort but also alienation; an educational system that emphasizes knowledge of technology rather than the liberal arts. Her conclusion is that “Tibor Scitovsky owed a significant intellectual debt to Erich Fromm” (Di Giovinazzo 2019, p. 329). It would have been the “shared formative, intellectual milieu” that must be counted among the intellectual premises of The Joyless Economy. Scitovsky studied international law at Cambridge and Budapest, but became increasingly interested in economics. After some sort of internship in his father’s bank, he made a dramatic decision: ‘I revolted: against the society around me and the banking career my mother wanted to ease me into’ (Pugno 2018, p. 46). Fascism in Germany also strengthened his decision to emigrate (de Haan 2016, p. 201), indeed to flee, as he himself said. “Wanting to stand on his own feet, and interested by the economic problems of the day, he left Hungary in 1935 to enroll at the London School of Economics” (Earl 2010, p. 1). There he soon attracted attention with original contributions (Arrow et al. 2004, p. 1). With a scholarship abroad, he left Europe for the United States in 1939.

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The One-Walker

Scitovsky first studied at Columbia, Harvard and Chicago Universities. He became an American in the process, although European culture remained alive in him. Parts of Europe, however, had become alien, even hostile, to him: when the USA entered the war in 1943, he joined the US Army. He changed his name so as not to endanger his family in Hungary, Nazi Germany’s ally (de Haan 2016, p. 201). Thomas Dennis became his nom de guerre, under which he served until 1946, first as a truck driver, then in counterintelligence, and finally with the US Strategic Bombing Survey (de Haan 2016, p. 201; Arrow et al. 2004, p. 1). There he met John Kenneth Galbraith, his boss, who appreciated his memoranda (de Haan 2016, pp. 201f.). In 1946 he was hired as a lecturer in the Economics Department at Stanford University. He took his real name again, but renounced the noble predicate “de”. There he was very successful: “Scitovsky remained central to the workings and teaching often of the department” (Arrow et al. 2004, p. 1). His wanderings between academic disciplines corresponded with an external mobility: in 1958 he went to Berkeley for 10 years and from 1965 he was at the same time a visiting professor at Harvard; in 1968 professor of economics at Yale; in 1970 again Stanford; from 1976 engagements at UC Santa Cruz and the London School of Economics. Then retirement in 1976 with Aplomb: The Joyless Economy appearing. He died in 2002. A longtime colleague said in his obituary, “He was interested in art. He had a deep aversion to mass culture and came to reflect on why America was so different from Europe. He was a U.S. citizen, but he was always a European” (Trei 2002, p. 1). His scientific reputation was high: “He was that type of intellectual of which there are too few: inquisitive, alert, curious, ready to breach disciplinary boundaries and to create unpracticable connections” (Bianchi 2003, p. 392). And therefore: “Professor Scitovsky was a pioneer and major influence in several different areas of economics”, an obituary said (Bianchi 2003, p. 392). These include welfare theory in the context of growth and competition, price formation, inflation, unemployment, externalities, foreign trade (Bianchi 2003, p. 392; Earl 2010). In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, the Scitovsky Reversal Paradox unsettled traditional welfare theory (Fonseca n.d.). “He also kept on publishing articles on economics through the 1990 s” (de Haan 2016, p. 203). Among his publications, however, one work stands out: The Joyless Economy. “It is the work of a behavioural economist avant la lettre” (de Haan 2016, p. 203).

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The Joyless Economy

The title already puts it in a nutshell. “The Joyless Economy (1976) attempts to explain why economic growth is not necessarily accompanied by a comparable growth in welfare, happiness and joy” (de Haan 2016, p. 205). The point is that the prosperity economy is joyless rather than satisfaction-giving. What may have prompted the German publisher at the time to choose the all-world title “Psychology of Prosperity” is hard to fathom. Other publishers had a surer sense and translated literally “L’ Économie sans joie” or “L’ economia senza gioia”. For this was, after all, the unexpectedly new message: that prosperity does not make people happy at all, that the American Dream is an illusion, that people remain joyless in their dream of consumer happiness. In Europe there were already sceptical objections of this kind, but neoclassical economics, here as there, had some catching up to do.

3.1

The Joyless Economy as a Research Program on Human Welfare

In the first part of the book, entitled “The Psychology and Economics of Motivations”, Scitovsky develops his theory on the basis of motivational psychological findings. In the second part, “The American Lifestyle”, he exemplifies his thoughts on phenomena of American society, culture and economy.

3.1.1

Scitovsky’s Programme in Brief

Scitovsky begins by asking whether economics can ensure that people’s lives are “joyful”. To answer this question, he develops a research programme for which he draws on motivational psychology in order to gain a realistic understanding of human needs and desires; the economic approach using “revealed preferences” would not have helped here. According to Pugno (2018, pp. 48ff.), his groundbreaking approach can be summarized in a nutshell. First, people cannot see the market offers that would be suitable for them. Scitovsky calls this a lack of life skill (or consumption skill), which manifests itself in fundamental uncertainty about the consequences of the available choices. The pursuit of well-being is thus hindered by this lack of knowledge. Second, however, this lack is by no means inevitable, for it can be remedied through learning and positive experience. Indeed, when people experience new things that are appropriate to their life knowledge and neither bore nor overwhelm them, the exciting feeling in the process creates satisfaction and encourages further learning. Scitovsky calls this

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type of learning creative because it results in new understanding. When, third, life learning is lacking, personal problems set in: People then replace pleasurable, stimulating learning with immediate, consumer gratification (comfort, the German translation chooses alternate terms). This kind of gratification is vulnerable, however, because habituation and third-party imitation weaken the effects; in the worst cases, addiction can even develop. When people lack both material resources and life skills, they are at risk of engaging in risky or even violent acts to escape chronic boredom. Fourth, a lack of life skill also creates social problems: Imitative and risky behaviors can cause negative externalities, such as environmental pollution or even unpleasant sensory stimulation in others. Fifth, personal and social problems may be caused by the economy: because of uncertainties in the labor market, social competition, or pressure from manufacturers on consumer decisions. Sixth, Scitovsky nevertheless maintains confidence in the market, because of its flexibility and non-personal conditions. Seventh, finally, Scitovsky emphasizes the importance of education in family and school for the development of personal capacity, life skills, as well as the function of culture and art for the imagination necessary for successful life decisions. According to Scitovsky, all of these points must be taken into account in research, because economists are unable to understand some current issues due to their fixation on rational decision-making. Therefore, one has to borrow from psychology. The correct methodological approach would therefore be to observe behaviour inductively: the behaviour of different people in similar situations and that of one person in different situations. The first approach is more conventional, common also in behavioural economics, the second is rarer. “The challenge for the next generation of economists is to discover how to formalize these ideas and integrate them into the existing body of neoclassical thought” (Frank 1992, p. v).

3.1.2

The Psychology and Economics of Motivations

The second chapter is called “Between Stress and Boredom”. In search of a general theory of motivation, Scitovsky chose the arousal approach of Daniel Berlyne (1960), “because it provided an instrument with which to study the heterogeneity of the available options in alternative to the model of revealed preference” (Pugno 2018, p. 52). Higher arousal, or activation, means alertness, quick response, and better performance, which drops off when arousal is excessive. Low arousal makes one feel tired and inattentive. Consequently, people strive for an optimal state of arousal of the organism, which they then want to maintain; with it, sensory stimulation is neither too low nor too intense, it is perceived as beneficial or even pleasurable (Pugno 2018, p. 41). Unsatisfied needs such as pain, hunger, heat, or even cognitive conflicts, as “disturbances” (discomfort), increase arousal, which

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drives the organism to action in order to lower the arousal level again. With this concept, Scitovsky attacked the traditional economic interpretation that satisfaction is the goal of economic activity and behavior is the effort to strive for a state of calm satisfaction by reducing arousal. Scitovsky, however, focuses on the other direction: increasing a too low, unpleasant level of arousal. He goes beyond Berlyne here by considering sources of activating stimulation beyond economic goods as well (Pugno 2018, pp. 41f.). These would be, above all, sociability, work, varied consumption through novelty, leisure activities as well as pleasure-filled learning by enjoying the stimulus of novelty. Prolonged satisfaction with comfort loses its appeal and becomes boring. Fighting boredom is the counterpart of the effort to eliminate discomfort. Thus, physical exercise is a proven remedy for too-low arousal. Mental stimulation is also helpful: intellectual activity, games, entertainment, art, satisfying curiosity, as is surprising news-all activities done for their own sake (intrinsically motivated). But the stimulus of novelty may be too meager if information is new but partly familiar (redundant); the stimulus must already be pronounced (subjective information) or very surprising or suggestive of danger. Then the new is perceived as a problem, the mastering of which even gives pleasure. Thus uncertainty, extreme sports or horror films can also bring strong satisfaction. However, the search for real or imagined danger must always remain controllable, limited; the danger can also only be feigned. Otherwise, the allure of novelty overwhelms and intimidates. The optimal degree of novelty is determined by the amount of information, the degree of surprise and the individual information processing capacity. With him, the greatest pleasure is possible, provided that the new can be combined with what is already there: “A fictional story, to be enjoyable, must deal with characters and situations which have some affinity to those we are familiar with. The same is also true of news” (Scitovsky 1992, p. 48). A work of art can only be properly appreciated and enjoyed if one has a certain prior knowledge. Enjoyment of novelty can therefore only be expected with a minimum of redundancy, which requires prior learning: “the consumption of novelty is skilled consumption” (de Haan 2016, p. 211). The activities mentioned are intended either to eliminate discomfort, i.e. to satisfy physical or mental needs by lowering high arousal, or to combat boredom by increasing arousal. Both aim at comfort, a “negative good”, namely freedom from pain or discomfort. Scitovsky introduces a central distinction here: The “positive good” pleasure (in the German translation Lustgefühl, also Genuss or Lust) is something different from comfort. Feelings of comfort or discomfort refer to certain levels of excitement and emotion. Pleasure, on the other hand, has to do with the acceleration or deceleration of emotions, i.e. with the processes of change themselves. This means that a feeling of pleasure is always preceded by discomfort,

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since the optimum is first sought (“hedonistic tension”). Thus, too much pleasure (= absence of discomfort) can also prevent feelings of pleasure, since the level of arousal achieved does not need to be changed. This tension between the two phenomena is, according to Scitovsky’s conviction, the background of the widespread dissatisfaction in affluent societies such as that in the USA. Scitovsky speaks of a seduction of pleasure. It lies in the lowering of arousal in the tendency to satisfy needs excessively: One eats, for example, out of “gluttony” more than the organism demands. The act of satisfying hunger, of gratification, is so pleasurable that the activities associated with it are intensified, beyond satiety. One eats too much because of the pleasure of eating, although hunger has long since been satisfied. Such a state of affairs is foreign to economic theory, whose principle of utility maximization suggests that the individual forms of discomfort are weighed thoughtfully against each other, that pleasure plays no reinforcing role. In the case of arousal enhancement, this too reinforces the stimulating, if perhaps exhausting, activities, so that here too the optimum may be exceeded. “This is why a detective novel or a crossword puzzle [. . .] will often so engross us that we simply cannot bring ourselves to stop in the middle” (Scitovsky 1977, p. 63; transl.). If the optimum is exceeded, feelings of pleasure are again induced in the release of tension then required; and the anticipation of these is a second reward. Examples of this reinforcement process are various sports, games, hobbies, artistic or scientific activities. “Man’s need for pleasure and its powerful influence on his behavior are a fundamental part of his being” (Scitovsky 1977, p. 65; transl.). With increasing prosperity, more and more needs are satisfied, and consequently the level of pleasure increases in many areas. But this prevents experiences of pleasure, because close to the optimal level of arousal there is no reason for change. This is a dilemma: one can choose pleasure and forgo some pleasure, or choose greater pleasure at the expense of pleasure. Scitovsky speaks here of the seduction of comfort. Increased comfort is immediately perceptible and effective, the loss of pleasure only becomes apparent gradually. With increasing age and changed preferences, people prefer comfort more and more to pleasure: Lifestyle changes, habits with it. The reward reinforcements from immediate perception of increased comfort produce a preference for such comfortable well-being. Can the elimination of boredom by excitement enhancement also have a pleasure-reducing effect, Scitovsky asks. Is the dual pleasure of tension build-up and release strong and persistent enough to hold its own against comfort? Clearly, neither can be fully enjoyed. Discomfort due to lack of need satisfaction is, as I have said, the precondition for feelings of pleasure in the release of excitement. Discomfort due to boredom is removed by arousal increase, but the precondition for feelings of pleasure is not the discomfort itself, but are the unpleasant sensations produced by the temporary

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tension. A film, for example, is only pleasurable when a tension is built up which is eventually resolved, though the spectators need by no means be bored at the outset. The difference with the pleasure of need satisfaction is that the pleasure associated with stimulation does not diminish when it is frequently and insistently sought. It offers, in principle, greater scope for a free choice between more pleasure and more comfort, if both are perceived to be of the same kind; increasing affluence does not necessarily lead one to prefer comfort to pleasure, as is the case with drive reduction. After this conceptual grounding, Scitovsky deals with decision-making behavior in affluent societies in which feelings of pleasure in satisfying needs have largely been lost in favor of feelings of comfort. In such affluent societies, for many people feelings of pleasure can now only be obtained through stimulation. He raises the question of what role the economy actually plays in connection with the totality of all means of satisfaction, what significance, for example, the national product has. To this end, he distinguishes between goods and services with market value, which are thus offered via the market, and those without market value, which are free. These include public goods, but also self-sufficiency, housework or personal services, all of which are not included in the gross national product and are therefore underestimated in their value. Work as self-stimulation is an economic activity, but the satisfaction for the person concerned is not an economic good. The satisfaction derived from work varies greatly according to the individual’s level of engagement, the context, etc.; this is also true for volunteer work. So-called external effects are satisfaction (or also disadvantages) through goods at third parties, which is also statistically not or hardly recorded. Goods and services with a market value can be recorded in the social product, but their contribution to satisfaction is not depicted, rather it is underestimated: everyone derives more satisfaction from a purchased item than from the possession of the money they pay for it. Scitovsky’s conclusion: the social product is not a sufficient indicator of the performance of an economy; economic satisfactions can have positive and negative side effects that are not recorded. In the following, Scitovsky describes how economic categories for goods and services and his concepts of comfort and stimulation fit together. Thus, he asks whether the need for comforts is limited, distinguishing between defensive goods (which help avoid pain or injury) and creative goods (which bring a positive reward). Thus, the desire to avoid pain is a quenchable desire, while the desire for pleasure is more insatiable. Limited, apparently, is also the desire for comfortable leisure or for financial security. Prosperity makes many defensive products more accessible, which can lead to their excessive use and also to environmental damage. On the other hand, creative products are also more valuable to society, more than

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they appear to the individual. Another amenity is the sense of status, the sense of belonging, the satisfaction of which is limited, which in turn makes the desire for it infinite. The feeling of being useful to others, for example by being able to hold stimulating conversations, also has its own limits. Finally, habits represent comforts from which one is reluctant to part. Immediate reward of an action with arousalreducing effects reinforces the action, but this leads to decreasing stimulus strength, resulting in habit formation. Thus, status orientation is a source of pleasure that one does not want to give up. A psychological process such as drug addiction can transform almost anything into such a sense of well-being. Status orientation and drug addiction are admittedly exceptions to the rule that demand for defensive products is limited. But such exceptions destroy the connection between spending money and gratification. Finally, Scitovsky discusses the relationship between income and happiness. He points out that the satisfaction of Americans has hardly risen over the decades despite increases in income. The decisive factor is not the level of living standards, but the relationship to “the Joneses”. Status and social rank matter, even to the point of addictive dependence. Important for stimulation satisfaction are still job satisfaction and the attraction of the new, which can result indirectly from an increase in income. Accordingly, national income cannot be a suitable indicator of general well-being.

3.1.3

The American Lifestyle

In the second part of The Joyless Economy, Scitovsky gives practical examples for his theoretical considerations. He asks why prosperity leaves many Americans so unsatisfied. To this end, he repeatedly makes comparisons with Europe, where people know how to consume more skilfully. Americans focus much more on comfort and much less on pleasure. Are they too comfortable? The tendency to comfort is evident when we don’t turn off the lights when leaving a room, throw away food hastily, don’t take the time to go shopping; in general, we want to save time all the time, which must be at the expense of pleasure. One takes too many medicines, replaces household appliances too quickly with new ones, dresses carelessly, does not complain in restaurants, is uncritical as a shopper – but the desire to remain unmolested has its price. The pursuit of comforts is excessive, you miss many other aspects of a beautiful life. In Europe, people have developed consumer skills, they have learned to manage their means of gratification more skillfully than Americans. This is evident in the enjoyment of nice meals, in the way leisure time and vacations are used for stimulation rather than for comfort, in the fact that Europeans spend more money on flowers (!), that they furnish their homes more tastefully, or that they socialize

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with other people often and with pleasure. Scitovsky says the following about the differences. Americans, as extroverts, do have lower average levels of arousal and would therefore need to take in a higher input of stimulants; they feel an urge for variety and novelty. Such, however, would not at all be apparent in dull food, monotonous surroundings, sitting around at home, and little enterprise in leisure. The inclination to act in a certain way and the external pressure that causes the opposite constitute a conflict, according to Scitovsky, which gives rise to a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction with one’s behavior. How does this happen? Scitovsky describes the presumed causes in a chapter titled “Our Puritan Ghost,” the polemical content of which the German translation disposed of as “Unser Puritanisches Erbe.” Cultural, educational, and economic forces bring about a cumulative effect that causes a conflict between what Americans need and what they effectively get, and which explains some of the frustrations. The Puritan ethic is excellent for developing preferences in people for pleasure and against stimulation. Puritans are fundamentally opposed to pleasure of any kind, but they will recognize, however grudgingly, the need for consumption necessary for a healthy and productive life. (Scitovsky 1977, p. 173; transl.)

In contrast, production, the creation of market value and one’s own contribution to it are highly valued. Earning money then takes on a moral significance that weighs more heavily than the use of income in consumption. Education, too, tends to be oriented towards pleasure rather than the joy of stimulation. It should actually train the ability to enjoy culture, music and literature, which requires practice, because the joy of stimulation is based on skilled consumption. The Puritan ethic here has caused curricula to aim at learning vocational skills in production rather than enjoyment of life. Industry and commerce also had a great influence on the curricula. In this, the need for consumer skills grew as the standard of living rose. This lack of cultural interest represents a bias in favor of pleasure and to the disadvantage of stimulation. Scitovsky’s harsh judgment of the Puritan ethic is self-evident today. At the time, he was probably a follower of Epicurean ethics. For Epicurus promoted the social life, the contemplation of nature, the fine arts, friendship (Adam 2006, p. 134). “Not in fleeting pleasures, the endless chain of sensual desire and sensual gratification, but in lasting peace of mind consisted for him the highest happiness” (Adam 2006, p. 134; transl.). Scitovsky (1977, pp. 190ff.) defines culture as knowledge. This provides the redundancy necessary for stimulation to be pleasurable. Pleasure in pleasure does not require any skills, only stimulation pleasure is a cultural activity. Consumption skills are thus part of culture, which can also be understood as the training and

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ability to enjoy stimulation pleasure. With increasing leisure time, however, Americans’ favorite pastimes are watching television, driving, and shopping – all inappropriate efforts to satisfy stimulation cravings. The Puritan tradition, however, prevents learning consumer skills and learning about and appreciating sources of stimulation such as music, art, history, and literature. Appropriate courses are not very popular, and the value of talking about such subjects goes unrecognized. As a result, Americans do not value conversation much; consequently, they are more solitary than Europeans. The disdain for culture is also visible in the mass production of goods. However, their novelty appeal – and stimulation satisfaction – is declining faster than their comfort satisfaction. Finally, there is the lack of imagination, from which everything new springs. The economy has not succeeded in increasing the capacity of the imagination to produce novelties. Therefore, the cost of obtaining stimulating excitation through concerts, operas, theatrical and ballet performances is increasing, and their prices are rising accordingly, discouraging the demand for artistic offerings. The prices for obtaining comfort offers, on the other hand, stagnate because of increased labour productivity. Since the technical development enables a broadly effective multiplication of music, pictures, films etc., a banalisation of art occurs: mass production offers what pleases and promises comfort. But the novelty content of, for example, poor reproductions of pictures wears off quickly. Finally, specialism, which enormously increases the productivity of labour, plays an obstructive role. Specialism is highly regarded and well paid. But efficient consumption and a fulfilled life require something else, namely generalized knowledge about the numerous sources of pleasurable stimulation. The generalist uses his judgment and general knowledge about the complex situation of the available different sources of satisfaction. Americans, however, are poor generalists. The do-it-yourself movement can be understood as a revolt against specialism and division of labor, both of which result in increasing dissatisfaction with work. That is, even if we miss out on a great deal of pleasurable stimulation because of our puritanical attitudes, our lack of consumer skills, and our disdain for a general education as consumers, we can make up for this loss by seeking the creative satisfaction of productive work. (Scitovsky 1977, pp. 236f.; transl.)

Then it would be easier to resolve the conflict between the American tendency to seek stimulation in sex, stimulants, or occupational and local changes, and the other tendency to accept less stimulation in most areas of consumption than other peoples do.

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The Message: Less Puritanism, More Enjoyment of Life!

What is the essential message of The Joyless Economy? Scitovsky demonstrates that novelty is both a desirable object and a source of satisfaction. Stimulation by the stimuli of anything novel is one of the basic human needs. The habituation to comfort or lukewarm well-being in the familiar and known leaves a void that one tries to fill compensatorily in order to get the desired stimulation that brings real pleasure: for example, through do-it-yourself, violence in movies and television. “We receive and pay for more comfort than is necessary for a pleasant life, and some of this comfort excludes some pleasures of life” (Scitovsky 1977, p. 239; transl.). The great lack of “normal” forms of stimulation is evident in the tolerance for violence and crime. This American lifestyle, embedded in puritanical spirit (Scitovsky actually says ghost), must not be allowed to continue, also because it means too high costs for environment, climate, energy. Scitovsky concludes on a thoughtful note: it would be decidedly difficult to imagine that one way, perhaps the only way, to make the lifestyle less expensive would be to make it less harsh and somewhat more frivolous, “yet the findings of this book clearly point in that direction” (Scitovsky 1977, p. 240; transl.). Such a finger pointing had to be seen as an imposition by a puritanically socialized majority society, not only by the neoclassical scientific colleagues.

3.2

First Reactions: So What?

In 1977 a book appeared in Germany whose author, when he wrote it, could not yet have known Scitovsky’s book: The Crisis of Prosperity: the Model of a Humane Economy by Burkhard Strümpel (Strümpel 1977). Strümpel, who cooperated closely with George Katona and Günter Schmölders, both of whom also integrated behavioral and psychological findings into their work, saw widespread dissatisfaction above all in the world of work. So it was not only in the USA that the time was ripe for the inclusion of psychological findings in efforts to understand economics. But after its publication in 1976, the book met with restrained reactions: “Tibor Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy [. . .] created only a small ripple of excitement” (Friedman and McCabe, 1996, p. 471). It “garnered a skeptical response from economists” (Trei, 2002, p. 1) – arguably classic turf behavior. According to Pugno (2018, p. 54f.), the ambiguity of his consumption theory and his welfare approach made it relatively easy for economists to criticize him. People bristled at the importance he attached to arousal measured by electroencephalograph (EEG), at his unfair comparisons with European consumer culture, and generally felt that his

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opposition to rational choice theory was based on bogus arguments. Reactions were glacial: “Most of us were in no mood to be distracted by Professor Scitovsky’s penetrating criticisms” (Frank 1992, p. iiv), as a fellow economist later acknowledged. The anthropologist Grant McCracken (1988, p. 128) called Scitovsky’s explanation of dissatisfaction with the widespread confusion of comfort and pleasure a brilliant account, but immediately set this approach aside by saying that with our dissatisfaction we are prisoners of the Diderot effect (invented by McCracken). Had he remained an outsider, especially because of his European background? Or was it indignation in the face of the disciplinary border crossing towards findings of such a different psychology? The reservations were probably based on a mix of different motives that stood in the way of immediate understanding or even benevolence. His polemical criticism of neoclassicism had certainly alienated many colleagues. The novelty of his decidedly psychological-behavioral argument could not have appealed to a disciplinary pride. And the biting attitude toward his consumerist fellow citizens had been taken as a rejection of the popular lifestyle, the American Dream. None of this could amuse at all.

3.3

The Second Edition

Gradually the mood changed, the neoclassical approach was increasingly questioned, attempts were made to understand “anomalies” and psychological insights were also drawn on from time to time (Frank 1992, p. iv). In 1992, a second, revised edition of The Joyless Economy appeared. The last chapter was revised, and a speech text by Scitovsky (“Culture is a Good Thing”) was added. The previous subtitle, An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction, was changed to The Psychology of Human Satisfaction; presumably because Scitovsky noted that consumer dissatisfaction has less to do with people “as consumers but as individuals” (Pugno 2018, p. 53). How true, one would like to say to this today. In the preface (Scitovsky 1992, pp. xff.) he commented, among other things, on two salient changes in American lifestyle, which he did not address in the second edition but which obviously concerned him. One novelty he saw in the increased interest in culture and quality of life of an affluent, college-educated upper class, the other at the lower end of the income and education scale: in the increasing violence and drug addiction of a growing lower class. Both groups would be punished with more leisure time than they knew what to do with. Both revolted: the first against the world of fathers, the second against society. They escape their respective predicaments in different ways. The first group enjoys a good life, cultural events,

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art exhibitions, the range of books on offer, the quality of local wines, the sophistication of restaurants, etc. But this would be reserved for the fortunate few, those with money, education and the ability to learn how to use their leisure time enjoyably and constructively. The other group are the poor, uneducated, especially the black male youth in the inner cities, victims of the miserable school system and job market, with lousy temporary jobs or no employment at all. These people without hopes suffer the burden of unmitigated boredom, around the clock, day after day. They don’t know what to do with their free time, often can’t even read properly, no one helps them satisfy the pressing need to do anything. They need a stronger medicine than television, movies and hanging around in the streets. Available stimulation many find only in drugs, crime, and violence. The only effective antidote is meaningful work, the teaching of skills, reasonable forms of leisure and activity, and the opportunity to practice both. Considering the broader aspects of the book, Scitovsky said, the reader can gain new understanding of the nature of these problems and how to overcome them. The second edition of The Joyless Economy gradually became popular, and in 1995 the British literary magazine Times Literary Supplement listed the book among the 100 most influential publications after World War II (Trei 2002, p. 1).

4

Bore or Long-Term Performer?

4.1

Twenty Years Later

The approval of the Psychology of Prosperity was at no time unanimous. But science could no longer get past Scitovsky without the danger of programmatic self-limitation; his analyses were too evident, his conclusions too compelling. “For Scitovsky’s merits to be fully recognized, time had to pass, as Kuhn had foreseen” (Di Giovinazzo 2010, p. 17). It so happened that 20 years after the publication of The Joyless Economy, a symposium was held in which renowned authors participated in order to get to the bottom of the Causa Scitovsky. The results were published in a special issue of Critical Review. A Journal of Politics and Society entitled “Tibor Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy after Twenty Years” (see Friedman and McCabe 1996). In their introduction Friedman and McCabe (1996, pp. 471ff.) give an overview of Scitovsky’s arguments why affluent consumption does not make people happy. Their conclusion is that “The Joyless Economy was a revolutionary book, but that was the problem with it” (Friedman and McCabe 1996, p. 471). Not only was it an

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affront to the prevailing economic doctrine, but it could not please either its conservative representatives or the opponents of homo economicus. For in the face of any preoccupation with the concept of freedom, The Joyless Economy would suggest that freely chosen ends could also be the source of general unhappiness. Furthermore, the book raises a number of fundamental questions, also for philosophy or political economy, which are still little discussed. For example, the tensions between democracy with the notion of self-determination and paternalistic proposals, such as Scitovsky’s recommendation of public funding for the arts and cultural education, or the problem that the assumption that capitalism and democracy are intrinsically valuable renders any examination of their current extensions worthless. Inglehart (1996) supports Scitovsky’s view in his paper by pointing out that further growth means diminishing marginal utility and has little or no effect on subjective well-being. A cultural shift is taking place and whole generations are ready to question the meaning of comfort without paternalistic support; postmaterial values are not necessarily congruent with Scitovsky’s concept of seeking higher pleasures, but this concept does not necessarily involve paternalism. In addition to pleasure, moving from discomfort to comfort and replacing boredom with stimulation, Hirschman (1996) cites an additional third form of pleasure that belongs to both the private and public spheres: the communal meal, which is individually satisfying and, as a table fellowship, also produces important social effects. He cites as an example the feast of the ancient Greeks, which was closely associated with a raffle. However, the communal meal can also lead to a devaluation of human relationships and political life. Sen’s (1996) paper points out the far-reaching implications of Scitovsky’s distinction between feelings of comfort and pleasure for notions of rationality, utility, and freedom. One reason for indifference to The Joyless Economy might have been that excessive esteem for freedom overlooks the fact that it can also have unhappy effects. However, Scitovsky could not be accused of paternalism, Sen says. Scitovsky (1996) became his own critic in his contribution. The boredom of the idle poor, he said, is much more serious than portrayed in the book because it is chronic and incurable. It begins with the neglect of poor children, who never learn to concentrate on school learning, become recalcitrant and unemployable, and get rid of their energies no better than through violence. The issue signaled a turn in scholarly reception toward broad recognition of The Joyless Economy, because: “It deserved better” (Friedman and McCabe 1996). In her article, Schor refers to the growing reservations about the consumerist lifestyle among intellectuals, politicians and citizens and predicts: “The next five years should produce a vibrant public debate on these issues, and the insights of The Joyless Economy are likely to be at the heart of it” (Schor 1996).

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And Today? Rarely Quoted, Little Noticed

What is the reception of the book like almost half a century later? What influence on consumer and consumer science can it be credited with? Has anything significant changed since 1992, when Earl (2010, p. 26) stated: “If we take a broad view of Scitovsky’s contribution to economics it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, despite a very extensive record of being cited, his work has not had the kind of impact it deserves”. The book seems strangely out of time when strolling through the consumer and marketing-oriented literature: little citation, no recourse whatsoever. Is Scitovsky considered a bore or scientifically outdated? While his name and book title occasionally appear in bibliographies, often his reflections are not echoed in the preceding text, either approvingly or critically, neither those of his psychologically based explanations nor his negative assessments of American Puritan culture. Surprisingly, Scitovsky is absent from publications in which arousal (or stimulation, urge for novelty, supply of stimuli, experience, excitement) plays a weighty role. Thus, his novelty concept is not mentioned in a standard work of marketing theory, Consumer Behavior by Kroeber-Riel and Gröppel-Klein (2019). Neither is there a hint in the remarks there on the lambda hypothesis that Scitovsky innovatively introduced the arousal approach into economic research, nor is reference made to his explanatory concept of boredom seeking stimulation. Even in the widely acclaimed Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart by Schulze (2005) Scitovsky is not mentioned, although the search for arousal of today’s consumers is central. Absent from von Rosenstiel’s and Neumann’s (2002) thick-bodied Market Psychology. Even Trentmann’s (2016) detailed account of the history of consumption takes no notice of him. American colleagues continue to give it the cold shoulder; for example, Solomon (2016) in his comprehensive Consumer Behavior, or Evans et al. (2009) in their best-selling Consumer Behavior, or Kotler (Kotler et al. 2011) in Foundations of Marketing. Even when the focus is solely on arousal-seeking, authors bypass Scitovsky’s approach widely: in Varietyseeking-behavior in consumer goods (Helmig 1997), in Experiential Marketing (Weinberg 1992), in Experiential Strategies in Retailing (Gröppel 1991), in Optimum stimulation level as a determinant of exploratory behaviors: Some Empirical Evidence (Giannelloni 1998), or on the relationship between optimal stimulation level and satisfaction (Wahlers and Etzel 1984), and this only a few years after the publication of The Joyless Economy. Even in the programmatic essay by Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) The experiential aspects of consumption: consumer

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fantasies, feelings, and fun, which is directed against the dominance of the information processing paradigm, Scitovsky’s pioneering approach is not mentioned. Scattered references to the psychology of prosperity can occasionally be found, such as Stihler’s explanation of the desire of well-off children for exciting activities (Stihler 1998, p. 225), Trommsdorff’s reference to the “urge for novelty” (Trommsdorff 1993, p. 66), Scherhorn’s explanation of why prosperity does not bring satisfaction (Scherhorn 1987, pp. 32f.) or Rosenberger’s finding of disgruntlement in the welfare society (Rosenberger 1987, p. 53). In the “1st half volume: Market Psychology as Social Science” of the 12th volume Market Psychology, Scitovsky is discussed in essays by Scherhorn (1983, pp. 99ff., p. 117) and von Wiswede (1983, p. 151, p. 171). Bolz (2002, pp. 90ff., p. 104f.) irritatingly uses the vocabulary comfort, pleasure and consumption skills, i.e. Scitovsky’s central terms, over long pages without mentioning their originator; only later does he name him (one has the impression, somewhat patronizingly) in order to immediately reject Scitovsky’s antithesis “comfort vs. pleasure”. Apparently social psychologists and social scientists have an easier access to Scitovsky’s world of thought than scientistic economists, be they micro-, macro-, marketing- or neuro-oriented. In any case, when browsing relevant literature, one notices that sociologists, for example, such as Wiswede or Hellmann, speak sympathetically of the psychology of prosperity (Wiswede 1995, p. 61, p. 299; Hellmann 2017, p. 156, 2013, p. 70).

4.3

Why Only, Why?

The reasons for Scitovsky’s infrequent mentions are difficult to fathom. Earl (2010) points to the extraordinary novelty of his work, which posed a challenge to established scientific routines. This is because Scitovsky wanted to establish a distinct psychological line of research within economics and by no means merely “infuse some psychology into the general framework often of the discipline” (Earl 2010, p. 26). It would be the otherness of psychological thinking that cannot be casually translated into mathematical models or deterministic statements. Scitovsky himself, Earl notes, has explained some rejection by the fact that he was misleadingly thought to be elitist because, for example, he advocated that sensory stimulation could be obtained outside the workplace and in many ways, beyond intellectual activity. Finally, the way Scitovsky presented his work to the economic guild, with no points of connection to existing work, made him too unconnectable. According to Pugno (2018, pp. 55ff.), more recent interpretations are also critically devoted to the programmatic distinction between comfort and novelty.

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Scitovsky was considered reserved, melancholy was apparently not foreign to him. “He was a shy person, reserved and very dignified. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could come into a new situation and make his own way,” as a colleague and friend described him (Trei 2002, p. 2). The few pictures available on the Internet show a serious, rather withdrawn man, although his second wife found him to be a “terribly pleasant character; it was fun to be with him” (Trei 2002, p. 3). One may assume that he was averse to any kind of impression management. Admittedly, this had to be a shortcoming in a field of communication such as that of US culture, in which opinion leaders are chosen on the basis of perceived social proximity and not just on the basis of factual competence. Anyone who is then, in the gestalt psychological sense, not sufficiently concise and does not make himself known with loud demands, who is still perceived as strange and somewhat opaque, is easily overlooked. “Personally, he gave a misleading impression of diffidence and delicacy” (Arrow et al. 2004, p. 2). One simply could not identify with him. This was probably also due to his aristocratic aura: “It contrasted mundane, limited horizons with more daring ideas and the aristocratic virtues of independence of mind” (Arrow et al. 2004, p. 1). Such will be the fate of a wanderer who set out from Europe several times, arrived in America several times, and brought with him no inviting offers of identification, but rather prepared intellectual impositions with surprising insights, which are sometimes resented even in scientific communities. Such a person cannot establish a fan base. It could be that German-speaking representatives of marketing and consumer research, who would have had cause to pay tribute to Scitovsky’s focus on arousal, were not quite mentally capable of doing so. Otherwise they would have had to admit the superiority of interdisciplinary and multimethod consumer research in the USA. This may also have been countered by a desire for self-assertion on the part of sales and consumer research within business administration, which, as a discipline traditionally not without controversy, has always insisted on a dignity that must be respected. Perhaps for some time-conscious authors the expiry date of scientific literature is reached after 10 or 15 years, when what was once original seems to have taken on a patina. And finally, the aversion of some intellectuals to an educated bourgeois free thinker who could be annoying as a lateral thinker and who caused cognitive dissonance when, for example, he did not please either leftists or conservatives came into play: “Leftists, for example, claim he was an elitist, while rightists say he was paternalistic” (Duke Trinity College of Arts and Sciences Center for the History of Political Economy, n.d.). An emphasis on the joylessness of the economic system will have a pessimistic effect on some advocates of prosperity and consumption, downright sour grapes. And a cheerful science such as marketing, which likes to offer royal roads to the

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solution of earthly problems (“Marketing and . . .”), may be reluctant to acknowledge joyless conditions. It prefers to promote optimistic things such as customer loyalty, brand trust, convenience or, more recently, even sings the praises of limiting consumption (“The Benefits of Having Less”; Hüttel et al. 2020). It long relied on the luminous rationality of the information paradigm, but now has to work through the dry objections of behavioral economics. In consumer and cultural criticism, the usual crown witnesses are repeatedly summoned in Scitovsky’s place: Veblen, Marcuse, Galbraith, Packard, Fromm, Haug, Pasolini. They created disturbing images of the consumer and pessimistic concepts of consumption. The latter, however, cannot be sustained, or not completely, for lack of empirical evidence: demonstrative waste (Veblen 2007), one-dimensional man (Marcuse 1967), society in abundance (Galbraith 1970), the secret seducers (Packard 1998), necrophiliac and destructive man (Fromm 2005), the manipulation of the masses (Haug 1980), Pasolini (1998) – old school in many ways, one must say. Trentmann (Trentmann 2016), in his lucid history of consumption, has destroyed some of the normative approaches in historical perspective. To quite a few critics of the affluent society, what he notes about Veblen is likely true: “The simplicity of his thesis is the key to its enduring appeal, but also its greatest weakness” (Trentmann 2016, p. 306; transl.). And on “exchange-critical topoi of leftist traditions of thought” Ullrich (2013, p. 9; transl.) notes: “The fact that individual products, if they have more than just use values, can perhaps also positively impress or motivate – even educate – is ignored”. Perhaps the language and argumentation of The Psychology of Prosperity were not only unfamiliar to some readers, but overly complex, difficult to understand. Before the publication of the book, there had already been initiatives in Germanlanguage economic research since the 1950s/1960s to draw on behavioural and psychological explanations for consumer behaviour. For example, there was the multidisciplinary social economics of the Schmölders and Katona schools, with their manifestation of socio-economic behavioural research (Trommsdorff 1993, p. 13). Thus, some may have thought they had been on the right track for some time, without the need to attach any novelty value to controversial publications. The “Nuremberg School” of consumer and market research (Ludwig Erhard, Wilhelm Vershofen, Georg Bergler and others) was also based on psychological thinking and developed innovative methods and psycho-social concepts (for example, the “additional benefit”). Some representatives of this school of thought were admittedly not always perceived as academically relevant actors because of their pronounced research and consulting activities for marketing practice.

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Scitovsky: An Outsider?

After all, one gets the impression that Scitovsky was and is undervalued by many. He eluded the economic mainstream, perhaps even because of that his approach reaches further in content and time: “Scitovsky’s name is now listed among the outliers of behavioral economics [. . .] and cited as forerunner of the happiness studies in economics” (Di Giovinazzo 2010, p. 17). Pugno (2018, p. 58) calls Scitovsky an outlier, but not an outsider. His particularity, he argues, was not so exceptional that any connections with economics were lost. His thinking about individual welfare was difficult to incorporate into mainstream approaches. He shared two goals with Behavioural Economics (Pugno 2014, p. 1): first, to increase the explanatory power of economics with a realistic psychological grounding, and, second, to show that consumers’ decisions may be subject to systematic bias (Pugno 2014, p. 2). Scitovsky anticipated a number of findings that pointed to new research directions. These include uncertainty, where option possibilities are partly unknown; individual consumption skills, where uncertainty may even be perceived as desirable, provided it is seen as a challenge; the increase in consumption skills, with preferences changing and decisions becoming more efficient; failure to increase skills, so that harmful or addictive products can become tempting alternatives. “Research in behavioural economics and other economic subfields can thus benefit from Scitovsky’s work if the relevant issues are properly formulated and focused” (Pugno 2014, p. 22). Bianchi (2018) identifies three points of contact between his thinking and Behavioral Economics. She shows the congruence of Scitovsky’s thinking and Behavioral Economics in both critiques of the conventional assumption that choice decisions always reflect rational behavior and reveal true preferences. Motives and goals of decisions together with their latent values, however, are said to matter to actors, something in which economics has no interest. Another commonality can be seen in the behavioral reasons that favor comfort. The low cost makes its preference attractive, but it is difficult to reverse such decisions because of habituation and increased alternative costs. Since choices are made in small steps, the consequences cannot always be seen in advance, so that in a sequence of apparently harmless choices a person may slip into a habit that is suboptimal and cannot be changed. Such contradictions between comfort and pleasure, as well as those between mass production and individual tastes, account for the divergence of choices and preferences. Finally, a third contact between Behavioural Economics and Scitovsky’s approach arises. Their contradictions with classical doctrine have significance for research and policy. The concept of nudging, based on the findings

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of Behavioural Economics, aims to compensate for deviations from the model of rational decision-making; it is oriented towards Kahneman’s cognitive “System 2”, the automatic, fast everyday system that leads to decision errors. For Scitovsky, bad decisions are often the result of institutional or cultural bias; he sees room for improvement in the decision-making process and well-being. Education and the acquisition of consumer skills are of corresponding importance here: the experiences of creative activities must be recognised, rewarding exploration and curiosity. Scitovsky’s central interest is boredom and the ambivalent consequences of the search for novelty, for excitement, which he already alluded to in the preface of the second edition. Dangerous sports, gambling or criminal activities lend themselves when young people in particular are exposed to a stimulus deficit and have no resources, little education and inadequate consumption skills (Scitovsky 1981). This is when things can turn nasty for them and for society, and Scitovsky (1999b) refers to the 1999 American college rampages, the deeper causes of which ultimately lie in agonizing boredom among young people. “Just as starvation can make a person steal if he has no money to buy food, so boredom can lead to violence if a person finds no peaceful activity for enjoying and keeping busy” (Scitovsky 1999b, p. 5). He even calls boredom “an overlooked disease” (Scitovsky 1999b, p. 5). America and Europe have changed since then, and not necessarily to their advantage. Some of the evil encroachments of the present can be interpreted using Scitovsky’s approach and behavioral economic criteria. In affluence-saturated Europe, boredom is also rampant, which many people seek to escape by stimulating themselves with norm-violating, dangerously violent, politically radical, addictive or criminal activities in order to regain archaic feelings of pleasure. “Showing the destructive potential inherent in certain consumption patterns represents another possibility” [besides the presentation of violent consumption criticism, author’s note] (Sedlmaier 2018, p. 27; transl.). There is an obvious strengthening of a tendency towards cosy, confirming habits (comfort), which, because of the redundancy of their familiar information content, do not require any mental effort, do not demand any effort and do not require any willingness to learn (easing and satisficing bias). Pleasantly confirming habits often have a substitute, compensatory function in the case of insufficient satisfaction of needs in other areas. They manifest themselves, evading perceptions of reality that might be overly arousing in unpleasant ways, in consumptive and in nonmaterial cognitive refuges. Such comfortable habits take different forms: in idyllic hideaways such as cocooning or soothing consumer aesthetics, in the echo chambers of the Internet, in daydreams, political pipe dreams, ideologies, esoteric flower dreams, various -isms, conspiracy theories – all comfort zones of blissful cognitive comfort (confirmation bias) and heightened sense of self.

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Modern and fashionable bourgeoisie without self-distance and with reduced frustration tolerance: If one sees one’s cherished refuges endangered by doubt and contradiction, or if one is even to be driven out of the fictional arbour, one reacts resolutely aggressively (inertia, status quo bias). Is cancel culture culture? Does a neo-puritanical spirit pervade civil society? Malignancy can also grow out of prolonged boredom. The pandemic of snivelling and intolerant hate reactions to real and imagined impositions of the pluralistic society possibly speaks for this. Or the angry reactions to dissenting opinions on mined issues such as migration, genderism, Islamism, far-right and far-left violence, equality, pressure to conform, or abused freedom of expression. Even disparagements of “old white men” or reflexively ejected accusations of racism point to hyper-moral attitudes for the purpose of exciting selfaggrandizement. One will not deny some justification for the ironic designation of some strong-minded activists and “contrarians” as hypersensitive “snowflakes” (Liu et al., 2019). The common denominator of variant stimulation practices, namely the desire to arouse bored affluent citizens weary of comfort, is hard to miss. Scitovsky’s evaluation of the annoying boredom in worn-out comfort zones as “boredom – an overlooked disease” (Scitovsky 1999b) points to this common denominator. Those who fail to recognize it may not see the forest for the trees, not the megatrend for the individual phenomena. Scitovsky has recognized the possibility of a tendency toward radicalization of comfortable comfort and intense stimulation, of bourgeoisie and rebellion. To be sure, he did not write The Joyless Economy on this problem, as he himself said (Scitovsky 1992, pp. xif.). Generalized aspects of the book, he hoped, might, however, facilitate understanding of the problem (Scitovsky 1992, pp. xif.). Why did Scitovsky not become a science matador, why was he never considered for the Nobel Prize in Economics? As a wanderer between disciplines and continents, did he not leave a sufficiently incisive impression? Obviously, he was too modest, or even too proud, for any sense of importance; perhaps, on the other hand, overconfident to gain the approval of the many; too headstrong to be identified with; too knowledgeable to accept neoclassical economics; too realistic to participate in the American Dream. Later respect was for his professional accomplishments, the person more conditionally. In the end, Tibor Scitovsky, “an author with a European soul in an American setting” (de Haan 2016, p. 205), remained a stranger to many, to Americans and to Europeans as well. One should finally do justice to the wanderer, in every respect.

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After Note

The American Dream seems to be coming to an end, the dream of ever-increasing prosperity within everyone’s reach. At present, the Corona pandemic will harm it, even if “Corona parties” of youthful event seekers enmeshed in hedonism suggest an apparent lightness of being. Greed for variety, exaggerated feel-good aspirations, and hypertrophic consumer expectations will remain resilient and will always flourish. At least as long as such pipe dreams are nurtured in the blockbusters and constructs of consumer aesthetic fantasy worlds: in movies, videos, clips, novels, songs, verses, dramas, books, paintings; also in our celebrations, memories and narratives. The history of ideology teaches us that references to reality can do little to harm a delusional dream. How joyful or joyless our society will be in the future is an open question. But where material restrictions, be they imposed by sustainability constraints or pandemic precautions, force our lifestyles to make unpleasant changes, one might say, following Hölderlin, the saving also grows. A different psychology of prosperity would then have to be written. What might it look like? The basic needs of the consumer would hardly change, after all, but what would the means of satisfaction of consumers look like, not just those of markets? To speak “of markets and people” would then be too narrow; “of means of satisfaction and people” would be more appropriate. Sociologist Heinz Bude (2020, p. 19; transl.) hopes that the benefit of the Covid 19 pandemic will be a “recovery of solidarity” from the feeling of individual vulnerability: “Solidarity is a kindness towards the world [. . .]. To see individual prosperity against the background of general prosperity – we have the very best means for this in Germany. We will find our way to a new form of social market economy”. Per aspera ad astra, through pain to the stars? An avatar named Tibor could refer to the arguments of a book published almost half a century ago: It’s about changing consumption practices and shifting more of our wants and needs to non-material, cultural, political, communicative needs. This could lead to a controlled-variable satisfaction arising from the expanded intrinsic use of non-economic means of satisfaction. At the same time, one would know how to make prudent and extrinsically motivated use of economic means of satisfaction. Or, to put it more simply, “What would be needed would be a general appreciation of the pleasure of a deeper and longer-lasting relationship with fewer things” (Trentmann 2016, p. 929; transl.). There would then presumably be little question of a joyless economy. A new big dream?

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Dr. Günther Rosenberger is a freelance market and consumer researcher in Berlin with interests in consumer competence, consumer policy, consumer socialisation, compensatory and deviant consumer behaviour, lifestyles, consumer culture; freelancer at the Institute for Consumer Journalism (ifv) at the OTH Amberg-Weiden, author of the newsletter “Verbraucherforschung aktuell” published by the imug Institute, Hannover.

Albert O. Hirschman: Pioneer of an Action-Oriented Consumption Theory Christian Bala

Abstract

Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012) led a life between emigration and dissent, exit and voice: he was a refugee and an escape helper, a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War and a US soldier in the Second World War, a student and a resister, an economist and a critic of economic doctrine. As a scholar, he saw himself in the role of a border-crosser or transgressor, which isolated him in his own discipline but made him a bridge-builder between economics and the social sciences. Hirschman was not concerned with economizing the social sciences, but with opening up economics to social factors. In his most famous work, he introduced voice as a non-market reaction of consumers to the decline in performance of companies as an alternative to market-conforming exit. However, his significance for a critical theory of consumption goes beyond this with the development of a theory of action. He saw changes in consumers’ choice behavior not only as capricious changes in preferences, but also understood contradictory actions as an expression of their different value orientations.

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A Life Between Exit and Voice

Between 1940 and 1942, the combined cargo and passenger ship SS Excalibur of the American Export Line “Four Acres” carried numerous emigrants from Lisbon to the USA. After the beginning of the Second World War, the port of the Portuguese C. Bala (✉) Verbraucherzentrale NRW e. V., Düsseldorf, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_4

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capital was the last opportunity for people persecuted by the Nazis to leave Europe for America (Blum and Rei 2018, pp. 1f.; von zur Mühlen 1998). Among the passengers that the SS Excalibur brought to New York in those years were the writer Lion Feuchtwanger, the composer Béla Bartók, and the sociologist Edith Kurzweil (Joukowsky 2017, p. 175; Kurzweil 2007, p. 60; Weber and Drees 2005, pp. 142, 1006), as well as a 25-year-old scientist who, fleeing from and resisting the Nazis, had already lived a life between emigration and dissent, exit and voice: Otto Albert Hirschmann. Born on April 13, 1915, as the son of the physician Carl Hirschmann and his wife Hedwig Hirschmann (Marcuse), he grew up as the middle of three children in an assimilated Jewish-educated middle-class milieu; the Hirschmanns’ children, Ursula, Otto Albert, and Eva, were baptized Protestants. Otto Albert, however, later refused to be confirmed; religion seemed to have no meaning for him (Adelman 2013, pp. 24f.). He attended the French Gymnasium in Berlin, which he left in 1932 to study at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin. Politically Otto Albert Hirschmann became involved with his older sister Ursula in the Social Democratic Socialist Workers’ Youth (SAJ), whose chairman was Erich Ollenhauer, and where he met Menshevik émigrés (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 38). When a group, including Willy Brandt, split from the SPD and founded the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), Hirschman had his first experience of “exit and voice”. He himself was also against the Social Democrats “toleration policy” towards the Brüning government, but did not leave the party, he wanted to remain a member “in order to be able to influence the party’s decisions at least in some way” (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 37; transl.). After the transfer of power to the Nazis in 1933, the SAJ group wanted to protest against the new government and was able to print some leaflets with the help of the Italian philosopher and anti-fascist Eugenio Colorni, Ursula Hirschmann’s friend and later husband (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 40). In early April 1933, Otto Albert Hirschmann emigrated to France, and his sister followed him 3 months later (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 41). Carl Hirschmann had died of cancer at the end of March (Hirschman 1996, p. 115), their mother was able to flee to Great Britain in July 1939, Eva Hirschmann had already left the year before (Adelman 2013, pp. 155f.). Otto Albert Hirschmann first went to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne from 1933 to 1935 and later continued his academic training at the London School of Economics (1935–1936). Shortly after returning to Paris, he went to Spain in 1936 and fought for 2 months in the ranks of the Marxist, anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) against General Franco’s fascist coup plotters during the Spanish Civil War. Traumatized by the fighting and the Stalinist

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“purges” (Adelman 2013, pp. 131–140; Evers 2015, p. 102; Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 46f.), he went to Trieste to finally finish his academic education at the Università degli Studi di Trieste in 1938 with a laurea thesis on French foreign trade policy, which was later accepted as a doctoral dissertation (Adelman 2013, p. 143). His “second job” in Trieste was “anti-fascist” according to Hirschman (2015 [1997], p. 47) in an autobiographical interview. Together with his sister Ursula, he belonged to a resistance group around his brother-in-law, the philosopher Eugenio Colorni. Ursula Hirschmann had married Colorni in 1935, who had taught at a teacher training seminar in Trieste since 1934 and was a member of the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom) (Adelman 2013, p. 113; Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 47f.). When the Fascist government enacted anti-Semitic racial laws – on September 7, 1938, a law decreed the expulsion of “foreign Jews” and revoked the citizenship of Jews naturalized after January 1, 1919 – Otto Albert Hirschmann was forced to return to Paris (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 50). Ursula Hirschmann remained in Italy and supported her husband Eugenio Colorni, who was arrested in October 1938 and imprisoned first in Varese and later on the island of Ventotene until 1941. There, together with the liberal Ernesto Rossi and the leftist Altiero Spinelli, he wrote the “Ventotene Manifesto” (Frank 2019; Mantelli and Scavino 2008). In the document, smuggled out of prison by Ursula Hirschmann, they outlined the idea of a federal Europe, which is why it is considered one of the sources for the later European unification (Europäische Kommission n.d.).1 Eugenio Colorni, after being transferred to Melfi and escaping in 1943, went underground and published the underground magazine “Avanti!”, which also published the “Ventotene Manifesto”. He was shot by fascist policemen of the “Banda Koch” only a few days before the liberation of Rome on April 28, 1944 and died of his severe injuries on May 30, 1944 (Mantelli and Scavino 2008, p. 62). Colorni left a considerable intellectual and political mark on Otto Albert Hirschmann (Hirschman 1996, pp. 142f.); Hirschman remained emotionally attached to his brother-in-law and dedicated his work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to him decades later. When he wrote this, Albert O. Hirschman was aware of the consequences that exit and voice can have. The question of which of these “responses to performance decline in corporations, organizations, and states” are necessary, meaningful, or 1

After Colorni’s death, Ursula Hirschmann married Altiero Spinelli in 1945 and became involved with him in the European Federalist Movement. She thus became a pioneer of European unification. In 1975 she founded the association Femmes pour l’Europe (Women for Europe) in Brussels; her memoirs were published in 1993 (Europäische Kommission n.d.; Hirschmann and Cases 1993; Pistone and Schmuck 2008).

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appropriate has run through the work of a thinker who had experienced how significant or dangerous it can be to exhibit one of these modes of response since the publication of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Like other survivors of the genocide of European Jews, he seems to have been plagued by feelings of guilt toward those who were murdered. Although Albert O. Hirschman admits that after the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler there was “virtually no possibility of effective dissent, whoever left or stayed”, he gives voice to his feeling that the exodus of the “young and energetic”, such he had been, had left a “seriously weakened community”. Thus, although he actually knew that he had had no alternative, “the real origin of the book [. . .] may well be a carefully suppressed sense of guilt that is simply there, even if it seems intellectually absurd” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. VII; transl.). Hirschmann returned to Paris from Trieste and was drafted into the French army on September 1, 1939; after basic training, he was a member of a labor battalion together with soldiers who came from Germany and Italy. Since the German attack meant a special danger for the emigrants, their commander issued them French papers, Otto Albert Hirschmann became Albert Hermant (Adelman 2013, pp. 169f.; Fry 2009 [1989], pp. 38f.; Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 51f.). He made a detour to Marseille, where he met the US-American Varian Fry, who was commissioned by the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to help emigrants escape to the USA. Hirschmann/Hermant, under the code name “Beamish”, became an employee and escape agent of the Centre Américain de Secours headed by Fry, who succeeded in bringing many people to safety over the Pyrenees. Hirschmann/Hermant spent 6 months helping over 2000 people, including Hannah Arendt, to escape from France until the Vichy police became aware of him and he himself had to flee to Portugal via Spain (Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 53f.), from where he left the USA on the SS Excalibur in December 1940. After obtaining a visa, he was a London School of Economics Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1941 to 1943. It was there that he met his wife Sarah Chapiro (1921–2012), who had been born in Kaunas, Lithuania, the daughter of Russian Jews. In 1943 he joined the United States Army and became the American citizen Albert O. Hirschman. Initially stationed on the North African front, where he learned of his brother-in-law’s death, he was later deployed to Italy in a unit of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a War Department intelligence agency that supported partisans (Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 55f.). Hirschman remained in Europe beyond the end of the war and participated as an interpreter in war crimes trials (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 56). After his military service, Hirschman began working as an economist, first at the U.S. Federal Reserve on the Marshall Plan and from 1952 as an economic advisor in

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Colombia. Albert O. Hirschman subsequently made a name for himself as a development economist (e.g. Hirschman 1958, 1967), teaching and researching from 1956, first at Yale (1956–1958), then at Columbia University in New York (1958–1964), and finally at Harvard (1964–1974). It was not until 1968 that he began to address social science and economic issues, which he explored in depth in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and, from 1970, in other works. His last academic stop was the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Princeton (1974–1985), where he helped to establish the School of Social Science and where he was an emeritus professor until 2012. In the 1980s, Hirschman also returned to his old home in Berlin. Claus Offe met Hirschman in the 1970s, and his wife Sabine translated two of Hirschman’s works. In addition, at the invitation of Wolf Lepenies, he was often a guest at the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg (Adelman 2013, pp. 617f.). Albert O. Hirschman died at the age of 97 on December 10, 2012 in Ewing Township, New Jersey.

2

Crossing Borders

Especially in his writings since 1970 in particular, Albert O. Hirschman saw himself in the role of a boundary crosser or transgressor; two volumes of his collected writings alone – including the Essays in Trespassing – bear witness to this selfimage (Hirschman 1981, 1998). This stance – obstinate and unorthodox he was – came at a price, Hirschman (2015 [1997], p. 82) was aware, for what one person sees as the broadening of horizons another evaluates as “trespassing,” as expressed by the double meaning of the English “to trespass” (Hirschman 1998, p. 102). Although the paradigm shift is seen as a hallmark of scientific progress (Kuhn 2011), it does not necessarily make one popular with one’s contemporaries (Adelman 2013, pp. 446ff., Schmid 2006, p. 123). In a discipline such as economics, which not only upholds its boundaries, but virtually celebrates them through a dominant doctrine, this entails the consequence of remaining ineffective to a certain extent. This is another reason why Albert O. Hirschman’s “transnational economics” (Pies 2016, pp. 323–350) did not found a new school, nor did he ever intend to (Eiden-Offe 2013, p. 1115; Evers 2015, p. 110). “Albert Hirschman has remained an outsider in economics and at the same time – with great impact into the neighboring disciplines of economics – has become a classic in his lifetime” (Lepenies 2006, p. 99; transl.). There is not even agreement as to which pigeonhole he should be placed in: Sometimes he argues as an economist (Bonß et al. 2013, p. 131), sometimes he is interpreted as a pioneer of

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economic sociology (Swedberg 1990) and his biographer calls him a philosopher (Adelman 2013). Hirschman is considered a “heretic, but with constructive intentions” (Evers 2015, p. 110; transl.). This attitude perhaps also accounts for its effect on the social sciences, since it was not determined by a presumed dominance of economic thinking, as is characteristic of “economic imperialism” (Aretz 1997; Schröder 2006), which Hirschman also commented on with a side-swipe at the willing takeover: Economists have succeeded in “occupying large parts of neighboring disciplines, whereby political scientists – whose inferiority complex vis-à-vis the economist, who is rich in conceptual tools, is matched only by the economist’s inferiority complex vis-à-vis the physicist – were quite happy to be colonized and often actively joined the invaders” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 16; transl.). In contrast, he does not want to “use the conceptual tools of one discipline to annex another discipline” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. V; transl.); he has always been hostile to these approaches (Swedberg and Hirschman 1990, pp. 158f.). For this reason alone, it seems misguided to ascribe Hirschman’s approach to the New Political Economy (cf. Nerb 2006), for he continuously criticized the fixation of economics on the market mechanism as well as “the moral obliviousness as well as the model platonism2 of neoclassicism” (Maurer 2006, p. 69; transl.) and did not want to export these flaws. Rather, Hirschman hoped to lay the groundwork for a dialogue, or, as he put it in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, to demonstrate “to political scientists the usefulness of economic concepts and to economists the usefulness of political concepts” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 16; transl.) and ultimately to overcome disciplinary boundaries (Schmid 2006, pp. 120f.). In other words, he was not interested in economizing the social sciences, but in opening up economics to social factors. “In contrast to neoclassical economics, Hirschman wants to integrate social and political mechanisms into economic analysis and ground it with a complex model of action that, in addition to interest-driven action, also provides room for morality and ideologies in the sense of metapreferences” (Maurer 2006, p. 68; transl.). Hirschman had already learned from his work as a development policy advisor in the 1950s that economic dynamics and affective trade can cause great plans to falter; sometimes actors are successful simply because of fortunate circumstances; the “problem of the uncertainty or defectiveness of individual decision-making and the associated unpredictability and contradictability of its consequences” is always present (Bonß et al. 2013, p. 126; transl., cf. also Eiden-Offe 2013, pp. 1111f.).

2

Emphasis in quotations is always in the original unless otherwise noted.

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The individual actions of economic actors do not automatically steer towards the common good; side-effects could be destructive and lead to imbalances and externalities (Evers 2015, p. 106; Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 29, fn. 7). In this way, he turned against the harmony doctrines of economics (Hirschman 1993 [1989], p. 141). Moreover, Hirschman emphasized that not every actor’s actions conformed to the simplistic rationality model of economic doctrine, but that this thinking denied the “incredible complexity of human nature” (Hirschman 1993 [1989], p. 242; transl.), in part by contrasting interests as predictable and enduring with indomitable passions (Hirschman 1977, 1987 [1980], pp. 57–64). Hirschman’s concern was not only that economics neglected morality and altruism, seeing only self-interest, but also that it included in its analysis “such basic character traits and emotions as the hunger for power and sacrifice, the fear of boredom, the need for commitment and volatile change, the search for meaning and community” as drivers of human action (Hirschman 1993 [1989], p. 98; transl.) and, furthermore, should not narrow itself to the market perspective, but should focus on other social relations (Schmid 2006, p. 118). Hirschman advocates taking the actors’ conditions and options for action seriously. In doing so, he thought beyond the traditional understanding of consumer behavior and used a different concept of rationality. Following the action theory of Harry G. Frankfurt (1971) and Amartya Sen (1977), he emphasized that people can step back behind their preferences expressed in needs “to ask themselves whether they really approve of those needs and really prefer those preferences, and then form meta-preferences that may well be different from their preferences” (Hirschman 1993 [1989], p. 228; transl.; see also Hirschman 1988 [1984], pp. 74–84). The constant change in voting behavior is not just a capricious change in preferences, which is also known to economics, but action is also an expression of the value orientation of people as “self-assessing beings” (Hirschman 1993 [1989], pp. 229, 242). Hirschman criticised two things here: on the one hand, the simple image of ‘the consumer’ in economic theory. Whose ‘actual buying behavior in the market reflects his very personal order of preferences, the existence of which is inferred from observed buying decisions’ (Hirschman 1988 [1984], p. 76). On the other hand, the consequent inability to recognize and explain change in people’s actions. Economic theory does not concede consumers any other options for action than those of the market and is therefore, in Hirschman’s view, necessarily incomplete. He can be understood as a thinker “who is interested in the unification of our knowledge of action and decision theory, which takes back the one-sidedness, incompleteness and partly consciously brought about ‘impoverishment’ of

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economic action theory [. . .] in order to open up the possibility, among other things, of explaining non-market forms of transport in terms of action theory” (Schmid 2006, p. 119; transl.). Thus, consumers demand goods and services on the market, but how they act, for example, in the case of dissatisfaction, does not have to correspond to market logic, he first developed this idea in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Hirschman 1970, 2004 [1974]).

3

Reaction Modes

What becomes clear in this work is that Hirschman’s aim is to model “dynamic social processes or procedures with the help of which actors can solve certain problems they face” (Schmid 2006, p. 119; transl.) One of these problems is the performance decline of companies and organizations. The starting point of his argument and the contemporary historical context of the writing of this book are processes of social change in the USA. On the one hand, “the little guy” in the form of the consumer rose up against the power of corporations (Adelman 2013, p. 429). Armed with the presidential announcement of a “Consumer Bill of Rights” and the possibilities of the US legal system, the lawyer and political activist Ralph Nader succeeded in putting corporations in their place and enforcing regulations on consumer protection at the federal level. Albert O. Hirschman observed the defensive and arrogant corporate responses to consumer complaints and Nader’s activities against Ford and General Motors. This “consumer revolution”, which he saw in the context of a “general ‘codetermination explosion’” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 35; transl.), formed a starting point for Hirschman’s research project: “Nader was interesting not just because he ventilated in such an articulate way how Americans were experiencing the corporate oversight of everyday life; he had tapped the disappointments of consumers whose activities had a special appeal for a Hirschman who was seeking to place consumerism into a broader panel of peoples’ responses to American capitalism” (Adelman 2013, p. 430). A second starting point for Hirschman was the observation that the liberal tradition of the USA was ideologically based on the reaction mode of exit; this can be seen in the two-party system or the ideology of free enterprise. The upward mobility of the individual, he argues, was coupled with exit from the social group from which one came (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 92). This model of individual upward mobility through exit, however, is increasingly breaking down, as can be seen, for example, in the Black Power movement in particular and protest

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movements in general, to which he refers several times. Black Power, Hirschman argues, pursued a strategy of protest to work for the betterment of all AfricanAmericans, as individual advancement weakened “collective thrust” (Nathan Hare, quoted in Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 93). Integration, Hirschman argues, is also necessarily unsatisfactory and ultimately unsuccessful from the point of view of the ascended “individuals who succeed in it” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 93), which he points out in the continued discrimination against minorities and indigenous people in South America or practices of domination in Japan despite individual ascents (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 93f.). Hirschman also sees churn of consumers as an expression of a basic individualistic and market-oriented attitude that is widespread in the USA: “As long as one can turn one’s favor away from the goods of company A and toward the competing goods of company B, the basic symbolism of the American’s love affair with exit is intact” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 95; transl.). In contrast, according to Hirschman, dissent has a collective and political moment: voice “requires that one articulate one’s critical stance rather than casting one’s vote privately and ‘secretly’ in the anonymity of a supermarket; and, finally, it is direct and straightforward, not circuitous. Voice is political action par excellence” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 13; transl.). For Hirschman, the ways in which consumers react as options for action to the decline in performance are an example of how people can respond to deteriorations in the quality of organizations. Only in this broader perspective, not as a special study limited to consumption, did his work have an impact in social science disciplines (Adelman 2013, p. 440). He understands performance decline as a deviation from what he perceives as the norm of “efficient, rational, law-abiding, virtuous, or otherwise functionally appropriate” behavior (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 1; transl.), expressed in an “absolute or relative deterioration in the quality of the good or service delivered” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 3). Such a decline, which he also characterizes as a loss of quality or “slackness”, is not unusual but arises constantly in affluent societies (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 12). For him, the reaction modes of exit and voice represent possibilities of a “recovery mechanism” as the opportunity to slow down the decline in performance and return to a state perceived as satisfactory or to reach another optimum. However, as Hirschman shows, the two modes of response, or a combination, are not always likely to function as a repair mechanism. On the contrary, they may prove ineffective or even harmful. Hirschman illustrates this with the since much-cited example of the Nigerian railway (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 37f.), to whose loss of quality the clientele reacted by switching to trucks, but the

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administration initially paid no attention to this, while voice did not penetrate because the potentially “noisiest customers” had already left (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 38). The aim of Hirschman’s study is not to find the right balance between the two modes of response. His method “does not provide a clear recipe for any optimal mix of exit and voice, nor is it intended to support the notion that each institution needs its own mix, the composition of which could be determined over time through constant experimentation” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 105; transl.). He is primarily concerned with analyzing how modes of response condition and influence each other and which forms of organization are sensitive to them, that is, how the actions of consumers influence the market and under what specific conditions they choose modes of response to the decline in performance. “What is at stake, then, is nothing more and nothing less than an explanation based on action theory and a realistically held context-bound analysis of exit and voice as repair mechanisms – taking loyalty into account” (Maurer 2006, p. 70; transl.).

3.1

Exit

Economic theory, according to Hirschman, tends to think that the market mechanism, the exit of dissatisfied customers to the competition, is “more effective, indeed the only one to be taken seriously at all” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 13; transl.). Economists attach no importance to a political, non-market mode of response such as voice, but Hirschman treats it as an equal, hoping to transcend disciplinary boundaries (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 16). Contemporary representatives of the New Political Economy reacted to this program in a rather reserved to hostile manner; “‘political’ solutions were no alternative to ‘market’ ones”, Gordon Tullock, for example, judged in a “rancorous review” (Adelman 2013, pp. 447f.). Hirschman emphasizes that the economy’s preferred response to a decline in performance in a competitive situation is to exit. If the quality of a product deteriorates, consumers will look around the market for an alternative and will switch to the competition. However, competition is imperfect because a firm has competitors “but enjoys some freedom of movement with respect to price and quality (and therefore quality deterioration)” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 17; transl.). However, economic science has not yet investigated how exactly exit functions and has therefore not understood it as a recovery mechanism, but only as a form of selection (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 17f.). To show how exit works, Hirschman first modifies the demand function: quality deteriorates while price remains the same, but the firm’s costs remain the same,

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since the loss of quality is not due to savings but to “a random reduction in efficiency” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 18). Due to exit, there will be a loss of income for the company, therefore, secondly, it will take countermeasures if it detects a link between quality loss and churn of customers (company reaction function) (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 19). The interaction between this reaction function and the modified demand function (exit) varies due to the elasticity of demand; if it is low to inelastic, the income losses would be lower (the customers have few or no alternatives); if, on the other hand, it is high, exit would also increase and income losses would rise accordingly (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 19f.). For the company concerned, it is important that some customers leave so that the decline in quality can be noticed and stopped, but that the exodus is kept within limits so that the company does not go under (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 19f.). Although economic theory assumes that we are dealing with mature customers, in the sense of the ideal image of a “mature consumer”, if “all people were avid readers of test reports and other consumer information, or if they made purchases only after making detailed comparisons”, Hirschman argues, “then there could be catastrophic instability, and firms would have no chance to make up for occasional failures” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 20; transl.), for consumers would immediately exit and buy only the best product. Under conditions of perfect competition and perfect market transparency, exit would not be a recovery mechanism, but would lead to the disappearance of firms whose performance deteriorates (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 20f.). According to Hirschman, exit as a recovery mechanism under normal conditions, i.e. in the absence of perfect competition, works if the quality variations in the market mean that the performance of the “sagging” firm can improve again. According to Hirschman, it is also possible that firms do not suffer any loss of income because they gain new customers to the same extent. This could happen if either all firms are equally affected by a deterioration or if the case arises that consumers are constantly on the lookout for improved products. In this case, competition does not lead to the individual firm improving again, but rather to the “constant illusion that ‘the neighbor’s apples are always better,’ that is, that one can escape the defects of the product in question by buying the competitor’s product”, even if it has the same or similar defects (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 22; transl.). Hirschman develops this idea directly on the basis of the problems that consumers had with cars made by Ford and General Motors; while Ford drivers switched to GM, GM customers turned to Ford, but both produced defective products (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 22, fn. 7). Under monopoly conditions, on the other hand, consumers would have to put up with “inevitable imperfections” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 22).

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3.2

Voice

According to Hirschman, the reaction mode voice has been completely ignored in economics until now: Choosing to voice rather than to leave means that you, as a customer or member, are making an attempt to change the practices, policies, and output of the company you buy from or the organization you belong to. Voice in this context is any attempt whatsoever to change an unfavorable condition rather than to avoid it, whether through individual or collective petitions to those directly responsible, appeals to higher authority with the intent of forcing a change in leadership, or various types of actions and protests, including those designed to mobilize public opinion. (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 25; transl.)

Hirschman borrows the idea of voice from the political science concept of interest articulation, emphasizing that U.S. political science, like economics, has been predominantly focused on viewing voice as indispensable to the functioning of the system, American-style democracy, without paying sufficient attention to the fact that exit has in fact played a special, if not dominant, role in U.S. political culture to date (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 25–28, pp. 90–101). Voice or dissent is seen by Hirschman on the one hand as a “complement” and on the other hand as an “alternative to exit” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 25, pp. 28ff., 30–36). In the former case, consumers do not exit immediately after a drop in performance, but become potential “carriers of the voice”; the importance of voice increases the less the possibility of exit is given (inelastic demand), up to the point where exit is no longer possible and voice becomes the only possible mode of reaction (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 28f.). In his reaction function, Hirschman sees voice as a gain for the recovery of the company. If it reacts appropriately to the voice, it can minimize exit and thus its destructive effects, the further decline in performance and the disappearance from the market (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 29f.). The second case, voice as an alternative, raises the question of why consumers stick with a product even though an alternative is available. Hirschman’s answer is that these individuals must firstly have the impression that their objection has a chance of success (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 30ff.) and secondly in the substitutability of the good (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 32). But if there is a minimum of non-substitutability, then voice will also depend on the willingness to take on the risk of this mode of response compared to security offered by exit, and on the likelihood that the consumer in question expects improvements to

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occur as a result of his actions, or actions taken by others in concert with him, or actions taken by others without his actions, or actions taken by others without his help. (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 32; transl.)

For Hirschman, however, in addition to the prospects of success and nonsubstitutability, another factor plays a role in voice: costs. Voice, he argues, is costly compared to exit (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 33). Since voice tends to be costly compared to exit, the consumer will be less able to afford voice as the number of goods and services in his shopping program increases – the cost to him of spending even a small fraction of his time correcting errors in one of the items on his shopping list at a time is likely to be greater than the benefits he can expect to gain from a large number of such items. (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 33; transl.)

Voice is to be expected above all in organizations of which one is a member and less from customers of individual firms; in the economy it will be activated “above all in the case of important purchases [. . .]” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 33). Hirschman emphasizes that price and durability will determine whether consumers engage rather than exit (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 34). People are more likely to complain about the poor performance of a washing machine than to find fault with the unsatisfactory taste of a chocolate bar. Hirschman sees two opposing trends: The increasing number of available goods favors exit, but at the same time the importance of durable consumer goods increases, and with it the importance of voice (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 34). The existence or creation of institutions that reduce the costs of voice and increase the chances of success could reinforce the importance of this mode of response, as they “reduce the costs of individual and collective action” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 35). Consumer policy measures, legal consumer protection and, in particular, the existence of powerful consumer organizations are important elements in strengthening the position of consumers and thus their power of voice. Hirschman illustrates this with the “consumer revolution” and the importance of consumer policy entrepreneurs such as Ralph Nader, “who has established himself as a kind of self-appointed consumer ombudsman” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 35). Massive opposition, here Hirschman refers to the “more militant actions” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 35) particularly those initiated by Ralph Nader against automobile manufacturers or criticism of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), led to the establishment of consumer-oriented advocacy and watchdog groups and new consumer protection laws in the 1970s (Bollier and Brobeck 2015; Martin 2003). Hirschman sees an institutionalization of consumer voice on three levels: “through independent entrepreneurial initiatives à la Nader, through a revitalization

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of official bodies endowed with regulatory powers, and through preventive steps on the part of the more important firms offering their products to the public” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 35; transl.). Preventing exit by strengthening voice is thus also in the interest of firms, which is why, as Hirschman makes clear, consumer protection is not solely in the interest of the consumer, but also has a marketstabilizing function for firms (cf. Nessel 2016). Ultimately, Hirschman attributes a formative power to institutional factors, the “invention of institutions and mechanisms”, which are capable of overcoming structural obstacles and restrictions (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 35f.).

3.3

Combinations of Exit and Voice

Hirschman sees the core of the problem in the relationship between the two modes of reaction in the tendency to choose the easy option of departure and to underestimate the power of voice, which leads to a “tendency to atrophy in the development of the art of voice” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 36; transl.). Hirschman illustrates the problem of combining the two modes of reaction with the well-known railroad example cited at the outset. According to Hirschman, a similar phenomenon can be found in the US-American school system, where private institutions contribute to the decline of public schools (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 38f.). In the case of those customers who are most concerned about quality and would therefore be the most active, reliable and creative bearers of voice, there is evidently for this very reason at the same time the probability that they will be the first to leave in the event of a deterioration in quality. (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 39; transl.)

To illustrate why the combination of exit and voice is so problematic, he draws on exit tendencies in price increases: “Is it possible that the same consumers are not the first to drop out when prices are raised as when quality is degraded?” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 40; transl.). If this were so, i.e. if the little-researched quality turned out to be a factor equivalent to price, then it would become clear that this equivalence, i.e. the deterioration in quality, can be expressed in a price increase that is “different for different buyers of the good, because there are large differences among buyers in the evaluation of quality” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 40f.; transl.). Hirschman here assigns meaning to the “age-grey concept” of consumer surplus: it

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is the measure of the advantage that the consumer enjoys by being able to buy a good at its market price. The greater this advantage is, the more likely it is that the consumer will have a motive to ‘do something’ to ensure that this advantage is secured or returned to him. (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 42; transl.)

The loss of quality is valued differently by consumers, which results in different exit behavior: In the case of “connoisseur goods” (such as schooling or top-quality wines), a “consumer who is fairly insensitive to price increases,” i.e., who has a high consumer surplus, would often display a high “sensitivity to deteriorations in quality” because he or she has the most to lose by doing so; such consumers would be “most likely to protest” until “they finally exit” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 41). This is especially true if no suitable substitute good is available (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 42). One could switch to a more expensive but better substitute good, but if only a cheaper, worse substitute is available, then consumers would remain loyal to the firm even if the good has deteriorated (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 42f. and Appendix D). However, if an attractive substitute good is available, quality-oriented customers would exit and not protest. However, exit could then further deteriorate quality and become a downward spiral if it lacked penetrating power (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 43). According to Hirschman, exit will set in when one actually has an alternative. If instead of a price increase there is a deterioration in quality, the quality-conscious customers would substitute the good, but the price-conscious customers would follow them later (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 44). Deterioration in quality of high-value products will tend to lead to voice, because the density of higher-value products is lower than the density of lower-value products in the era of mass production. Therefore, the deterioration in this area would have to be particularly high before customers would leave (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 44). However, this also leads to a worsening of social inequality, since the upper classes are easier to activate for voice than the middle and lower classes (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 45). For Hirschman, the courses of action under which actors choose between exit and voice are important because they affect costs and returns under various competitive conditions such as monopolies, which could be both exploitative or flaccid, the latter even relying on exit of the disaffected (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 46–52), or dyopoles, such as the U.S. party system, in which exit seemed possible but clients could not or would not exit because the alternative did not seem attractive and maximizing the organizations’ profits would lead to leaving supporters behind (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 53–64). Hirschman shows that the degree of exit is fed by “autonomous decisions to act, while the degree of voice in an organization depends not only on the importance of the goods and services, but also

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on the assessment of the extent to which one’s own actions are relevant for recovery and on the expectations regarding the corresponding actions of others” (Maurer 2006, p. 74; transl.).

3.4

Loyalty

In the decision between exit and voice, Albert O. Hirschman introduces a “social factor” into the analysis, which he conceptualizes as a “reflexive-rational mode of action” (Maurer 2006, pp. 78f.). Loyalty as an attachment to a company, a brand or an organization leads to postponing exit and activating voice (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 66f.). It differs from blind faith by the expectation that “the right and righteous actions will outweigh the wrong and morally condemnable ones” and that one has a certain possibility of influence (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 67; transl.). “Loyalty is thus by no means irrational, but is capable of serving the socially useful purpose of preventing quality deterioration from becoming cumulative, as it so often does when exit is not impeded by any barrier” (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 68; transl.). According to Hirschman, loyalty as a barrier is useful to strengthen the repair mechanism of exit and voice where vioce must first be discovered and developed (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 68f.) and where customers have alternatives but the service is substitutable, Hirschman cites football teams, clubs and political parties as examples here, but loyalties can also be discovered in consumption, expressed, for example, in brand loyalty, which can develop into a brand fetish (Hellmann 2005 [2003]). To achieve loyal behavior, organizations and firms have various means at their disposal. While coercion and repression (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 78–83) are largely ruled out in relationships with customers, except perhaps through long-term contractual commitments or opaque exit options, companies will tend to encourage unconscious loyal behavior (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 77f.), for example through customer retention strategies, such as bonus points or exclusive offers for existing customers (from the large body of literature on the topic, exemplified by Ranzinger 2017 [2011]). This can lead to firms exposing themselves to a threat potential if the voice mechanism can be strengthened by the threat, i.e. the option of exit does not weaken the opposition but strengthens it (Hirschman 2004 [1974], pp. 70f.). Another mechanism that combines exit and voice is the boycott, which Hirschman (2004 [1974], pp. 73f.) understands as a exit in which re-entry is promised if performance improves again. In fact, the boycott or threat is also a way for political actors who

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are not part of the company’s clientele to pressure it by calling on customers to exit in order to protest grievances (Friedman 1999; Zorell 2019). Another option is to publicly support and demonstrate loyalty to companies that are performing particularly well, in the sense of the actors, by buyers in the form of a buycott (Neilson 2010; Zorell 2019). However, as Andrea Maurer (2006, p. 78f.) interprets it, Hirschman is still stuck in economics here: for him, loyalty is “a purpose-rational form of action, albeit one that also reflects medium-term returns”; he takes “social-cultural situational characteristics” just as little into account as the question of when and whether “loyal perseverance actually leads to voice and does not result in resignation, sabotage or inner emigration” (Maurer 2006, p. 79; transl.). Moreover, Hirschman does not consider the link between consumption and political action. Although he points out, albeit only in a footnote, that the market mechanism does not prevent the occurrence of “negative external effects”, but that they can be “kept within limits or eliminated altogether” through protests by those affected. Consumer dissent, i.e. political action, could also complement the competitive mechanism here (Hirschman 2004 [1974], p. 29, fn. 7). What might lead them to perform dissent, a theory that brackets consumption and politics, was formulated by Hirschman 12 years after Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

4

Disappointment

To say it in advance, the theory he develops in Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Hirschman 1982, 1988 [1984]) is considered by scholars to be only partially successful. Even the biographer who is quite sympathetic to Albert O. Hirschman judges, “Shifting Involvements may have been a flawed book, but a brave one” (Adelman 2013, p. 564). And the sociologist Michael Schmid prefaces his commentary on the work with the following words: “I remember reading Hirschman’s book on ‘Shifting Involvements’ shortly after it appeared in 1985 and [. . .] classifying it as trivial” (Schmid 2006, p. 117; transl.). Flawed, trivial – these judgments are justified because Hirschman devised a cycle model that does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. He thought he could identify phases or leaps between engagement with public issues (commitment) and withdrawal into private life, with a focus on one’s own well-being. According to Hirschman, the leap into phases of engagement is triggered by disappointments, especially by unsatisfactory consumption experiences. However, in retrospect, the author himself saw this “in a different light” (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 11). Albert

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O. Hirschman was always willing to question his own analysis, something he called “self-subversion” (Hirschman 1996, pp. 103–111). Ideas that he was “very proud of at the moment of origin” could turn out to be less ingenious at a later stage, he later discovered aspects “that I had not considered before”: “This does not mean that I am inclined to skepticism and half-cockily claim that all my analyses are wrong. I do, however, discover new aspects of reality that either deepen or limit the coherence of the analysis. Doubt and idea are inseparable” (Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 78f.; transl.). Based on and strongly influenced by Tibor Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy (Scitovsky 1989 [1977]), Hirschman identified disappointment as the “most important motivating” force in his model of action (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 12). It results almost inevitably from consumption, because consumers have only limited knowledge and a hoped-for higher social positioning does not succeed permanently through consumption (Henning 2006, pp. 102f.). Disappointment through demonstrative consumption, here Hirschman refers to Hirsch (1980) and the critique of consumption, which he sees as early as the eighteenth century (Hirschman 1988 [1984], pp. 53–68), is the essential driving force, “for whoever of the consumers in the process of social advancement has failed to achieve his consumption goal, this experience could spur him on to new, even more intensive efforts” (Hirschman 1988 [1984], p. 68; transl.). In the aftermath of this disenchantment, Hirschman identifies two leaps: Those disappointed by consumption reorient themselves and no longer seek fulfillment in the private sphere but in public engagement; they turn away from “private consumer happiness,” discover the public interest, and offer opposition in politics (Hirschman 1988 [1984], pp. 72f.). Even this first leap can be doubted, because a “necessity of becoming political as a response to disappointments in and through consumption is [. . .] difficult to assert” (Henning 2006, p. 104; transl.). Rather, other modes of action such as alternative styles of consumption and culture are empirically demonstrable (Henning 2006, p. 104), for example in the conscious dissociation from overconsumption, which are not necessarily political, but can also succeed in a privatistic way. Even if Hirschman’s cycle model is not empirically tenable, it does provide impetus for an action-oriented consumption theory in two respects. First, in the development of the concept of preference and lifestyle change (Schmid 2006; see also Chap. 2 of this article), and second, in the linking of consumption and politics, private and public. Hirschman, unlike Hannah Arendt (2016 [1967], pp. 150–161), sees both levels as a form of active life (Hirschman 1988 [1984], p. 13), but keeps them separate, both competing for the “attention and time of the consumer-citizen” (Hirschman 1988 [1984], p. 70; transl.). The “cyclical and phased forms of

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engagement” of the consumer-citizen take place in “correspondingly differentiated arenas of action in consumption and politics” (Lamla 2013, p. 199; transl.). However, Christoph Henning (2006, pp. 106f.) sees a “twist” in Hirschman’s remarks in that both levels become blurred, for example when consumption is used to call for self-optimization, when consumers are influenced to buy through increasingly fine-tuned personalized advertising, or when, in “surveillance capitalism”, companies use their economic and political power to enforce the extraction of users’ data (Zuboff 2018). Even when consumer policies are intended to encourage citizens to buy, for example to boost the economy, as most recently with the VAT cut and child bonuses in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic, “the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ looks strangely anachronistic” (Henning 2006, p. 107; transl.). Hirschman also emphasizes this when he writes in retrospect, “I lacked the insight at the time that there are occasions when the public and the private can intermingle and merge” (Hirschman 2015 [1997], p. 15; transl.). Hence, his model of “table community” refers to the importance of the common meal for social and political developments (Hirschman 2015 [1997], pp. 15–30). The second leap from engagement to private life (Hirschman 1988 [1984], pp. 101–131) also seems only partially conclusive. It is true that political frustrating experiences can lead to a withdrawal, but the political is “a sphere that always runs along and can by no means be suspended in a privatistic and consumeristic way. On the contrary, consumption possibilities [. . .] are an essential component of politics” (Henning 2006, pp. 107f.; transl.). Political issues are increasingly brought into or shifted into the supposedly private sphere of consumption, when social, ecological and animal welfare-oriented consumer behavior is urged and actually political action is reduced to individual purchasing decisions. Political actors appeal to consumers when they cannot or do not want to act (Grunwald 2012; Stehr 2007). Moreover, Hirschman interprets disenchantment with politics as disappointment with failed engagement and institutionalization, without taking into account other forms of participation and “endogenous factors” of politicization (Henning 2006, p. 111).

5

Legacy

Even though Albert O. Hirschman did not found a school, his works still have an impact. His border crossings between economics and the social sciences beyond an economic imperialism make him an important reference point for economic sociology, heterodox economics, and interdisciplinary dialog (Knoll 2017; Maurer 2006;

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Pies and Leschke 2006; Swedberg 1990), but also isolated him within his discipline (Döring 2006). In development economics, his early works are still influential (Özçelik 2014, pp. 1116–1125). In economics, he is rediscovered in the context of questions on business ethics (Brink 2006 based on Hirschman 1995 [1991]) and his study of the history of ideas on the doux-commerce thesis (Terjanian 2013, p. 11). In political science, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is used to understand membership behavior in parties and interest groups (Dehling and Schubert 2011, pp. 132ff.; Offe 2007; Sack and Strünck 2016). It is this work, above all, that will remain associated with his name and that is an important point of reference for consumer science. With collective and individual voice, he introduced a non-market mode of reaction which, because it represents an alternative to the market-compliant mechanism of exit, broadens the spectrum of consumer action (Heidbrink and Schmidt 2011; Scherhorn et al. 1975; Strünck and Reisch 2018, pp. 475f.). Hirschman shows that by anchoring consumer protection institutionally, consumers’ position and ability to resist can be strengthened and corporate strategies can be adapted (for reception, see especially Nessel 2016 and Kraemer and Nessel 2011). For research on customer loyalty and the handling of customer complaints, Hirschman continues to be an important theoretical reference in relevant handbooks, professional articles and qualification papers (cf. exemplarily Brock et al. 2011; Plein 2016; Töpfer 2008). “Exit and voice” are of particular importance as modes of reaction for the demand side. With regard to their effect as repair mechanisms, Hirschman was criticized early on by institutional economists for having too limited a view and for not taking alternatives into account (Williamson 1974). Criticism was also levelled at the fact that Hirschman did not include “inactivity, non-participation” (Barry 1974, p. 91). Albert O. Hirschman’s basic idea from Shifting Involvements, that there is a connection between consumption and politics, is also applicable to an actionoriented theory of consumption because he builds a bridge between political action and consumer behavior and focuses on the “autonomy potentials and reserves” of consumers (Lamla 2013, p. 184). He is thus one of the initiators of a theory of consumer citizenship (Kneip 2010; Lamla 2013). However, he does not conflate consumption and politics, but mediates both levels through a flawed cycle model. By leaving his discipline and “jumping” into social science (Henning 2006, p. 96), he also adopts its methodological weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. The dichotomy between a political and an apolitical sphere, which Siegfried Landshut identifies as a basic problem of political thought in modernity, which distinguishes between politics and society, i.e. the unconnected individual (Landshut 2004 [1929]; cf. Knöbl 2020, p. 10; Nicolaysen 1997, p. 75), therefore remains present in

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Hirschman’s model; the consumer is not a zoon politikon with him, he only becomes so through disenchantment. At the same time, Hirschman’s strength is to question the economically shaped image of the consumer in terms of action theory. Against the background of bounded rationality (Hargreaves Heap 2016), he introduces the concept of metapreferences with reference to Frankfurt and Sen. This focus on value orientations and lifestyle change could be much more fruitful for the analysis of consumers’ fluctuating and contradictory ways of acting than the behaviorist search for the consumer behavior one wishes to condition.

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Christian Bala Dr., Consumer Research Office of the Verbraucherzentrale NordrheinWestfalen e. V (Consumer Association of North Rhine-Westphalia). Head of the office of the Competence Center of Consumer Research North Rhine-Westphalia (CECORE NRW). Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Ruhr University Bochum. Co-editor of the publication series “Contributions to Consumer Research”. Main research interests: Consumer and consumer policy.

Part II In Search of Environmental Sustainability

Kenneth Ewart Boulding: Economics and Ecology Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky

Abstract

Kenneth Ewart Boulding – beginning in the early 1930s – almost completely rethought economics and consumption against the prevailing doctrine in parts. His critical analyses and contributions to economics are still relevant today and point the way for reflection and further development of consumption theory, but this is hardly noticed in the scientific community. Therefore, in this article selected elements of Bouldingnomics from a manageable number of publications on economics, consumption and nature-environment are compiled and commented on. Boulding’s understanding of the economic process: consumption and production, of actors: consumers and firms, of the economy: market economy and non-market economy, of the basic organization: private household, and of alternative styles of economic activity: cowboy economy versus spaceship economy are outlined. Finally, a résumé is presented to summarize the main findings and to promote a rethinking of conventional consumption and consumer theory.

1

Biographical Sketch of Kenneth Ewart Boulding

Kenneth Ewart Boulding was born in Liverpool on January 18, 1910. The families of Kenneth’s parents, Elizabeth Ann Boulding and William Couchman Boulding, have been classed as working class by Robert Scott (2015, p. 9), and Robert A. Solo M.-B. Piorkowsky (✉) Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_5

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(1994, p. 1187) has also classed their parents likewise. Elizabeth was a skilled dressmaker, William was a gas-water plumber, at times with his own workshop. Both were practicing Methodists and politically and literarily interested and engaged. William was active as a lay preacher and in outreach church work; and he campaigned for the Liberal Party. Elizabeth wrote poetry, as did Kenneth later, beginning at age seven. Kenneth was given his middle name in honour and memory of William Ewart Gladstone, a Liberal Party politician held in high esteem by his parents, who had been born in Liverpool, in close proximity to the Bouldings. So much for the parents – further elaboration can be found in Scott (2015, pp. 9–26), who wrote the first comprehensive biography of Kenneth E. Boulding. Kenneth Boulding probably never wrote out his middle name in connection with publications, but at least quite predominantly gave it in the widely used form – Kenneth E. Boulding. Scott (2015) has mostly dispensed with the middle name and also the abbreviation, often reporting simply “Kenneth”, as here occasionally. Family experiences during the First World War had a very strong influence on Kenneth Boulding. As Scott (2015, p. 17) has noted: “Coming of age in wartime affected him in many ways that would follow him the rest of his life. It is easy to suppose that the war had a bigger impact on him than any other life event”. Scott (2015, pp. 18–22) particularly highlights that Kenneth became a resolute pacifist and – probably also as a direct or indirect consequence of the war – began to stutter. Another lasting formative influence on his life and work was his deeply felt and lived religiosity. Kenneth became a Quaker, thus later met his wife Elizabeth in the USA, who strongly influenced him spiritually and scientifically, and devoted substantial parts of his work together with Elizabeth to peace and conflict research. At the end of his schooling, Kenneth Boulding, who was almost always the best or second best pupil in his year, applied unsuccessfully first in 1927, then successfully in 1928, for a scholarship to study science at New College, Oxford, and began to study chemistry (Scott 2015, p. 28). After a year of laboratory work, he applied to transfer to the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics on the grounds that “at that time the great problems of the human race seemed to be economic” (quoted in Scott 2015, p. 32). Kenneth was mentored in his first year by Lionel Robbins, which will be discussed in Sect. 2.3. Kenneth developed into an ardent yet critical Keynesian and graduated from Oxford in Economics in 1931 as one of the best graduates of any course and the best degree in Economics that year. Boulding regarded the result as a secure foundation for an academic career and justification for not having to pursue a doctorate and thus avoid the drudgery of a PhD (Scott 2015, p. 34). Boulding did not feel at home in Oxford. To escape the snobbish university culture, he went to the USA in 1931 on a Commonwealth scholarship and studied

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first in Chicago and later at Harvard. His socialisation in Liverpool prepared him well for the American melting pot, and he enjoyed the debating atmosphere in lectures, seminars and study groups. His teachers and discussion partners included Frank Heyneman Knight, Henry Schultz, Jacob Viner, and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (Solo 1994, p. 1187; Scott 2015, pp. 36–39). With the expiry of the Commonwealth Scholarship, Boulding dutifully but reluctantly returned to England in 1934. University positions were scarce there at that time. The only offer Boulding had was an unattractive, low-prestige, and poorly paid teaching position at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, with a three-year contract, which he accepted. One bright spot for Boulding was a good rapport with William Baxter, professor of management accounting, who introduced Boulding to the theory and techniques of accounting and bookkeeping, giving him a managerial understanding of economic resources, especially capital, of organizations and decisions, and of the control of operational processes (Scott 2015, p. 41; Solo 1994, pp. 1188f.). Boulding was academically “ennobled” with the publication of an essay by Frank H. Knight in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1935, in which Boulding is already mentioned by name in the title (The Theory of Investment Once More: Mr. Boulding and the Austrians). This and the ensuing controversy between Boulding, who was still unknown among experts, and Knight proved to be a springboard for Boulding’s career (Scott 2015, pp. 41f.). At a conference in Philadelphia in 1937, Boulding was tipped off about a vacant position at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, which he accepted and from there, according to Solo (1994, p. 1188), launched his illustrious university career. Other major stops along the way included Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Iowa State College, later Iowa State University, in Ames, McGill University in Montreal, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, an extended research period at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and finally the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he became emeritus professor in 1980 (Solo 1994, p. 1188; Scott 2015, pp. 43–59, p. 139). Individual stations will still be addressed in the following Sect. 2 in connection with Boulding’s contributions selected here. Kenneth Boulding died in Boulder on March 20, 1993. His last diary entry ends with the statement: “I have had an extraordinarily good life. I will be 83 in three months and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. If there is a future life, well, that’s fine; if there isn’t, I won’t know about it, and that’s fine too” (quoted in Scott 2015, p. 182). Kenneth Boulding has published over a thousand papers on 30 subject areas, it can be read in Solo (1994, p. 1188). Looking at his economic writings, he could be classified as a universal pioneer of new approaches to economics, such as evolutionary economics, new institutional economics, ecological economics, and social

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and behavioral economics, but also as a post-Keynesian (see the contributions in Dolfsma and Kesting 2013). Solo (1994, p. 1187), in posthumous tribute, has called Boulding the most creative social scientist of his time. His book A Reconstruction of Economics (1950) was groundbreaking, with arguably the first comprehensive ecological grounding of economic theory (Scott 2015, p. 3; cf. Fisher and Peterson 1976, p. 3), which Solo (1994, pp. 1188f.) also highlighted in his appreciation and which has been chosen here as the starting point for the consideration of Bouldingnomics. With reference to this original approach, Boulding is classified here as an ecologically oriented economist. Ecology (and hence evolution) is a central building block in his theory of the economy, especially via the central processes of production and consumption – alongside the institutional extension of market economics to include his analysis of the non-market economy, which he called the “grants economy”. Kenneth Boulding was headstrong and unorthodox. In the first sentence of his introduction to the Grants Economics Series in his programmatic book The Economy of Love and Fear – A Preface to Grants Economics (Boulding 1973), he speculated that the work of the editors of the series – besides Boulding, it was the German economist Martin Pfaff – could almost be interpreted as “radical economics by regular economists”. This may also explain why the ecological economist Robert Underwood Ayres is said to have accused him of being an institutional economist (Wray 2013, p. 431). In fact, Boulding radically rethought economics and consumption in parts and gradually published the insights in his works. In Business Week magazine in 1969, Boulding has been called a “heretic” among economists; and in another context, when asked if he considered himself an economist, he replied: I must be, I am the president of the American Association of Economists (Scott 2015, p. 5). The tribute to his economic work in several articles in the Journal of Economic Issues (1994), including Solo’s obituary (1994) cited here, was prefaced by the journal’s editor with the sentence, “The late Kenneth Boulding was a controversial economist even among the heterodox” (Editor 1994, p. 1187). Kenneth Boulding was not only president of the American Association of Economists, but also of other academic societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, the Association for the Study of the Grants Economy, and the International Studies Association, some of which he co-founded. Finally, it should be mentioned here that Kenneth Boulding was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics and, together with Elizabeth Boulding, for the Nobel Peace Prize several times (Scott 2015, p. 4).

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Selected Contributions of K. E. Boulding to a Critical Theory of Consumption

The selected contributions deal with topics that are central to a critical theory of consumption. They deal with basic questions of understanding consumption and production (Sect. 2.1), consumers and firms (Sect. 2.2), non-market economy and market economy (Sect. 2.3), private households (Sect. 2.4) and alternative styles of economic activity for a more or less sustainable economy (Sect. 2.5).

2.1

Consumption and Production

Boulding understood consumption in the economic sense as the use of assets and (preliminary) services – ultimately – for the production of human capital or human assets, including desired mental states. This, he argues, must be strictly distinguished from the destruction of goods in the technical sense (and the literal meaning of consumption as “to consume”, “to use up”). He argues, mutatis mutandis, as follows: In order to sustain and shape life, processes of supply must be organized (Boulding 1986, p. 10). The consumption process is unavoidably linked to the simultaneous or gradual technical destruction of the consumer goods used, as well as to environmental pollution. Consequently, consumption leads to a reduction in the stock of the goods used and an increase in the stock of human capital and is the trigger for production in order to provide substitutes or additional goods. But production, too, is consumption when looked at closely. For the process of the production of goods requires the transformation of the input goods into the useful services intended for consumption. This inevitably causes the dissipation of part of the energy and matter used in extraction processes as well as in further processes of processing and treatment. Consequently, consumption and production are to be understood as a process of transformation of intermediate inputs into targeted useful services, waste and environmental pollution, which market economists have in the majority of cases broken down into two phases interpreted as opposing and described dichotomously: production in the sense of the production of goods and consumption in the sense of the destruction of goods (cf. Piorkowsky 2017, pp. 76–85, 2019a). For Boulding, the reasons for the economically erroneous classification of consumption and production are – as is explained in many of his works – above all the market-centred consideration of separate organisations, in particular companies and households, and the mixing of real-goods and nominal-goods

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economic analysis of economic processes with a focus on exchange values (Boulding 1945); in addition, the failure to recognise the effects of consumption on the formation of human wealth or human capital. Human capital – Boulding (1950, pp. 135–140) refers in this respect to the necessity of maintaining and shaping life and concretizes this with “utilization”, “enjoyment” and “psychic capital” – as well as the lack of a theoretical classification of the economic process in accordance with the natural foundations of the shaping of life, in particular taking into account the laws of thermodynamics. However, he also addresses the difficulty of reformulating the theory (Boulding 1950, p. 135) and refers in particular to the fact that the traditional economic conceptual apparatus hinders an appropriate conceptualization (cf. Boulding 1986, p. 8). Boulding had developed the new economic view of consumption and production over many years, not least while working on his textbook Economic Analysis (Boulding 1941, pp. 119f., p. 279, pp. 636f., 1948a, pp. 284f., pp. 290f.), which, after the second edition (Boulding 1948a), was still published in a third edition (Boulding 1955) and most recently in a fourth edition in two volumes in 1966 (Scott 2015, pp. 48f.). Boulding had been asked to write a textbook during his time at Colgate University. It developed – according to Scott (2015, pp. 48f.) – into one of the most widely used and influential textbooks, at least in the USA, until the third edition, but was gradually superseded by the new “classic” Economics: An Introductory Analysis by Paul Anthony Samuelson. When Boulding began writing his book A Reconstruction of Economics (Boulding 1950) in 1948, it was his last year at Iowa State College. There, at the request of Theodore William Schultz, then head of the economics department and later winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, he had specialized with interest but no enthusiasm as a labor economist. Boulding was particularly moved by questions about the structures and functions and the interaction of individual and aggregate economic processes. Already in his essay on Consumption Economics. The Consumption Concept in Economic Theory (Boulding 1945), he briefly undertook a critical reckoning with classics of economics, beginning with Adam Smith, JeanBaptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus, and David Ricardo and ending with Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes, and he makes clear at the outset: It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the classical economists, up to and including Marshall, had a fairly clear concept of consumption but no adequate theory of how consumption fitted into the whole economic process. [. . .] Marshall, for instance, having defined consumption fairly accurately, immediately leaves the subject and devotes the rest of his Book III to a discussion of the related, but by no means identical, topic of demand. (Boulding 1945, p. 1)

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Boulding’s criticism, however, was not primarily directed against the representation of consumption in Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics (cf. Piorkowsky 2019b). Rather, the criticism was aimed at John Maynard Keynes and the equation of demand or consumption expenditure with the consumption of the goods acquired, as defined by Keynes’s consumption function. This was because expenditure was merely a part of a market transaction in which money was exchanged for an asset or service. It is true that the two processes, purchase and consumption, as well as purchase and production, are interrelated, but they are completely different: on the one hand, circulation of existing real and nominal goods, on the other hand, transformation of real goods into useful services and waste. In fact, it is difficult to understand that, to this day, economists and social scientists interpret the acquisition and use of goods as consumption or as production, depending on whether the actors are members of households or employees of companies or administrative bodies. Correcting the conflation of real goods and nominal goods economics was not Boulding’s (1950, pp. vii–x) only concern. He was generally dissatisfied with the state of economic science. He felt that the lack of integration of economics with the social sciences and the neglect of insights from the natural sciences were failures on the part of economists that had led to a disconnection from the real world. In particular, he saw the postulation of maximizing behavior, marginal analysis, and static equilibrium theory as unnecessary constrictions (cf. Boulding 1948b, 1986, p. 9, p. 12), and he sought alternative approaches. Exemplary for him were, on the one hand, the works of the agricultural economists at Iowa State College, which were influenced in particular by Theodore W. Schulz, and, on the other hand, crossdisciplinary subject formations in the natural and social sciences, such as physical chemistry, biophysics, social psychology and economic sociology (Boulding 1950, pp. viif.). The outstanding success of what may still be called the ‘Ames School’ in agricultural economics has been somewhat facetiously attributed to the discovery that there was no such subject – that there was only economics applied to agricultural problems. In somewhat similar vein I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics – there is only social science applied to economic problems. Indeed, there may not even be such a thing as social science – there may only be general science applied to the problems of society. (Boulding 1950, p. vii)

In his Reconstruction of Economics, Boulding – from 1949 professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Scott 2015, p. 70) – offers three things: first, a theoretical embedding of economics in the socio-economic-ecological environment; second, a systematic separation between real-goods and nominal-goods economic

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processes; and third, a classification of the findings into the conventional structure of economic textbooks according to microeconomics and macroeconomics – an achievement that has not received universal recognition (see the review by Turvey 1951, p. 204; also Spash 2013, pp. 355f.). Boulding (1950, pp. 3–8) did not want to view the economy in sharply delineated terms as an economic system of society essentially characterized by the use of money, but rather to explain it aspectually as a set of relations based on behavioral science. For in social organisms, such as families, firms, trade unions, churches and states, economic aspects of production, consumption and exchange could be determined – as in all biological organisms and populations. Boulding (1950, p. 6) is emphatic that viewing society as an ecological system is not merely an analogy. Rather, society represents an example of an ecosystem, just as forests, fields, and swamps are other examples of ecosystems. For the ecological-economic understanding of consumption and production by social organizations and organisms, Boulding refers in his book to the physiological concept of homeostasis, i.e. the mechanism of the necessary maintenance of lifesustaining functions through the supply of energy to compensate for the energy drained by activity. Accordingly, for growth and development, additional energy must be obtained in the sense of a steady state. “Thus the human body has a complex physiochemical equilibrium, involving, for instance, a constant temperature and certain concentrations of various substances in its various parts. If the equilibrium is disturbed, ‘wants’ are set up which induce the body to act so as to restore its optimum condition” (Boulding 1950, p. 27). Seen in this way, in terms of the real economy of goods, consumption and production, including exchange, are organised processes of the absorption, transformation and release of matter and energy, i.e. metabolic, substance-transforming processes, whereby the absorption and release is partly actively organised from the socio-economic environment and the natural environment, and partly occurs without intervention, such as the access to elementary foodstuffs, e.g. air, solar radiation and water. A closer look shows, on the one hand, that active exchange, i.e. the procurement of input goods and the disposal of services and undesired materials, requires the use of labour and often also of other resources, i.e. it is production. What is desired is actively procured, what is no longer desired is actively disposed of. On the other hand, it can be seen that production and consumption, viewed precisely, is a process of transformation: conversion of raw materials and energy, as well as of intermediate inputs through work, into desired useful services, as well as into residual and harmful substances. Production generally means the simultaneous creation of one or more kinds of assets through the destruction of other kinds, the net effect being the replacement of the

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destroyed assets by the produced assets, i.e. the transformation of destroyed assets into produced assets. The destroyed or consumed assets constitute the ‘cost’, from the point of view of the firm, of the assets produced. Thus in the production of 1000 tons of flour 1250 tons of wheat may be consumed, a certain amount of machinery and equipment may be consumed, and a certain quantity of money must be spent in the purchase of labor. The shifts in the asset structure as a result of this productive operation therefore consists of (i) an increase in the flour item (the ‘production’), and (ii) decreases in the cash, wheat, and machinery items (the ‘costs of production’). These increases and decreases may, of course, be valued in dollar terms. If the operation has been profitable the value of the increase in flour should be greater than the value of the decreases in the other items. This is the essence of the profit-making process – the manipulation (transformation) of assets in order to achieve an increase in their total value. [. . .] In accounting terms such consumption of assets is said to be expensed’. (Boulding 1950, pp. 30f.)

The ecological foundation of his reconstruction of economic theory also led Boulding to the clarification that a dynamic economic theory oriented towards the life cycle of organisms and organisations must be a theory of disequilibrium: “Indeed, true equilibrium is unknown in the world of nature, for all things are subject to the irreversible process of entropy” (Boulding 1950, p. 37). Thus, to the best of my knowledge, Boulding was the first economist to introduce thermodynamics into economic analysis – long before Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) – and to clearly recognize and explain the consequences for production and consumption. Consumption in its literal sense means destruction: if we ask destruction of what, the answer is destruction of capital, i.e. of real assets. When we eat food, burn fuel, and wear out clothes we have a smaller stock of these things than we had before the act of consumption. Economists have frequently written, as if consumption was the desideratum, the end product of all economic activity. Such, however, is not the case. It is true that there are some commodities which must be consumed in the utilization, such as food and fuel. This, however, is a technical incident. For most commodities consumption is merely incidental to their use and, far from being a desideratum, is to be avoided as much as possible. (Boulding 1950, p. 135)

Boulding (1950, p. 136) converts the insight of the economic-ecological metabolism into the general recommendation to keep consumption and thus also production as low as possible: “We do not want to consume fuel except as a means to getting heat, light, or power: the more of these things we can get from a unit of fuel the better off we are [. . .]. We burn coal in a house furnace only because the temperature of the house is a depreciating asset in winter, which has to be replaced by the consumption of fuel”. Not only does he make clear that, of course, the

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preservation of life must be reasonably ensured, but also that the use of durable goods can contribute to their preservation, that an inhabited and well-maintained house decays more slowly than an uninhabited house; he also points out that destructions caused by nature and by disease, e.g. natural and pathological destruction, e.g. by fire, also occurs by pyromaniacs; that the creation of benefit can arise from the act of consumption itself, for example in the self-perception as an actor; and that in the case of directly personal services production and consumption obviously coincide, e.g. when attending a film screening, which leads to the formation of psychic capital through mental processing and storage, but which also sooner or later evaporates and then often stimulates the desire for renewed information or entertainment (Boulding 1950, pp. 136–141). Concluding this train of thought with the statement: “Oddly enough, the mental state of having gone to a bad movie may depreciate at a slower rate than the state of having gone to a good one!” (Boulding 1950, p. 141), is typical of Boulding. He was appreciated not only for the thematic diversity of his work, his creativity and astuteness, but also for his witty remarks and clever puns (see, for example, Turvey 1951, p. 203; Solo 1994, p. 1187). Exemplary is one of his reverences to Adam Smith, “who has strong claim being both the Adam and the smith of systematic economics” (Boulding 1970a, p. 117).

2.2

Consumers and Firms

“Let us now see what is the problem which a theory of a consumer – who may be a firm as well as a household – must solve” (Boulding 1950, p. 144). With this invitation Boulding begins the section “A theory of the consumer” in his Reconstruction of Economics. Before going into this in detail, it should be briefly reiterated here that Boulding – economically and ecologically consistent – conzeptualized households and firms equally as producers and consumers. In his Reconstruction, he also explains that households do not only produce for their own needs, but also engage in entrepreneurial activities and set up businesses. When Boulding speaks of firms, he means corporately constituted large firms, as indeed is seen in the professional community (see Coase 1937) and in everyday thinking (though underestimating the overwhelming numerical dominance of minibusinesses). Boulding deals with basic structures and processes of production in the firm already in the context of the ecological foundations of economic activity, but picks this up again later. This allowed him to follow the common division of material in the textbook literature and treat the microeconomic theory of production in the context of the theory of the firm and then the theory of the consumer in the

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context of the theory of the household. Looking at the real economic development and the history of economic thought and following the research findings of Boulding (1942), it could have been, I would almost say should have been, the other way round, which will be substantiated later. The simplest theory of the firm is to assume that there is a ‘homeostasis of the balance sheet’ – that there is some desired quantity of all the various items in the balance sheet, and that any disturbance of this structure immediately sets in motion forces which will restore the status quo. Thus, if a customer purchases finished product, this diminishes the firm’s stock of finished product and increases its stocks of money. In order to restore the status quo the firm must spent the increased money stock to produce more finished product. On these assumptions the firm’s production, and indeed the production of the whole society, is a necessity imposed on it by the fact of consumption. (Boulding 1950, p. 27)

The theory of homeostasis and the concept of asset structure and balancing is for Boulding 1950, p. 27), as already presented in Sect. 2.1, a basic model which he considers applicable to the analysis of all social organisms and organisations – he cites universities, churches and trade unions as examples (cf. Sect. 2.3) – and which he applied in his Reconstruction in particular to firms as well as to consumers and households (cf. Solo 1994, pp. 1188f.). For social organisms, Boulding (1950, pp. 33f.) makes it clear that their equilibrium position is shaped not only by natural environmental conditions, but to a large extent by the goals and decisions of the organisation’s leadership. For firms, ownership structure, legal regulations, and procurement and sales markets in particular play a significant role; this will not be discussed in further detail here. Boulding (1950, pp. 144f.) considers consumers in the household context, especially with regard to purchases and sales of goods, labour force participation and money income, household production and income in kind, structure of goods and assets, preferences for use and further usage behaviour as well as life courses. The social form of life is not taken into account, but the conventional family life cycle is assumed. The behaviours and determinants mentioned go far beyond what traditional consumer theory – either then or now – holistically depicts. Boulding, as already pointed out, considers in particular the equation of demand or purchase with consumption to be completely mistaken. He also considers household production and self-sufficiency as alternatives to purchase for the accumulation, renewal, and immediate use of household assets, and also includes natural exchange and sales of household goods in the considerations. With reference to the economic theory of the consumer, he states:

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The patterns of the consumer are in fact the patterns of living and require complex psychological and sociological study. It may well be that variables which fall under the general field of sociology – e.g. Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, emulation of the neighbours, conventional patterns associated with certain occupations or certain ‘positions’ in society – play a more important role in determining the consumer’s economic behaviour than any strictly ‘economic’ considerations. (Boulding 1950, p. 147)

In the following, Boulding discusses with reference to market theory on the one hand the specifically economic orientation of consumers in their demand for goods towards monetary variables, in particular money income and goods prices, as well as their changes and on the other hand – going further – the tendency towards entrepreneurial action in the household context. He refers in particular to the widespread practice of selling discarded household goods, e.g. motor vehicles and furnishings, in second-hand markets and generally sees an entrepreneurial character among households, up to and including the transition into self-employed entrepreneurial activity. To this end, Boulding (1950, p. 152) argues that while it is tempting to define a “pure household” in which money income, expenditure on consumer goods and consumption are equal in value, it would be much more important to perceive the different activities of households rather than to define an ideal type. The spectrum of activities addressed here by Boulding includes various forms of moneyraising and investment, as well as buying, exchanging, sharing, household production, market production, selling, consumptive uses, and founding organizations, starting with one’s own household (see also Piorkowsky 2017, pp. 89–99, 2018, pp. 86–90, pp. 102ff.). Boulding (1950, pp. 153f.) points out at the end of the section “A theory of the consumer” that the economic theory of the firm and of production and of the household and of consumption were becoming increasingly similar. In fact, the neoclassical theory of the firm was developed in the 1930s by analogy with the theory of the household, something that Boulding (1941) had already taken up and developed further in the first edition of his Economic Analysis (Boulding 1942, p. 800). The similarities in the acquisition and use of input goods in household production for own use and in the market goods production of firms are, after all, unmistakable, even if one is called consumption goods and the other production factors. And because economists assume or presuppose the most efficient possible use of goods, it did not take long for the analytical foundations first developed for explaining household demand to be gradually formulated by analogy for business theory and thus transferred “from consumption theory to production theory” (Blaug 1975, p. 12).

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This will be briefly explained with examples (Boulding 1942, pp. 798ff.; Piorkowsky 2011, pp. 83–105). The distinction between complementary and substitutive consumer goods in the demand theory of the household corresponds to the distinction between limitational and substitutional factor combination in the production theory of the firm. Corresponding to the axioms of consumer preference are assumptions about technological process structures in the firm. The following applies to substitutional production factors and processes: To the concept of marginal utility of a consumer good corresponds that of marginal revenue of a factor of production. The statement of the law of diminishing marginal utility (first Gossen’s law) corresponds to the assumption of diminishing marginal returns. The marginal rate of substitution between consumption goods (second Gossen’s law) corresponds to the marginal rate of substitution between factors of production. Corresponding to the indifference curves of utility theory are the isoquants of production theory, i.e. those curves curved towards the origin of a coordinate system, which are geometric locations of all combinations of two inputs with which a respective constant output can be efficiently produced at different levels. The household is assumed to maximize a utility function under the constraint of a budget constraint by choosing a bundle of goods. And the firm is assumed to maximize profit under the constraint of a given budget to acquire the factors of production. Boulding (1942, pp. 799f.) understood the similarities not merely as formal analogies, but as broadly consistent with reality: “Indeed, a consumer is merely a ‘firm’ whose product is ‘utility’. [. . .] I have extended this type of analysis to cover even the theory of selling cost, relegating the once predominant theory of consumption to its place as a special case of the general theory of an economic organism”. Boulding could thus, as critically alluded to at the beginning of Sect. 2.2, have emphasized the importance of private households more emphatically. For the production theory of the firm is in part an extension of the household theory. And households are the logically and historically original enterprises out of which derived organizations develop, such as families, businesses, and associations. Boulding made up for this later, as will be shown in Sects. 2.3 and 2.4. Boulding left the University of Michigan in 1967 after 28 years – angered by disciplinary reforms, including the removal of the history of economics from the subject canon, and disappointed by changing financial and political conditions – and took up an attractively endowed professorship at the University of Colorado, at the Boulder location, where he initially continued his conflict and peace research in the Institute of Behavioral Science (Scott 2015, pp. 110f.).

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Non-market Economy and Market Economy

Boulding developed the conception of non-market economics – complementary to the economic theory of the market – because of the market orientation of modern economics and the consequent neglect of organizations not primarily controlled by markets, such as family households, unions, churches, and government bodies (Boulding 1970a, pp. 1–22, pp. 53–75, 1973, 1981). No doubt he had internalized the non-market-exchange paradigm understanding of the economics of Lionel Robbins, who, as mentioned in Sect. 1, was his supervisor in economics at Oxford. Robbins represented a behaviour-oriented understanding of economics, which he already formulated in the early 1930s in the famous definition: “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” (Robbins 1945 [1932], p. 16; cf. on this Boulding 1970b [1949], pp. 5ff.). Moreover, Boulding missed the consideration of conflict, power, and benevolence in the economic analysis of society. Recognizing that some conflicts can be destructive, while others can be productive, led him to distinguish between integrative and disintegrative mechanisms of managing the supply of goods, as outlined in the “Introduction to the Series on Grants Economics” and the “Preface” (Boulding 1973). In his Preface he states that: I concluded that the main problem lay in what I have come to call the ‘integrative system’ – that is, the aspect of society that deals with status, identity, community, legitimacy, loyalty, benevolence, and so on, and of course the appropriate opposites. This approach could almost be defined as the study of ‘how things come to hold together and how they fall apart’. Still an economist, I naturally asked myself how the famous ‘measuring rod of money’ might be used to measure the relationships of the integrative system, and this question set me onto the idea of the grant, or the one-way transfer, as a measure of integrative relationship. If A gives B something and B does not give A anything in the way of an economic good, then there must be some kind of integrative relationship between them. I concluded that studying the ‘grants matrix’ – that is, who gives what to whom – could throw a great deal of light on the clusterings of the integrative structure. (Boulding 1973, Preface)

Boulding (1973, pp. 1–13, pp. 30f.) describes as “grants” unilateral transfers of money as well as of material goods and services including possibilities of use, e.g. publicly provided goods, so that the asset position or the current account between the parties involved changes unilaterally. In two-sided transactions, such as the exchange of goods for goods or goods for money, the exchange is ideally equal in value, so that only the structure of the asset positions of the exchange

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partners changes. According to the primary motivation for the one-sided transfer, Boulding distinguishes two main groups of grants, positive and negative: on the one hand, voluntary transfers motivated by solidarity and love, and on the other hand, involuntary transfers prompted by threat and fear. Voluntary transfers include monetary donations, in-kind gifts, financial child support, household and family work, bequests, operating budget allocations, third party research funds, and volunteer services. Involuntary transfers include extorted ransom and tribute payments and, by point of view, tax payments, which in democratically constituted societies may be linked to the notion of getting some of it back in the form of public goods and personal social services. Boulding (1973, p. 2) justifies the choice of the term “grant” as follows: “I use the term ‘grant’ as a generic name for the one-way transfer, as it seems to have the broadest connotation of any name that might be used”. In further analysis of transactions, Boulding (1973, pp. 2–5, 1981, pp. 2–5) describes a “grants-exchange continuum” with different mixes of self-interest and altruism, specifically: equivalent exchange of goods in impersonal markets as one extreme, reciprocity expectation in some gifts as a middle position, and selfless gift as the other extreme. He also saw elements of threat and fear in exchange relationships and in voluntary unilateral transfers, and of reciprocity and exchange in involuntary transfers. As a result of his reflections, Boulding (1973, pp. 106f.) assumed that the vast majority of transactions are mixed forms in which exchange, love and threat interact in different relationships, e.g. the generous provision of children by parents in expectation of gratitude and good behaviour, shopping in the neighbourhood shop out of solidarity with the proprietor and concern about the shop’s abandonment and closure, paying taxes not only out of fear of the tax authorities but also out of solidarity with the community and in expectation of a good infrastructure. Thus Boulding (1970a, pp. 9–15, 1973, p. 107) develops the model of a mixed economic system in several respects with two overlapping subsystems, a marketdominated and a non-market-dominated subsystem, and with three likewise overlapping control systems: exchange, love, and threat, which he sees as “social organizers” and graphically depicts as a “social triangle” with 100% control effect at each of the three corners of the triangle and a mixed area within the triangle. He assumes that in the economy of his time none of the control systems exclusively, i.e. 100%, directed economic activity, and estimates that the US economy of the time was dominantly organized by exchange (60%) and grants (40%), of which 30% was organized by integrative forces such as love and solidarity, and 10% by threats of various kinds (Boulding 1973, pp. 106f.). However, in connection with his critique of the gross national product, Boulding (1970c, p. 162) only roughly

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estimated the share of household production, measured in terms of the gross national product, at 5–10% (cf. Boulding 1973, pp. 30f.). Other estimates and calculations comparable in time put the value of household production – depending on the scope of the services taken into account and the value approach for the time component – at 20–45%, measured in terms of gross national product (Hawrylyshyn 1976, pp. 107–115; Becker 1995). With the theory of the Grants Economy, Boulding expanded the institutional economic picture of households, firms and the state to include associations, esp. non-profit organizations, as considered by sociologists in third sector theory (e.g. Etzioni 1973), and added integrative and disintegrative elements to the motivational and behavioral spectrum of actors, such as love, solidarity and goodwill, as well as concern, fear and threat, which may be more or less interlocked with selfinterest and mixed differently according to the situation. In this way, market transactions and tax payments as well as further external transfers in the form of extorted ransom, donations for charitable projects and the giving of money as alms as well as internal transfers of money and benefits to household and family members can be described in a more differentiated way and explained more accurately than with the conventional economic view of separate roles in the money and goods cycle and the sole pattern of argumentation according to the self-interest axiom. Increasing approximation to reality, however, also means decreasing possibility to formulate general statements and could provide arguments for a more rigorous analysis. This also applies to Boulding’s (1973, pp. 49–61) distinction between direct, explicit grants and indirect, implicit grants: “Implicit grants may be defined as redistributions of income or wealth that take place as a result of structural changes or manipulations in the set of prices and wages, licenses, prohibitions, opportunity or access; they are anything, in fact, that is not a direct and explicit grant yet leads to economic redistributions” (Boulding 1973, p. 49). Boulding stresses that the treatment of implicit grants is one of the most difficult issues in grants economics theory. The approximation to the complex reality, however, tends to be bought by difficulties of analysis and/or the renunciation of unambiguous statements. In a visionary perspective, Boulding (1973, pp. 106–112) used his “social triangle” of exchange, love and threat to analyse historical transformations of macroeconomic supply structures and to explore optimisation strategies for the social supply of goods by companies, the state, associations and households based on the division of labour. And even further, he transferred the Grants concept to the use of natural goods in the economic process (Boulding 1973, pp. 105f., 1981, p. 7). In the light of Grants Economics, the occasional talk of the “gifts of nature” and the “depletion of nature” appears not only as a metaphorical description, but can be

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used in a model of the economy extended to include the ecological environment to characterize different economic styles with regard to the use of nature as a source of raw materials and a sink for pollutants, something that Boulding (1966) undertook and set out in his famous essay on the economics of “Spaceship Earth” (for more on this, see Sect. 2.5). Finally, it is worth mentioning Randall Wray’s (2013, p. 431) criticism that various transaction patterns of one-sided transfers had already been extensively analysed by renowned “regular” economists before Boulding. There is nothing wrong with this, but Boulding’s achievement of differentiating the forms and bringing them together to form an overall picture of the Grants Economy, as well as linking it to the Exchange Economy to form an extended economic model, is arguably undeniable. In any case, as Arjo Klamer (2013, p. 441) notes, “Boulding actually tries to alter the picture of the world that economists usually have”. And with Scott (2015, p. 118) it can be stated: “This is an important concept because it speaks to many misconceptions among people today about the way society is organized. Most people are stuck in an exchange-system mind-set, where everything has a price and its cost should fall on those who benefit directly from it”. Wray’s (2013, pp. 433f.) criticism that Boulding is “apparently ignorant of anthropological studies” is inaccurate. In fact, Boulding (1973, p. 2) already cites in the 3rd footnote the famous work The Gift. Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Maus (1990) in the 1967 American edition.

2.4

Basic Institution: Private Household

“Households are by far the largest reasonably homogeneous sector of any society, and have been for a long time. If we look at something even as commonplace as national income economics, we find that household purchases are about 60 percent of the GNP [. . .]. Then, we find that households are by far the most important agent in the ‘grants’ economy. [. . .] Transfers within the households are over $ 300 billion; these are transfers from earning members of households to non-earning members” (Boulding 1972, pp. 110f.). In his essay The Household as Achilles’ Heel, Boulding (1972) emphasizes not only the function of controlling production through the aggregate demand of households and the function of redistributing money within the household sector, but also the generative function of securing offspring as well as the functions of primary socialization and provisioning of family households, and refers to the transmission of learning skills and knowledge as an indispensable, critical foundation of social development:

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The GNP is essentially a by-product of the learning process. Capital is only human knowledge impressed upon the material world. The problem of the transmission and expansion of the knowledge stock is the crucial problem of any society. Knowledge is highly perishable; we lose, I would estimate, perhaps 3 to 5 percent of the knowledge stock every year by people getting old, forgetful and dead, and it has to be replaced in the young. As I keep telling my students, the business of education is the transfer of knowledge from decaying old minds to decaying young minds. This is the only way the world keeps going. The household has an enormously important role in this process. We do not know how much because we have no adequate measures of knowledge production, but it would not surprise me if it were close to 50 percent of the total. (Boulding 1972, pp. 111f.)

Boulding worried about society’s future in the face of socio-economic changes in values and structure, and the associated shift from household and family functions to support systems in the corporate, associational and state sectors, and the seeming concomitant atrophy of original care-giving skills. He feared that the emptying of households of basic tasks would lead to micro-level disintegration and thus a breakdown of society. Therefore, in the title of the essay referred to here, he refers to the household as the “Achilles heel” of society. In particular, he saw a decline in values and loss of competence with regard to healthy nutrition, family-oriented lifestyles and integrative relationships in close proximity, which corresponded not only to the socially widespread conservative image of the traditional family, but also to his lived traditionally oriented family model (cf. Scott 2015, p. 56). The essay The Household as Achilles’ Heel had emerged from the presentation of the same title at the 1972 spring meeting of the American Council on Consumer Interests (ACCI); it was intended primarily as a warning call not to misjudge private households as basic socioeconomic organizations and culminated in a call to strengthen education and counseling for households and even to consider establishing a ministry for household affairs (Boulding 1972, p. 119). The emphasis on the basal importance of households, especially family households, and the provisioning functions of the non-market economy, as well as the concern about a loss of tasks and importance of family households, combined with the effort to strengthen them, is reminiscent of Erich Egner’s (1952, 1963) theory of the household sector and his contributions to the politics of households and families (on this, see Hufnagel 2019). It is also worth recalling what Boulding emphasised in another context, namely that private households not only create families but also businesses (cf. Sect. 2.2). In fact, one may wonder how the perception of people’s economic activities is dealt with or not dealt with in a disciplinary differentiated manner in the economic and social sciences and divided among ministries in the political administration as

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well as redistributed now and then. In Germany there is obviously a correspondence between the decomposition of households according to the economic cycular flow model and role theory into employed and non-employed as well as into consumers and entrepreneurs on the one hand and the distribution of responsibilities among ministries on the other hand, e.g. at the federal level mainly among the Ministries of Labour and Social Affairs, of Economic Affairs and Energy, of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, of Food and Agriculture as well as of Justice and Consumer Protection.

2.5

Spaceship Economy Versus Cowboy Economy

In the essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, Boulding (1966), with reference to the increasingly emerging scarcity of natural environmental goods and the findings of thermodynamics, describes the Earth as a spaceship making its orbit around the sun with limited resources and pollution areas on board. According to Boulding (1966, p. 9), a more sustainable way of life in the future would require an economy of the kind that space travelers would inevitably have to practice. Strictly speaking, the Earth is not a completely closed system in terms of energy and matter, but from a practical point of view it can be regarded as approximately closed. Neither are raw materials available on earth in unlimited supply, nor can they be procured in kind and quantity from outside; nor can human beings dispose of waste on other planets. With regard to the extraction and use of energy, things did not and still do not look much better in the long run. With regard to the second law of thermodynamics, it therefore had to be stated: “With regard to the energy system there is, unfortunately, no escape from the grim second law of thermodynamics” (Boulding 1966, p. 7), i.e. the naturally increasing dispersion and mixing of all energy and ultimately also matter in the universe. This process is irreversible and is rapidly accelerated on Earth, in particular by industrial economic activity (cf. Spash 2013, pp. 357ff.). Whoever imagines himself in a physically open world with unlimited resources and areas of pollution does not think and act – according to Boulding – like a spaceman, but like a cowboy. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the ‘cowboy economy’, the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of

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continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the ‘factors of production’, a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. [. . .] By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. (Boulding 1966, p. 9)

The understanding of consumption and production already elaborated in his Reconstruction of Economics (see Sect. 2.1) is summarized by Boulding (1966, p. 10) – with critical emphasis directed against traditionally working economists – in the sentence: “This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts” (cf. in this connection affirmatively Ayres and Kneese 1969, pp. 282f., who refer to Boulding’s essay). He then discusses the concepts of wealth, welfare and well-being associated with the individual design and general evaluation of consumption and production, as well as arguments for and against an immediate shift, towards a more sustainable economic style. First, Boulding looks in particular at the question of whether welfare and well-being are determined by the process or the outcome of consumption. Secondly, he looks at the moral or ethical case for or against more sustainable economic activity. With regard to the general assessment of the importance of consumption, Boulding considers, on the one hand, according to the concept of homeostasis, the result of being well-fed and well-dressed, for example, to be decisive: Is it, for instance, eating that is a good thing, or is it being well fed? Does economic welfare involve having nice clothes, fine houses, good equipment, and so on, or is it to be measured by the depreciation and the wearing out of these things? I am inclined myself to regard the stock concept as most fundamental, that is, to think of being well fed as more important than eating, and to think even of so-called services as essentially involving the restoration of a depleting psychic capital. (Boulding 1966, p. 10)

On the other hand, he does not want to fundamentally deny an intrinsic value to the processes of manufacturing and using products: Would we, for instance, really want an operation that would enable us to restore all our bodily tissues by intravenous feeding while we slept? Is here not, that is to say, a certain virtue in throughput itself, in activity itself, in production and consumption itself, in raising food and in eating it? It would certainly be rash to exclude this

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possibility. Further interesting problems are raised by the demand for variety. We certainly do not want a constant state to be maintained; we want fluctuations in the state. Otherwise there would be no demand for variety in food, for variety in scene, as in travel, for variety in social contact, and so on. The demand for variety can, of course, be costly, and sometimes it seems to be too costly to be tolerated or at least legitimated, as in the case of marital partners, where the maintenance of a homeostatic state in the family is usually regarded as much more desirable than the variety and excessive throughput of the libertine. There are problems here which the economics profession has neglected with astonishing singlemindedness. (Boulding 1966, pp. 10f.)

But why should one concern oneself at all with the solution of problems that will only become topical in the distant future? Boulding (1966, pp. 11ff.) argues in his essay that the “shadow of the future spaceship Earth”, i.e. the limits of the industrially accelerated, excessive use of exhaustible resources and the immense throughput of goods for production and consumption, as well as the associated environmental pollution, are already clearly discernible; that by developing new, more durable materials and energy systems, including nuclear energy, the limits to growth could merely be postponed, but not permanently overcome; that individual welfare also depends on identification with others, with the community, not only in the present but also in the past and with a view to the future; and that a society in which the feeling of responsibility for posterity is lost loses its positive self-image and thus also the ability to solve current problems, and falls apart. With regard to reasons for the excessive use of goods and the associated burden on the environment, as well as possible short-term measures, Boulding (1966, pp. 13f.) addresses the misdirection by the market-driven price system, which is not suitable for the accurate recording of environmental costs in the prices of raw materials and finished goods, and argues for an internalisation of external effects through corrective taxation. He also considers it necessary to tighten up the criminal prosecution of environmental offences and sees the overly broad right to purchase and use private goods as a general problem. Boulding later revisited the idea of “Spaceship Earth” and wrote a commentary entitled Spaceship Earth Revisited, first published in 1980 and reprinted repeatedly in 1993 and 2013. He prefaces the commentary by stating, “The spaceship metaphor stresses the earth’s smallness, crowdedness, and limited resources; the need for avoiding destructive conflict; and the necessity for a sense of world community with a very heterogeneous crew” (Boulding 2013, p. 345). Boulding was dissatisfied with the profligate lifestyles of US citizens and prosumers in other supposedly affluent societies, as well as with the low political profile of growth-critical analyses of environmental threats, such as those presented by the Club of Rome in particular. However, he also takes up – evolutionary biology and technology oriented and

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inspired by futurology – considerations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to which a colonization of other planets is considered possible, and does not want to exclude that humans could leave the earth at some point. However, Boulding (2013, p. 346) also clarifies: “Ultimately, of course, we must face the spaceship earth on earth. Uncertainty, however, is the principal property of the future, and time horizons themselves have an irreducible uncertainty about them”. Boulding (2013, p. 347) ends his commentary with the – thought-provoking – sentence: “It would be presumptuous of us to think that the human race is any more than a link in the great evolutionary process of the universe that moves majestically from unknown Alpha to the even more unknown Omega”. Boulding coined the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth” with journalist, economist, and environmental activist Barbara Ward, or at least popularized it in professional discussions (Boulding 1970c, p. 163, 2013, p. 345). Boulding wrote the essay – initially conceived as a manuscript for presentation at the Sixth Resources for the Future Forum on Environmental Quality in March 1966 – at a time when economists were still little interested in environmental issues, and thus significantly stimulated and influenced related research and discussion beyond disciplinary boundaries (see, for example, Fisher and Peterson 1976, p. 3; Höhler and Luks 2006a, pp. 5ff.; Spash 2013, pp. 348–351; Scott 2015, p. 71). A broad critique of “Spaceship Earth” economics has been presented by Clive L. Spash (2013). Spash (2013, pp. 353ff.) criticizes in particular Boulding’s technological optimism regarding the possibilities of postponing the drying up of raw material sources and the overloading of pollution sinks on Earth, and even of colonizing outer space (cf. on this Spash 2013, p. 362). The criticism overlooks the fact that Boulding did not want to ignore technical developments and projections of the time and naturally regarded the future as unknown. Spash’s (2013, p. 355) observation is correct – presumably with reference to Boulding’s 1980 commentary: “Boulding would not be seen as having provided the full range of arguments and concerns of modern environmentalists. For example, he does not address the social and political factors or structural issues driving economic growth and environmental degradation”. Höhler and Luks (2006b, p. 6; transl.) are much more “gracious” in their assessment of Boulding’s remarks in the two spaceship contributions – at least in part – as “issues of global political dimension, in that he definitively consigned the expansionist policy of high imperialism to the past and appealed to a world community that would be closely dependent on each other in the future to solve common problems”. In his commentary, Spash (2013) reflects not only on Boulding’s original contribution of 1966 and his addendum of 1980, but also on Boulding’s earlier publications and the history of the emergence of ecological economics in the USA.

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Spash (2013, pp. 355ff.) reports, among other things, on the failure – probably also blamed by himself on Boulding – to found an association of ecological economists in the 1970s; he points, e.g. to Georgescu-Roegen’s (1971) criticism of the presentation of production functions in Boulding’s 1955 textbook Economic Analysis; and, in connection with the classification of “spaceship economics” as “social ecological economics”, he presents the ecological foundation of the Reconstruction of Economics (Boulding 1950) in a highly truncated way, regarding it as “some early reflections on the relationships between ecology and economcis” (Spash 2013, p. 356), and as a source he merely refers to the title of the first chapter (“An Ecological Introduction”) of the Reconstruction as if it were an essay, thus giving the impression that the book was an anthology edited by Boulding, but not a monograph. This criticism by Spash (2013, p. 356, plus p. 361) does not, in my estimation, do justice to Boulding’s achievement. Scott (2015, p. 66) has – it should be added here – written about the book: “Many people (including me) think Reconstruction was Boulding’s most underappreciated work” (see also Scott 2015, pp. 106f.).

3

Implications for Consumption and Consumer Theory

For the description, explanation and design of economic processes, the consideration of mental activities and the use of money is not sufficient. Economic activity takes place through supply processes that are embedded in family, social and ecological functional systems. Consequently, economic activity is subject to social rules and the laws of nature. Both classes of determinants cannot be permanently overridden. Anyone who is serious about sustainability and environmental protection cannot – following the insights of Boulding (1950, 1966) and also of other ecologically oriented economists, e.g. Ayres and Kneese (1969) – exclude relevant laws of nature from the analysis of economic action and ignore known conclusions. This is especially true of the laws of thermodynamics and the conclusion to understand production and consumption as a process of transformation that normally extends over a multitude of economic stages, instead of distinguishing production and consumption according to whether the transformation takes place in firms or in private households. The idea of consumption as the final consumption of goods in households is not tenable. Members of private households ultimately produce the directly useful goods and thus human capital for themselves, parents also for their children, and thus for society (see e.g. Deutscher Bundestag 1994, pp. 144f.). Enterprises supply

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only a part of the intermediate inputs that have been produced by transforming the input goods. The sole assignment of the consumer role to private households is obsolete. It is also outdated and misleading to think that households only use market goods in the transformation of intermediate inputs into directly useable goods and human capital. Rather, they also use collective and public goods of enterprises of private and public associations as well as directly the goods of nature. Private households are generative, entrepreneurial and civically active, creating not only families but also businesses and associations (see e.g. Verbraucherzentrale 2011; Selbsthilfezentrum München 2013). To be sure, the economic process is an interdependent one. But if a starting and end point is sought, then only private households come into consideration; they are the basic units of the economy and society – and as Boulding (1972) metaphorically put it – thus at the same time the “Achilles’ heel” of society. Production and consumption in companies, associations and private households serve to sustain and shape life. But every transformation of goods is causally linked to environmental uses and should be oriented according to socially and ecologically reasonable standards. This is undisputed in consumer research today. But a one-dimensional understanding of the final consumer in the household sector still dominates, which provides the template for consumer policy by the state and private associations with the task of buyer protection in the consumer goods sector, while the representation of the interests of the same people – equally one-dimensional – as employees is supposed to be the responsibility of the trade unions (cf. on this Stauss 1982). It cannot be ruled out that, as a result, the “whole person” in the household as well as in the company or in the association is pressed into role conflicts and is torn back and forth in his or her behaviour. Entrenched role models and tasks of professional and voluntary interest groups, traditionally oriented educational content in schools and universities, misconceptions about the origins, forms and size structures in the household, corporate and association sectors, as well as about the contributions of the aforementioned main groups of actors to welfare production, promote the idea of the opposition between households and corporations as consumers and producers. These overgeneralized figures of thought increasingly correspond less to reality, they are no longer up-to-date and need to be rethought as well as empirically underpinned in order to promote a new understanding of the economy and economic activity and to enable evidence-based recommendations and measures for a more sustainable, personally successful as well as socially and ecologically responsible way of life (cf. on this Piorkowsky 2020).

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Piorkowsky, M.-B. (2019b). Alfred Marshalls Konsumenten sind Prosumenten. In M.-B. Piorkowsky & K. Kollmann (Eds.), Vergessene und verkannte Vordenker für eine Kritische Konsumtheorie. Beiträge aus Ökonomik, Soziologie und Philosophie (Reihe Kritische Verbraucherforschung) (pp. 21–46). Springer VS. Piorkowsky, M.-B. (2020). Ökonomie ist menschlich. Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftslehre neu gedacht. Springer Gabler. Robbins, L. (1945 [1932]). An essay on the nature and significance of economic science (2nd ed., reviesed and extendet). Macmillan & Co. (1st ed., 1932). Scott, R. (2015). Kenneth Boulding. A voice crying in the wilderness. Palgrave Macmillan. Selbsthilfezentrum München, S. (Eds.). (2013). Recht für Selbsthilfegruppen. Autorin: Renate Mitleger-Lehner. 2. aktualisierte und erweiterte Aufl. AG SPAK. Solo, R. A. (1994). Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910–1993. An appreciation. Journal of Economic Issues, 28(4), 1187–1200. Spash, C. L. (2013). Comment: The economics of Boulding’s spaceship earth. In W. Dolfsma & S. Kesting (Eds.), Interdisciplinary economics: Kenneth E. Boulding’s engagement in the sciences (pp. 348–363). Routledge. Stauss, B. (1982). Verbraucherbegriff und Verbraucherpolitik. Mitteilungsdienst der Verbraucher-Zentrale Nordrhein-Westfalen – Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbände e.V., 4(3), 66–70. Turvey, R. (1951). A reconstruction of economics by Kenneth E. Boulding. Economica (New Series), 18(70), 203–207. Verbraucherzentrale. (2011). Nebenberuflich selbstständig. Steuern, Recht, Finanzierung, Marketing (1st ed.). Verbraucherzentrale NRW. Wray, L. R. (2013). Commentary article: Keneth Boulding’s grants economics. In W. Dolfsma & S. Kesting (Eds.), Interdisciplinary economics: Kenneth E. Boulding’s engagement in the sciences (pp. 425–439). Routledge.

Michael-Burkhard Piorkowsky Dipl.-Kfm., Dipl.-Volksw., Dr. rer. pol., Professor emeritus of Household and Consumption Economics at the University of Bonn. Main research interests: Life design in the household context, socio-economic hybrids, micro-macro transitions in the economic system, production and consumption theory.

Sustainable Development Is the Alternative to Capitalism: Memories of Gerhard Scherhorn Johannes Hoffmann and Gerhard Hofmann Abstract

Gerhard Scherhorn incorporated the natural philosophical critique of the socially self-inflicted destruction of the natural foundations of living conditions on earth, as formulated in particular by Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich, into economic analysis and, together with like-minded people, translated it into ethically and ecologically sound evaluations and recommendations for action as well as into political communication strategies. He saw the overconfidence in the selfregulating forces of a free market economy, the under-regulated use of natural goods in the economic process and the system-inherent tendency to externalise the environmental costs caused by business as decisive for the misorientations in the economic process. In this way, the economist Gerhard Scherhorn went from being a consumer researcher and consumer politician to a thought leader and pioneer for “sustainable management” and “new models of prosperity”.

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Gerhard Scherhorn: Lateral Thinker and Initiator

Gerhard Scherhorn was born in 1930. After school, he first did an apprenticeship as an editor and publishing bookseller. He then studied philosophy and economics in Cologne under the social economist Günter Schmölders, with whom he earned his J. Hoffmann (✉) Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] G. Hofmann Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_6

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doctorate in 1959 and his habilitation in 1966. This shows that interdisciplinarity was extremely important to him from the beginning of his studies. Scherhorn was appointed to the Hamburg University of Economics and Politics in 1966. In 1971 he became a member of the board of the Cologne Institute for Applied Consumer Research (IFAV). In 1975 Scherhorn followed a call to Stuttgart-Hohenheim, where he founded the only Institute for Consumer Research and Consumer Policy to date. From 1974 to 1979 he was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts (Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung) and of the Consumer Advisory Council to the Federal Minister of Economics. Until 1991 he was a member of the Consumer Policy Advisory Council to the Senator for Economics, Transport and Agriculture in Hamburg and until 1995 he was co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Policy. After his retirement in Stuttgart-Hohenheim, Scherhorn was persuaded by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker to join the Wuppertal Institute and became director of the working group “New Models of Prosperity” in 1996 and director of the research group “Sustainable Production and Consumption” in 2004, to name just a few stages of his extensive research and advisory activities. Scherhorn founded the Research Group for Ethical-Ecological Rating (FG EÖR) with me, Johannes Hoffmann, in 1992 and co-directed and shaped it with us, Johannes Hoffmann and Gerhard Hofmann, until his tragic bicycle accident in June 2013. His publications during this time, which have been published in an anthology on the occasion of his 80th birthday, are eloquent testimony to this. The volume bears the title he himself suggested for it: Growth or Sustainability. Economics at the Crossroads (Scherhorn 2015). Our thanks go to Gerhard Scherhorn. On 4 May 2018, we said farewell to Prof. Dr. Gerhard Scherhorn in a large circle at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. With this contribution we want to set him and his work present. By remembering our collaboration over many years, we continue an intense, enriching and dense communication. Perhaps the memory of him is the densest form of communication of all. A communication that focuses entirely on him; a communication in which we allow ourselves to be captured and inspired by his clear view of social, economic and political reality. He is then fully present to us. Yes, we feel an immediacy of perception in which present, past and future merge into one. It was a pleasure to work with him. He did not take anyone by surprise with his knowledge, but put it up for discussion and was pleased when everyone got involved and contributed to the clarification and further development in the discussion. Working with him, one had the feeling of being involved in the outcome. Therefore, it is no wonder that all who experienced him, met him, worked with him,

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discussed with him, argued with him, learned with him and laughed with him, miss him and his way painfully. But this is precisely the experience that allows us to remain in communication with him in a new way and a new form after his departure. In every culture there is the experience of the presence of the deceased, of the presence of the ancestors. This experience can be so strong that we converse with the deceased as a matter of course, as we always have. Our encouragement will not be without resonance, but will experience a response in a way that is quite different from before, but which is nevertheless a response from him, a sign of his presence with us in our midst. We can realize a new form of relationship with him that takes up the experiences we have shared with him. This is the purpose of our contribution.

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Recollection of Our Interaction in the Research Group Ethical-Ecological Rating

I, Johannes Hoffmann, would like to remember Gerhard Scherhorn from the more than 20 years of joint leadership of the research group Ethical-Ecological Rating (FG EÖR) at the Department of Catholic Theology of the Goethe University Frankfurt. We met for the first time in 1989. Dr. Gotthard Fuchs, director of the Rabanus Maurus Academy in Wiesbaden-Naurod, had asked both of us whether we wanted to conceive and carry out a conference together on an ecological topic to be chosen by us. Gerhard Scherhorn asked me what topic I could imagine, and I said: “Ethicalecological rating”. Scherhorn was enthusiastic about the suggestion and so we set to work. The topic was probably not yet on the agenda of the academy’s clientele at the time, because the conference did not take place due to a lack of participants. But we got to know each other on that occasion and both discovered – albeit from quite different perspectives – our common interest in sustainable development within the framework of the market economy. The opportunity for concrete cooperation arose after a conference with bank managers at the Protestant Academy in Bad Boll on the subject of “Clean Profits – Ethical Asset Investments under Discussion” in March 1991 (Roche et al. 1992). At the end of the conference I was asked whether I could form a research group to develop a criteriology for the evaluation of capital investments, because in the land of poets and thinkers one needs a scientifically developed and methodically supported evaluation system. In Germany one could not act like in the USA, where a fund is already considered ethically correct if it does not invest in tobacco or weapons. I accepted this invitation, got together with Gerhard Scherhorn and

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founded the FG EÖR with him in 1992. It was important to Scherhorn that scientists and students in the research group should work together not only interdisciplinarily, but also transdisciplinarily with practitioners from business and society. Our economic order allows us to use (overuse) the commons (resources), which form the basis of our common life and production, more than they can bear. For the right of private owners to dispose of their land, production facilities, vehicles, etc. as they see fit, does not usually end consistently where private ownership leads to unrestrained access to the commons, such as the atmosphere, the air we breathe, soil fertility, water purity, abundance of fish, biodiversity, mineral resources. As if fresh air, pure water, fertile soil or rich fishing grounds were still available in abundance, as if the latter could be plundered almost at will, the others unduly burdened. According to the principle of “highest return in the shortest time”, costs are saved at their expense, thus making prices cheaper and qualities higher. This happens with the blessing of competition and corporate law: expenditures and self-restraints that would be necessary to avoid damage to used common goods or to restore these goods after use can be omitted. In a word: common goods (of human, natural and social capital) are overused, just as the proverbial commons, the common meadow, was overused when too many animals grazed on it for too long instead of being given the opportunity to regenerate through limited use. Overexploitation occurs when restrictions on the use of the commons or expenditures for their preservation or replacement may be omitted – in other words, because costs may be passed on (externalized) to third parties. A third word for overuse and externalization is overexploitation, a fourth is depletion. Today, all commons are threatened by overexploitation and depletion; many are close to the critical point at which their depletion can no longer be reversed; there is no tipping switch. But competition law still protects competitors even when they use externalization to gain advantages over those who bear costs themselves in order to preserve natural and social livelihoods. And still corporate law obliges the board of directors of a corporation to act solely in the pecuniary interest of shareholders, but not also to protect natural and social capital. Our contribution in the FG EÖR was and is to this day carried by the effort to expose hidden facts, to make the unseen visible, to lure out of outdated traditions, to give courage for new ways, to accompany and promote effective altruists, to go a way of “subversive integration” (Ziegler 2017a; cf. also Ziegler 2017b), so that becoming human in community in being with creation can succeed. This was entirely in the sense of Gerhard’s friend, the natural philosopher Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich (1997a, b), who accompanied us correspondingly in the development of the Criteriology. Among other things, he wrote to me on 9.6.1997:

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Thank you for your letter and the manuscript on cultural compatibility. I find your reflections deeply insightful, just as I would like to imagine the reintegration of the economy into the cultural context of our society! Of course, I am happy if you refer to my reflections as well. I particularly liked the fact that you know how to treat this large and difficult subject in a relatively relaxed manner. The only thing I missed was that you did not make a small book out of it, because many beautiful thoughts are only all too briefly hinted at. [. . .] It seems to me that your thoughts are so mature that it would be a pity if you did not develop them calmly and with a little longer breath on at least 100 pages. (Excerpt from the letter of Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich of 9.6.1997 to Johannes Hoffmann)

After more than 25 years of scientific work by the FG EÖR on the development of ecological, social, economic, ecumenical, interreligious and intercultural sustainability in the market economy, it makes sense to recall the beginnings and to take a look at the work currently underway in order to gain ideas for future research and awareness-raising work. The overexploitation of the commons will continue unabated as long as it is not prevented by legislative initiatives that put an end to the toleration of externalising competition. There will be no other way to achieve sustainable development. Costcutting at the expense of common goods must be sanctioned by law as unfair competition. This is in line with the constitutional mandate to implement the social obligation of property. Article 14(2) of the German Basic Law requires the legislature to regulate the use of private property in such a way that it also serves the common good. The legislature is most likely to comply with this requirement if it adopts rules whose observance can be monitored and, if necessary, enforced by the general public itself, by aggrieved individuals, by the affected competitors and by the institutions of civil society. To this end, various concrete legal amendments have been proposed, including to the Civil Code: the arbitrary disposal of private property should exclude externalisation. Externalisation should be included in the prohibited acts of competition under Sects. 3 and 4 of the Act against Unfair Competition. In addition, agreements between companies that guarantee each other the internalisation of certain costs that they have passed on to date should be exempted from the ban on cartels; this should be accompanied by relevant clarifications of the Stock Corporation Act, the Banking Act and the Investment Act, the latter with an obligation to provide certified investment advice. It was Scherhorn’s concern that women and men from science and practice work together in the FG EÖR. Therefore, the FG EÖR has been interdisciplinary, ecumenical, interreligious, intercultural and transdisciplinary from the beginning. Today this is the favoured scientific conception (cf. Borgwardt 2017).

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Joyous Serenity

I, Gerhard Hofmann, first met Gerhard Scherhorn in May 2008 at a meeting of the Ethical-Ecological Rating Research Group (FG EÖR) at the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) at Frankfurt’s Palmengarten. Johannes Hoffmann and Gerhard Scherhorn chaired the conference, as they always did – until a tragic accident for which he was not responsible took him out of work (on June 11, 2013) and later out of life (February 28, 2018). But by then he was already 88 years old. Scherhorn, an ascetic-looking lightning-bright man – I had been told – feared a global financial crisis as early as 2002. In order to plan an international and intercultural symposium of experts, the research group developed a discussion paper under the heading: “Sustainable Development: The Special Responsibility of Financial Capital” for the participants. Lead: Gerhard Scherhorn. The symposium itself, with the theme: “Sustainability as a design principle for the frameworks of financial and goods markets”, was the meeting mentioned above. As a result, a communiqué was published – topic: “Political guard rails for sustainable markets and sustainable competition” (see Hoffmann and Scherhorn 2009). At the same time – parallel to the final discussion – I drafted a media release (which I don’t know whether any medium published, despite the broadest possible distribution): “Markets and competition must finally become sustainable”, it said. Finally! “High capital rents are only available at the expense of others” and “most of those who play the stock market game lose”. Such sentences, surprising for some, were uttered in the course of the conference. Starting from the horror reports about unleashed capitalism, boundless globalization and its consequences, capital vagabonding around the globe and morality-free shareholder value, the group demanded urgently to change the law against unfair competition: Those who pass on costs to the general public, “externalize”, create an advantage for themselves – the law must put a stop to this. Moreover, competition should only be considered worthy of protection if it is also ecologically, socially and culturally sustainable. This was the unique selling point of the research group (sustainability was demanded by many, but which one?: cultural sustainability). The final declaration adopted by the symposium called for absolute transparency and risk control for the international financial markets – along with the transaction tax, which was still a provocation at the time. Financial capital had to be returned to the old social bond from which it had been freed to the disadvantage of many. This could only be achieved through strict controls. A sustainability obligation should be included in

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the Stock Corporation Act, with which the shareholders must be “obliged to give equal consideration to the productive forces of labour and nature”. These were largely Gerhard Scherhorn’s thoughts, but he had the gift of conveying to everyone, with cheerful composure, the feeling that he himself had made the decisive contribution. This was also the case when we occasionally worked together on (his!) texts; I had stylistic-grammatical contributions to make – which is not to say that he had particular weaknesses there. But the weights were distributed without him ever letting you feel it. Later, we drafted an appeal to the Bundestag (“We need legislative initiatives for sustainable competition”); I sent our demands, disguised as “proposals” to all coalition negotiators during the formation of the government in 2013. Our true influence on politics was kept within narrow limits. Gerhard Scherhorn didn’t mind: “The board doesn’t get thinner when you stop drilling”.

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Boundless Optimism

Peter Hennicke, who worked with Scherhorn at the Wuppertal Institute until 2000 and then became his successor, praised him (a “fine man”) during the academic funeral service at Frankfurt University on 4 May 2018 for “his enormous scientific breadth, his elaborate language, his impressive acumen, his moral rigorism, his interdisciplinary courage, and – last but not least – his boundless optimism” (Hennicke n.d. [2018]; transl.). Under the heading Weak sustainability destroys the earth, Gerhard Scherhorn (Scherhorn and Wilts 2001) had formulated his concept of strong sustainability as an opposition to the capitalist logic of exploitation. On this basis, it was only consistent that he did not exclude questions of power in economy and society, but tried to balance them in almost Solomonic wisdom. In his book contribution to “Psychology in Conversation with Gerhard Scherhorn on Economics”, Scherhorn (2001) stated the following with regard to the “relations of power”: So one cannot blindly rely on the wisdom of the market, but must critically and in detail examine how the respective power relations affect its outcome. I call powerblind, for example, the idea that one can look at the relationship between labour and capital solely from the aspect that both are factors of production that must be rationally combined in the interest of the production of goods, without at the same time ensuring that both are in a stable balance of power. (Scherhorn 2001, p. 448; transl.)

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Hennicke (n.d. [2018]) emphasized that “balance” was a key word for understanding Gerhard Scherhorn’s work. Behind this stood for him the normative question “of the right measure”, which he understood as a universal theme for consumption and production, just like the understanding of sufficiency. Scherhorn had always taken a critical view of his own discipline, economics. It was important to him to emphasize the role and reflection of non-monetary economics and the economic dimensions of the commons: The idea that the purpose of work is solely the acquisition of money is also powerblind. It ignores informal work in the household and family, in self-production and real exchange, in neighbourly help and civic engagement, although the higher the productivity and the lower the volume of work in formal work, the more important this becomes for the overall well-being, and therefore it urgently needs to be included in the visible socially valued social product. (Scherhorn 2001, p. 449; transl.)

Furthermore, Scherhorn repeatedly emphasized that job destruction and environmental destruction had the same cause. With regard to the “power of conditions” he explained it as follows: The relation of prices for nature and labour is determined in political decisions. For centuries – and even more so in the times of cheap oil – these decisions have been designed in such a way that companies have to pay less for nature consumption than for labour, so it is economical to increase labour productivity at the expense of resource productivity. This prevents nature-given resources from being used efficiently and sparingly; therefore, the environment is destroyed. Labor productivity is increased so rapidly by wasteful use of fossil fuels, and now combined with digital information and communication technologies, that aggregate demand cannot keep pace; therefore, jobs are lost. (Scherhorn 2001, p. 447; transl.)

Scherhorn repeatedly criticized the excessive trust in self-interested behavior in markets and organizations. In his opinion, it produces the very social conditions that promote indifference to the whole, make the overexploitation of the global commons seem normal, and encourage the unlimited expansion of capital. The source of the threat lies “in the irresponsibility of capital. A charter for corporations today must define responsibilities of an ecological, economic and social nature. In the realization of these three responsibilities one can see the basis for a cultivation of capital, because thereby the birth defect of capitalism is remedied and it becomes possible to integrate capital into the whole of the productive forces” (Hennicke n.d. [2018]; transl.). The exceptional personality, the radical lateral thinker within the guild of economists, linguistically and conceptually always striving for connectivity with

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his discipline, had – according to Hennicke (op. cit. [2018]) – a deep and empirically well-founded aversion to unleashed global capitalism, but he was not a critic of capitalism in the sense of a Marxian methodology and capital analysis. A key word for Gerhard Scherhorn was “externalisation”. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker (building on this) had coined the dictum that “prices must tell the ecological truth”. For there is no doubt that capitalism would be fenced into more ecologically and socially acceptable guard rails if as many external costs as possible were reflected in prices. Scherhorn, knowing full well that this could only be a beginning, took the concept of externalization beyond the sphere of costs and prices, thereby also giving it a new force in his critique of the system, Hennicke said (see Hennicke n.d. [2018]). Scherhorn had considered “externalization a necessary property of capitalist societies, the opposite of sustainability, and surmountable through sustainable development”. Capitalism, he argued, is about “accumulation by appropriation” of common goods, Marx’s original accumulation continuing in the present, in its totality opposed to the market principle. The fact that and how this could be overcome was expressed by Scherhorn – shortly before his tragic accident – in a contribution to the externalisation debate in 2013, and his optimistic assessment of the establishment of a New Prosperity Model was formulated particularly succinctly in a radical thesis, which also inspired the title for this contribution: Since the [problem of externalization, P. H.] is becoming increasingly clear to us today, we must sooner or later introduce a fundamental protection of the commons, by supplementing the property right to use them with a property obligation to preserve them. This will remove the basis of accumulation by appropriation – and thus the basis of capitalism. [. . .] This is facilitated by the fact that we no longer see the alternative to capitalism in socialism, but in sustainable development, which is closer to the skin and more compatible with democracy. Sustainability consists in the preservation of the common goods, above all others of the natural ones; the principle of sustainability consists in the priority of the preservation of the natural basis of life; thus, Sustainable Development is the alternative to capitalism. (Gerhard Scherhorn, excerpt from discussion paper 2013, quoted in Hennicke n.d. [2018]; transl.)

References Borgwardt, A. (2017). Impulse für die strategische Debatte in der Wissenschaft (Schriftenreihe des Netzwerk Exzellenz an Deutschen Hochschulen) (Vol. 11). Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Im Internet: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/studienfoerderung/ 13460.pdf. Accessed on 29. Mai. 2020

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Hennicke, P. (n.d. [2018]). Gerhard Scherhorn und das Wuppertal Institut. In Weltethos Institut (Hrsg.), “Also ist Nachhaltigkeit die Alternative zum Kapitalismus”. https:// weltethos-institut.org/blog/allgemein/also-ist-nachhaltigkeit-die-alternative-zumkapitalismus/. Accessed on 30. Mai. 2020. Hoffmann, J., & Scherhorn, G. (Eds.). (2009). Eine Politik für Nachhaltigkeit. Neuordnung der Kapital- und Gütermärkte. Reihe “Geld und Ethik”,. Reihe “Geld & Ethik” (Vol. 2). Altius. Meyer-Abich, K. M. (1997a). Praktische Naturphilosophie. Erinnerung an einen vergessenen Traum. C. H. Beck. Meyer-Abich, K. M. (Ed.). (1997b). Vom Baum der Erkenntnis zum Baum des Lebens. Ganzheitliches Denken der Natur in Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft. C. H. Beck. Roche, P., Hoffmann, J., & Homolka, W. (Eds.). (1992). Ethische Geldanlagen. Kapital auf neuen Wegen. Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation. Scherhorn, G. (2001). Ökonomie. In H. Keupp & K. Weber (Eds.), Psychologie. Ein Grundkurs (pp. 441–450). Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Scherhorn, G. (2015). Wachstum oder Nachhaltigkeit. Die Ökonomie am Scheideweg. Mit einem Vorwort von Johannes Hoffmann (Hrsg.), Für die Forschungsgruppe EthischÖkologisches Rating. Reihe “Geld und Ethik” (Vol. 3). Altius. Scherhorn, G., & Wilts, C. H. (2001). Schwach nachhaltig wird die Erde zerstört. GAIA– Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 10, 249–255. Ziegler, J. (2017a). Tahir Chaudhry. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 202, 50. Ziegler, J. (2017b). Der schmale Grat der Hoffnung. Meine gewonnenen und verlorenen Kämpfe und die, die wir gemeinsam gewinnen werden. C. Bertelsmann.

Johannes Hoffmann Professor of Moral Theology, Social Ethics and Business Ethics at the Department of Catholic Theology of the Goethe University in Frankfurt/M; Deacon with civil vocation of the Diocese of Limburg, Member of the Board of Theologie Interkulturell e.V.; Project Leader of the Research Group Ethical-Ecological Rating (FG ÖER) of the Goethe University Frankfurt; since 2018 Member of the Research Group Finance and Economy of the Global Ethic Foundation at the University of Tübingen. Gerhard Hofmann Dr. phil., publicist, numerous stations as TV reporter and correspondent (Munich, Mainz, Buenos Aires, Baden-Baden, Bonn, Berlin); today managing director of Agentur Zukunft, Büro für Nachhaltigkeitsfragen (Agency for the Future, Office for Sustainability Issues) – longstanding member of the management team of the research group Ethical-Ecological Rating at the Goethe University Frankfurt – today Global Ethic Research Group Finance and Economy at the University of Tübingen.

Georg Simmel: Fashion and Beauty Rainer Hufnagel

For Klaus Christian Köhnke 1953–2013

Abstract

Without taking social milieus into account, explanations of consumer behaviour will remain incomplete. Against this background, we look at the life and work of a classic of modernity: Georg Simmel. From his exuberant oeuvre, this paper will focus on his philosophy of fashion. We examine what suggestions might be drawn from Simmel’s essay today, as “fast fashion” contributes noticeably to environmental pollution and waste of resources. His qualitative model is supplemented by quantitative simulations. It can be deduced that the beauty of things could help to slow down and dampen fashion waves. The concept of beauty leads us to Simmel’s contributions to neo-Kantian aesthetics. However, their dialectical nature makes them seem of limited use in moving from “fast” fashion to a more sustainable “slow” fashion. From another point of view, however, the dialectic of social systems is also to be welcomed. The weaker the determinant parts of the social system, the more hope remains for individual freedom, even in a future that is likely to be characterized by the accumulation of social data.

R. Hufnagel (✉) HSWT, Weidenbach, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. -B. Piorkowsky, K. Kollmann (eds.), Headstrong and Unorthodox Pioneers for a Critical Theory of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42050-5_7

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Introduction

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) from Berlin is considered a pioneer of modern sociology. His current importance is based primarily on the fact that he – along with Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen – is considered the founder of the lifestyle concept. Formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century by this trio within the framework of a qualitative sociology, this concept was married in the last quarter of the twentieth century with sophisticated quantitative methods of statistical clustering. This is how the concept of lifestyle clusters was arrived at, the best known of which are the “Sinus Milieus” (on all this Hartmann 1999). The canonization of Simmel as a classic of modernity became concrete in the 1980s with the production of the 24-volume complete edition published by Suhrkamp-Verlag from 1989 to 2015. Parallel to the work on the edition, Rammstedt, Köhnke, Dahme, Frisby and others published a broad stream of research results and interpretations on Simmel and his work (cf. in particular Dahme and Rammstedt 1984). Why should consumer research be concerned with Simmel? The first answer is obvious. No advertising man or consumer researcher would seriously dismiss the background of social milieus as unimportant in explaining consumer behavior. A second answer points us to Berlin. In the course of his life, Simmel became the chronicler of Berlin’s rise from a small residential town to a metropolis on the scale of London or Paris. The attitude to life of urbanity is described in the Philosophy of Money, published in 1900 (Simmel 1989). It is condensed in the 1903 essay Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (Simmel 1991, pp. 116–131). In the big city, the individual is anonymous, he distances himself from others. If he wants to live his individuality, he must choose from the rich cultural offer of the metropolis and present himself expressively. He must distinguish himself from the others as much as possible through his lifestyle, for example in fashion and prestige consumption (see also Jung 2016, pp. 156–161). Since 1989, we have also witnessed Berlin’s resurgence as an international metropolis. We encounter the dialectic of extreme anonymization and expressive individualization all the more on the Internet. Whereas before it was enough to appear shrill in the S-Bahn, today it takes the most elaborate self-presentation in the social media to stand out. In this essay, however, we do not want to trace the breadth of Simmel’s work any further. We will limit ourselves to his philosophy of fashion (Simmel 2016a). Like Simmel in his time, we are also experiencing a general acceleration of living conditions, especially in the field of clothing fashion. “Fast fashion” is throwing new clothes on the market ever faster, fueled by influencers on the web. 5% of global emissions are consumed by new clothing. After 1 year, 60% of all clothing is

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already in the trash (Frey 2020; see Overview 1 for more). People’s tendency to follow fashions is used by the consumer goods industry and retailers, in shopping malls and online, to boost sales. From a sustainability perspective, this is concerning. Let’s look at what a philosophy of fashion has to say about the genesis and persistence of fashions! Overview 1 Facts About Fast Fashion. Source: Frey 2020

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Since 2000, sales of new clothing have more than doubled. More than 100 billion parts are produced each year. A German buys more than 60 items per year. 40% of the clothes produced are not sold. 60% of the clothes sold end up in the garbage after 1 year. The collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh killed 1 135 people. 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions are caused annually by the textile industry (as much as Russia emits in total). Up to 3000 litres of water are needed for a T-shirt, and 8000 litres for a pair of jeans. 2.5% of the world’s arable land is devoted to cotton, yet it is the source of over 10% of the world’s pesticide use. ½ of the microparticles in the oceans come from synthetic fiber residues in the detergent solution.

Philosophical foundations and the use of mathematics give prestige to a science (cf. also McCloskey 1998). When Simmel is referred to as the “founder of sociology as a science” (Jung 2016, p. 194), when he himself presents “philosophies” (of money, fashion, the meal, etc.), we must not overestimate him on this point – with regard to methodology. Simmel’s “philosophies” are first of all conceptual analyses in cultural philosophy, as paraphrased by Köhnke (2019, p. 24): Understanding what a concept entails. Anyone who understands philosophizing to mean the development of a system, e.g. as done by Hegel, or at least the location of the object of consideration within one, will find himself disappointed. He will have to agree with the criticism already voiced by Simmel’s contemporaries (Koigen 1910, p. 924) of the “tendency towards systemless”. Those accustomed to today’s scholarly publishing, where editors and reviewers often press for brevity and conciseness, will soon be alienated by the causal nature of large passages of Simmel’s texts. A

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contemporary reviewer attests to Simmel’s remarks an “aphoristic character” (Gassen and Landmann 1958, p. 16). We are still most likely to do justice to Simmel if we appreciate him as a collector of material and a stimulator – no more and no less, as Quentin Skinner (1969) urged in an influential essay. In this sense, let this article (in Sect. 3) exemplify how and to what extent the mathematization and systematization of sociology can take Simmel’s basic ideas further. Moreover, the path from data and material collection to social theory and practice is a highly topical issue in our time (cf. Weigend 2017, pp. 38ff.); for we are confronted with the question of the extent to which the search engines, which know more and more about us, want to and can control our actions. In the following second chapter we first briefly introduce Vita and Opera. In chapter “Of Markets and People: Tibor Scitovsky’s Joyless Economy”, we look in detail at Simmel’s model of the phenomenon of fashion. Chapter “Albert O. Hirschman: Pioneer of an Action-Oriented Consumption Theory” discusses Simmel’s contribution to our current debates on fashion and sustainability. Chapter “Kenneth Ewart Boulding: Economics and Ecology” gives an outlook on the potential of Simmel’s collection of materials in the twenty-first century.

2

Life and Work

2.1

Curriculum Vitae

Georg Simmel himself attached little importance to the transmission of biographical details. The work seemed more important to him than the author. The most important primary sources of memoirs are Gassen and Landmann (1958), Susman (1959), and Hans Simmel (1976). Secondary sources, in order of detail, are Guth (in Simmel 2016a, pp. 50–51), Jung (2016, pp. 11–21), Rammstedt (in Simmel 2016b, pp. 362–377), and Köhnke (1996, pp. 9–153). Here is some information about Simmel’s vita in brief. Georg Simmel was born in Berlin on March 1, 1858, the son of Edward Simmel, a merchant. Edward Simmel was not very successful in business, although he was one of the co-founders of Sarotti chocolates, so that Georg, together with six siblings, grew up cramped but without hardship in the nascent cosmopolitan city of Berlin. At least he was able to attend grammar school and passed his Abitur in 1876. He then studied history and philosophy in Berlin. In 1874 his father died. The rich publisher Julius Friedländer, who was related to the Simmels by marriage, became Simmel’s guardian and left him his fortune in

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1889. Always financially secured by Friedländer, Simmel never had to submit unconditionally to monetary restrictions. This also allowed him a high degree of intellectual and journalistic autonomy, if not contentiousness. This was met with resistance and resentment enough. The Simmels were converted Jews, Georg’s lectures and talks were hip, and his publications sold well. All this together did not necessarily ensure universal popularity. The thesis “Psychological-ethnological studies on the beginnings of music”, which was initially submitted, was rejected because it was too sloppy in form and the choice of topic was too abstruse for the examination committee. Instead, they then accepted the already published and prize-winning treatise Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant’s Physischer Monadologie (Simmel 2000) and waved him through with “cum laude”. His habilitation thesis was accepted in 1883. But this time he failed the test lecture. It was not until 1885 that he became a Privatdozent. As such he offered, without a fixed salary, numerous lectures, popular and well attended, on numerous topics at the Berlin University. In 1890 Simmel married Gertrud Kinel. Their child Hans Simmel was born in 1891. In 1907 Gertrud Kantorowicz gave birth to his daughter Angela. In 1900, the Berlin University appointed him to the still unpaid position of Extraordinarius. In 1910 he became co-founder of the German Sociological Society. In 1914, finally and almost insultingly overdue, he received a full professorship in philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Strasbourg. Because of the war, of course, academic life in Strasbourg quickly died out. Simmel put his writings in order and, in fight with cancer, wrote his last philosophical outlooks. He died on September 26, 1918.

2.2

Complete Works

From his student days until his death, Georg Simmel was a prolific writer over four decades. The complete edition comprises 24 volumes, totalling more than 10,000 printed pages. Simmel’s work includes weighty monographs and a large number of smaller occasional writings. For a chronological list, see Simmel (2016b, pp. 366–368, pp. 371–372, p. 355, p. 377). In the middle of his work is the Philosophy of Money, published in 1900 (in the Gesamtausgabe Simmel 1989). It hits the nerve of the time, sketches an overall picture of the then modern culture under the sign of money, “a book that could only be written in this time and only in Berlin” (Joël 1901, p. 813; transl.).

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Three layers can be distinguished in Simmel’s work (Jung 2016, pp. 22–28). In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, he dealt with the developments of epistemological criticism of the time. Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism first provide an epistemological foundation for mathematized natural science. In the process, the a priori form of Anschauung is analytically separated from its content. The last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth century develop and discuss a transfer of this concept to the humanities. Are there a priori forms of historical and sociological Anschauung? Probably yes, but far more so than in the natural sciences. Ernst Cassirer elaborated this further after Simmel (cf. Paetzold 1995). We still draw on these developments today, when we francophilically rely on postmodern constructivism and deconstructivism. At the end of the nineteenth century – he had only just completed his studies, his doctorate and his habilitation – Simmel worked his way to the top of research that was current at the time and astonished his contemporaries with his daring blend of neo-Kantianism, pragmatism, social psychology, evolutionary theory and ethnology. From the vantage point of our present, we must admittedly state that even in this phase of development he was perhaps still unfinished, but not a “crank”. Simmel’s considerations (cf. Köhnke 1996, pp. 337–355) are clearly precursors of the concept of “memes” that has become popular in evolutionary economics (e.g. Dopfer 2004). Likewise, predecessor considerations can be found with regard to the field of research on the evolution of egoism and cooperation, which is so current today (e.g. Axelrod 1984; Wilson 2012; Nowak 2013). Around the turn of the century before last, Simmel then concentrated more and more on sociology. Better said, he became a co-founder, from today’s perspective a “classic” of this subject. The Philosophy of Money, based on at least 3 years of preliminary work published in 1900, and the monograph Sociology from 1908 are weighty outlines of this period (in the complete edition Simmel 1992). Thereafter, Simmel discovered Bergson and increasingly moved towards lifephilosophical considerations in his writings themselves. The enumeration of Simmel’s work in layers, periods or phases, should not lead to the misunderstanding that these are strictly separated or sharply delimitable. Rather, it is the case that throughout his scholarly life, Simmel revisited, reworked, or reincorporated materials, methods, and themes into subsequent larger works. Other essays, on the other hand, apparently owe their genesis to the occasion of the day, such as his 1910 Sociology of the Meal (Simmel 2016b, pp. 95–102), or to the opportunities of the times. For a discussion that we must return to in chapter “Albert O. Hirschman: Pioneer of an Action-Oriented Consumption Theory”, it is good to introduce Simmel’s

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attitude to beauty. The relevant writings do not fit well into the three-phase scheme. Therefore, we round off this second chapter with a brief look at Simmel’s aesthetics.

2.3

Aesthetics

Simmel entered the academic stage in the 1880s of the century before last as a Neukantian. Accordingly, Simmel’s aesthetics cannot deny its roots in German idealism. Kant had formulated an aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment (see Höffe 2014, pp. 271–278 for more details). According to this, a work of art is something created. This concept develops a certain dialectic on its own. Something created must be lifted out of the general stream of life, requires delimitation, form. The created must be original, not imitated. This leads idealism and romanticism more and more to the glorification of genius. Art thus becomes elitist. But the work of art also has a collective component. Artists and critics, even more the public, expect the work of art to please many people. Although idealism wants to distinguish stylistic judgements from fads, the reference to the quantity of judgement brings aesthetics close to fashion again. Originality, on the other hand, also entails the constant creation of new works of art. The mere copying of the tried and tested may be skilful craftsmanship, but it is not ingenious art. Simmel himself was friends with many artists, such as Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke, and furnished himself with art objects. “The large, high study [. . .] was covered with precious, old Persian carpets. Pictures by great masters, many of Rodin’s own drawings, hung on the walls. Everywhere, in showcases and open, stood vases and bowls of Far Eastern art, exquisite Buddha figures,” Margarete Susman (1959, p. 52; transl.) depicted the furnishings of her hero in the most beautiful light. Simmel has commented on aesthetics, directly in reviews or indirectly in his biographies of artists such as Dante, Goethe and Rembrandt (Simmel 2000, 2003, 2016b). Here, Simmel develops the dialectic of form and life already implied in Kant. For Simmel (2016b, pp. 307–308), form even means symmetry of the art object, the shaping of the work of art according to fixed, recognizable principles. But this quickly becomes boring and ends up looking sterile and unoriginal. The only way to escape this static is to keep drawing from real life. Simmel’s philosophy of art thus offers the image of a dialectical dynamic. “The vibrating life of the soul creating in any sense, developing into the boundless, is opposed by its fixed, ideally immovable product”, Simmel (1996, p. 390; transl.) formulated in the volume of essays Philosophical Culture. For Simmel, the tragedy of life consists in the fact

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that it wants to objectify itself in permanent forms. However, it can never be fully grasped by these forms; it must always go beyond them and move on (Jung 2016, p. 119). This process of art-making is in danger of slipping. The static of the form can become a commodity fetish, the dynamic can degenerate into the perpetual arousal of meaningless needs (Simmel 1996, pp. 408–410). Such reflections belong to Simmel’s last, life-philosophical phase. He did not resolve the dialectic or tragedy of his aesthetics in his life on earth. We, too, are little further on this question. We shall discuss this in more detail in the chapter after next, and relate it to our own time. Before that, however, we will explicitly introduce Simmel’s Philosophy of Fashion, published in 1905.

3

Philosophy of Fashion

3.1

Contents

Simmel’s Philosophy of Fashion is most conveniently available to us in a 2016 reprint supervised by Karl-Maria Guth (Simmel 2016a). In this reprint, Philosophy of Fashion comprises 34 octavo pages, the length of a journal publication by today’s standards. Likewise, by today’s standards, we would rather not call it a “philosophy”, but more informatively an essayistic qualitative sociological model (of fashion). The essayistic aspect is found in the fact that many arguments are not simply and uniquely statued, but that Simmel attempts to explain much through examples and metaphors. These examples and metaphors shine through their erudition. Unfortunately, this has the consequence that the content of the example cannot be assumed to be known by everyone (in the Berlin audience or the Central European readership). However, this only occurs to Simmel in retrospect, whereupon he does not omit the example, but seeks to clarify it through further explanations. Thus, he gets carried away, and line after line fills up until the master finds his way back to the actual line of argument. The essay contains a variety of clever aperçus on the phenomenon of fashion: 1. Fashion is a continuous phenomenon in the history of our species. Fashions change in time; the existence of fashions in general is a “timeless” phenomenon (Simmel 2016a, p. 6, p. 32).

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2. Fashion is class fashion. It sinks from the higher stratum to the lower stratum. After that, it can no longer serve as a class distinction. Therefore, the higher class develops a new fashion (Simmel 2016a, p. 6, p. 8). 3. Fashion is an example of the far-reaching plasticity of the social. Practicability does not matter concerning the question, “whether wide or narrow skirts, pointed or wide hairstyles, coloured or black ties are worn. Such ugly and adverse things are sometimes fashionable, as if fashion wanted to show its power precisely by the fact that we take upon ourselves the most abominable things for their sake” (Simmel 2016a, pp. 7ff.; transl.). 4. Fashion likes to focus on the exotic, the foreign, the alien (Simmel 2016a, pp. 8ff.). 5. The demi-monde, the “pariahs” are the source of new fashion styles (Simmel 2016a, p. 22). 6. Fashion infatuation arises from the discrepancy between a great need for recognition and low self-esteem (Simmel 2016a, pp. 14ff., p. 21). 7. Fashion is an institution. It reduces the transaction costs of life in society (Simmel 2016a, p. 26). 8. Women are more interested in fashion than men (Simmel 2016a, p. 19, p. 21). 9. Young people are more interested in fashion than old people (Simmel 2016a, p. 27). 10. Fashion can go beyond the boundaries of individual sense of shame (Simmel 2016a, p. 25). 11. The cheaper it is to follow fashion, the faster fashions change (Simmel 2016a, p. 31). 12. Fashions can take a cyclical course. What was out can experience a renaissance. Dress fashions in particular “keep harking back to earlier forms, so that their path compares to a cycle. As soon as an earlier fashion has to some extent faded from memory, there is no reason not to revive it” (Simmel 2016a, p. 33). 13. The classical and the natural are rather alien to fashion, the baroque and the immoderate more accessible to it (Simmel 2016a, p. 35). 14. One can also emphasize one’s originality by not caring about fashion (Simmel 2016a, pp. 36–37). Simmel usually underlines these points with examples taken from his time, the turn of the century before last. More or less spontaneously, however, we too can think of examples from our present that support the correctness of Simmel’s aphorisms or at least do not make them seem implausible. In any case, as far as the fashion phenomenon is concerned, our postmodernity is not so different from Simmel’s modernity – which means that point 1 can also be regarded as proven from our point

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of view. 2 is also correct. The middle classes are looking to join the upper classes (currently, for example, in driving an electric car). Big gasoline driven South German cars are now the posers’ downtown Saturday night pleasure. Regarding 3 the memory of the unspeakable “baggy pants” can suffice. Regarding 4 think of dreadlocks hairstyles or going out for sushi. Regarding 5 it is worth mentioning that blue jeans were once working clothes, as well as yellow oil jackets, and remember the origin of punk! Re 6: Especially children from precarious families cannot afford to come along with a used school satchel or a second-hand bicycle (Chassé et al. 2003). Middle class children are more likely to get from home the self-confidence and social capital to use something that does not meet the latest fashion demands. A need for selfexpression combined with low self-esteem can lead to Facebook addiction, the inability to log off for fear of missing out or being backstabbed. The broad audience of influencers on the Internet is also likely to be recruited from this motive. Re 7: We, too, dress “reasonably” fashionably in our professional lives; you can save yourself a lot of looks if you don’t come across as completely old-fashioned. Young people have enormous institutionalized pressure even in their free time. If you’re not dressed properly, you might not be able to get into a trendy club on Saturday night. Whether 8 it could still be substantiated today that women are more interested in fashion than men and young people more than old people, we will leave open in this essay. The fact that 10th fashion follies tempt people to wear clothing that touches the limits of the sense of shame is something that many have probably already encountered in their everyday lives. “Fast fashion” is only possible as cheap fashion. 4–6 new collections per year can only be sold if shirts and hoodies are discarded cheaply. The cyclical nature of various fashion phenomena can be understood by looking back decades. For men, for example, beards alternated with slicked-back chins, long hair with short hair, wide ties with thin ties. In cars, angular clear shapes and round baroque ones. More examples can be easily remembered. 14: Presenting oneself as a fashionista is still an option to gain social profile The extent to which the natural and the classical are less subject to the pressure of fashion will be discussed in more detail in chapter “Albert O. Hirschman: Pioneer of an Action-Oriented Consumption Theory”. Fashion knows an up and down, a back and forth, if not (even 12) a cyclical back and forth, an oscillation. In order to be able to explain oscillations, one must state two forces, one that drives away from equilibrium and one that counteracts or brakes the deflection. Simmel’s model on fashion prepares these explanatory

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possibilities at the very outset (Simmel 2016a, pp. 1–6). A dynamic world, in any case, could not be explained from one principle. At least two are necessary, he argues: Struggle and peace, movement and rest, productivity and receptivity, generality and particularity, devotion and self-assertion, merging with and standing out from the social group, socialism and individualism, sameness and uniqueness. One notices that Simmel is getting nearer and nearer to what it takes to explain fashions. Simmel offers, as said, a qualitative model of fashion dynamics. In Sect. 3.3 we will develop it in a little more detail and place it as a special case in a more comprehensive quantitative model of fashion oscillations. We discuss what Simmel’s ideas contribute in a fruitful way and where they come up against the limits of purely qualitative argumentation. Before that, however, a digression on the quantitative modeling of oscillations is in order.

3.2

Mathematics of Oscillations

Let an object be characterized by a state variable x that varies over time. The state variable x is therefore a function of time x(t). The graph of the function x(t) in a t/x axis intersection is called a trajectory. Figure 1 illustrates this with a swinging pendulum and the corresponding trajectory curve. The state variable x in this example is the deflection of the pendulum. An oscillation results from a deflecting force. Furthermore, a force is needed which drives the state variable back to its initial position. In Fig. 1 – with the pendulum – the resetting force is gravity. If the resetting force is proportional to the deflection, the result is a so-called “harmonic” oscillation. Its path is a sinusoidal curve as shown in Fig. 1. In reality, however, a pendulum is slowed down by friction. Due to friction, an oscillation dies away after some back and forth. In such a case, one speaks of a “damped” oscillation (see Fig. 2). If the friction is very strong, a so-called “creeping” oscillation is obtained. After a single deflection, the state variable “creeps” back to its rest position (Fig. 3). If the restoring force is not proportional to the displacement, then this is called a “nonlinear” oscillation. Non-linear oscillations can decay gently in the rest position or have a simple oscillating course, similar to the harmonic oscillation. However, they can also become increasingly turbulent, up to a “chaotic” course. A classic example of this is the “Verhulst” dynamics, first described at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Belgian mathematician Verhulst. It arises from the equation:

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Fig. 1 Harmonic oscillation with trajectory: A swinging pendulum with deflection x and associated trajectory x (t). (Source: Own representation)

Δx = xðt þ 1Þ - xðtÞ = ða - 1Þ × xðtÞ - a × xðtÞ2

ð1Þ

Here, the reset Δx of the state variable is a quadratic function of the deflection x. The strength of the reset is controlled by a positive parameter a. As long as this

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Deflecon X

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Time t

Deflecon x

Fig. 2 Trajectory of a damped oscillation. (Source: Own representation)

Time t

Fig. 3 Trajectory of a creeping oscillation. (Source: Own representation)

parameter a is smaller than 3, the Verhulst dynamics tends towards a stable equilibrium state. If a is larger than 3, then an oscillation begins, which includes more and more harmonics as a continues to increase, until the course of the function x(t) finally becomes chaotic, as can be seen in Fig. 4 (with a = 3.9). “Chaos” in this

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State variable X

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0

Time t

Fig. 4 Chaotic oscillation from a Verhulst dynamic. (Source: Own representation)

case means that minute changes in the initial conditions result in a completely different course of x(t). Because the initial conditions cannot be known with arbitrary precision, “chaos” consequently means that it is practically unpredictable what value x will have at a future time t. Let us generalize slightly the Verhulst equation (Eq. 1) in order to use it for a quantitative model of fashion waves. To generate oscillatory dynamics of a state variable x(t) in time t, let us choose an approach: Δx = AðxðtÞÞ - BðxðtÞÞ

ð2Þ

Let A(x) and B(x) be positive functions of x. Such an approach can generate oscillations. The Verhulst approach (Eq. 1) is a special case of (Eq. 2) with A (x) = (a - 1)x and B(x) = ax2. In the more general case (Eq. 2), we generate an oscillation through the positive function A, which further amplifies and drives a deflection x, and a reset -B, which at some point gains the upper hand over A, consequently causing Δx to become negative and driving the deflection x back to the original position – and beyond it into the negative. Depending on the choice of A (x) and B(x), stability and oscillation can be produced in dynamic models, plus the type of oscillation, whether damped, harmonic, periodic or turbulent. The stronger the influence of A, the longer the periods. The stronger and more abrupt the influence of B, the more turbulent the oscillation becomes.

3.3

Quantitative Models for Fashion

In the mid-1980s Otthein Rammstedt’s team started to edit Simmels complete works, initiating a Simmel renaissance and even his canonization. At the same

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time, “chaos research” became the dernier cri in the field of quantitative social sciences. It too identified its classics, such as the mathematicians Pierre-François Verhulst (1804–1849) and Henri Poincaré (1854–1912). Stars of the late 1980s and early 1990s were Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010), with his Fractal Geometry of Nature (Mandelbrot 1987), and Herrmann Haken (*1927) with his Synergetik (Haken 1983). An important method of quantitative social research had become the simulation of dynamics and evolution on the computer, paradigmatic here for example Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation (Axelrod 1984). From the end of the 1980s onwards, scientists had personal computers on their desks, soon as powerful as medium-sized computers or even mainframes had been in the past. Simulations, once a time-consuming undertaking for entire research teams, could now easily be calculated in the comfort of one’s own office. A flood of working papers, expert reports and publications was generated by the ever cheaper and faster computers. In this framework, Hufnagel (1992) was able to present a simulation of fashion fluctuations in the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik – following on from a paper by Weise (1991) on Gossen’s first law. In this simulation, all possibilities in the time dynamics of the consumption of a good in quantity x (t) could be generated: Stability, Oscillation, Turbulent Oscillation, as shown in the previous Sect. 3.2. As finally described there with equation (Eq. 2), this requires a term which amplifies an initial deflection Δx, i.e. A, and a term B which brakes a further deflection again and leads it back in the opposite direction -Δx. For the amplification A(x) Hufnagel (1992) chose the “band wagon effect”, which has been familiar in consumption theory since Alfred Marshall’s days (Stigler 1954). For the braking and reversing moment -B(x) Hufnagel (1992) chose Gossen’s first law: “The size of one and the same pleasure decreases, if we continue with the preparation of the pleasure uninterruptedly, continuously, until finally satiation occurs”. Weise (1991) had pointed out in his paper that the microeconomic textbooks interprete the Gossen quote in the form: 2

∂ u