Luxurious Citizens valuably enhances our understanding of the history of consumer society, and the sources and debates she examines are illuminating. Whereas scholars focusing on the production side have charted discursive and ideological shifts that transformed wage work from a feared relation of dependency into “free labor,” her study charts discursive shifts that cast consumption as freedom and undergird a consumerist model of the “American Dream.” Consumption is an extraordinarily broad, complex subject, and many different stories can be told about it; but I would have appreciated hearing more about politicized understandings of consumption that challenged the liberal model whose rise Cohen narrates—such as price riots and other mobilizations of the commons and the antislavery “free produce” movement, efforts that challenged rather than reinforced freemarket capitalism and aimed to remake relations of production rather than affirm liberal ideologies of “freedom of choice.” Such efforts suggest that, in the nineteenth century, the “republican vision of political economy” was not so much worn down as recast. As a literary scholar I found fascinating Cohen’s parsing of midcentury anxieties about American consumer “taste,” which usefully contextualizes concerns about American literary commodities and consumption (e.g., George Eliot’s famous comment that American literature betrays “certain defects of taste”); at the same time, I wondered how we might connect this anxious antebellum moment to the confident exporting of Americanstyle consumption by the late nineteenth century described by scholars such as Mona Domosh and Victoria de Grazia. In inspiring such questions, Cohen’s ambitious, suggestive study will likely provide fruitful provocation, inspiring further work in this important area.

中文翻译：

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美国的美好：文化史 Carrie Tirado Bramen

Luxurious Citizens 极大地增强了我们对消费社会历史的理解，她所研究的资料来源和辩论很有启发性。关注生产方面的学者描绘了将有薪工作从可怕的依赖关系转变为“自由劳动”的话语和意识形态转变，而她的研究则描绘了将消费视为自由并巩固了“美国梦”的消费主义模式的话语转变。 ” 消费是一个非常广泛、复杂的主题，可以讲述许多不同的故事；但我会很高兴听到更多关于消费的政治化理解，这些理解挑战了科恩所描述的自由主义模式——例如价格暴动和其他公地动员以及反奴隶制的“自由生产”运动，这些努力挑战而不是加强自由市场资本主义，旨在重塑生产关系而不是肯定“选择自由”的自由意识形态。这些努力表明，在 19 世纪，“政治经济学的共和党愿景”与其说是破旧，不如说是重新塑造。作为一名文学学者，我发现科恩对世纪中叶美国消费者“品味”焦虑的分析引人入胜，这对美国文学商品和消费的担忧很有用（例如，乔治·艾略特（George Eliot）关于美国文学背叛“某些品味缺陷”的著名评论；与此同时，我想知道我们如何将这个焦虑的战前时刻与 Mona Domosh 和 Victoria de Grazia 等学者描述的 19 世纪后期美式消费的自信出口联系起来。