Sensational Capitalism: Mass Luxury, Fine Arts, and the Rise of Consumer Society

• In Event: Democracy and the Social Question

Abstract

This paper charts an alternative historical narrative of the drawn-out contention among eighteenth-century thinkers known as “the luxury debate.” From the 1750s onwards, the consumer boom responsible for much of England’s economic growth reached revolutionary proportions. The onset of this “consumer revolution” sparked a wave of conflicting ideas on the virtues and vices cultivated by luxury—its economic benefits and social detriments to the individual, the public, and the state. While political theorists and intellectual historians have touched on virtually every aspect of luxury as an idea in modern economic discourse, they have seldom probed its relation to the congeries of interwoven transformations in aesthetic theory, modern art, mass consumption, and the capitalist labor process. This oversight is quite striking once we consider how often eighteenth-century thinkers articulated their positions on luxury by explicitly drawing on emerging models of judgment, new taxonomies of art, and innovative techniques of commodity production. Overall, this paper addresses these lacunae by earmarking luxury’s place within a network of modern developments that cut across the histories of capitalism, aesthetics, art, and the rise of consumer society.

I pursue this by, first, reading David Hume’s defense of luxury, published from 1752 to 1777, in the context of his political economy and aesthetic theory. From this textual interpretation, I argue in Part 1 that Hume understood luxury as an instrument meant to catalyze economic developments in industrial production while also diffusing and refining a specific variety of popular, middle-class taste by purveying a culture of consumerism among the masses. My engagement with Hume’s writings on luxury, political economy, and aesthetics reveals an important yet understated aspect of the luxury debate, namely, that luxury’s promises of pleasure, happiness, and sensuous gratification were strictly contingent on a specific organization of production characteristic of the factory system and consumer capitalism. In short, Hume’s vision of a developed commercial society lured by commodity fetishism and material desire was the fait accompli of capitalist modernity. Throughout these texts, Hume consistently figures luxury as the spark meant to unchain a succession of cultural, aesthetic, social, and economic developments that were either imminent or already afoot.

In the second half of the paper, I take up the work of Josiah Wedgwood as an illustration of how Hume’s projections played out historically from1759 to 1795. At this juncture, I suggest that Wedgwood’s innovations in industrial production were largely animated by his artistic ambition to produce vases whose elegance, beauty, and public reception elevated them to the status of art, consequently absolving his reputation from the classist stigma associated with ceramic craft. In attending to this goal, Wedgwood transformed an artisanal apparatus of production by imposing stricter divisions of labor, scaling output, streamlining manufacturing, and ultimately veering legions of artisans toward his factory, Etruria. As Wedgwood’s factory town engulfed the traditional pottery industry around Staffordshire, it gradually converted scores of artisan potters into a mass of menial industrial workers, accordingly advancing the agenda of a modern ideal of art that depended in large part on figuring artisanal labor as the waged, mechanical ‘Other’ against which artistic labor was defined as liberal, creative, and free.

Author

• Lucas G. Pinheiro, University of Chicago