| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. By Daniel Horowitz. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. xii, 339 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-55849-432-4.)
Anxiety and affluence have never been more prominent subjects of public conversation than at the present moment, but Daniel Horowitz's new book makes us realize that contemporary discourse has significantly inverted the terms of the mid-twentieth-century debate over consumer culture. Whereas Cold War critics would have argued about the threats posed by abundance, today's commentators are far more likely to itemize the threats posed to abundance. Anxieties of Affluence stops well short of the contemporary moment, to be sure, but it does retrace, lucidly and dispassionately, the book-by-book journey by which the nation's public intellectuals helped change the terms of debate about consumer culture from a moralist to a "post-moralist" (p. 3) frame of reference.	1
Beginning with the rationed world of World War II, Horowitz finds a distinct moral and aesthetic vision of "curtailed consumption" (p. 20) emerging under the pen of Lewis Mumford, Reinhold Niebuhr, Philip Wylie, and numerous consumer activists. These critics regarded the wartime acceptance of deferred consumption as the pause that would refresh and regenerate a "secular religion" of "common sacrifice" (p. 37) in the bleak, exiguous postwar period. When those years turned out to be ones of Cold War–sponsored prosperity, and, further, when that prosperity came to be celebrated by émigré market intellectuals such as Ernest Dichter, George Katona, and Paul Lazarsfeld, the moralist vision of a "chastened consumption" (p. 20), became less Marxist and more Freudian, less utopian and more tragic, less like a blueprint and more like the blues.	. . .

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