| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Kathleen B. Donohue. Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer. (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 326. $45.95.
In this book, Kathleen G. Donohue describes a crucial transformation in classical liberal thought. She explores how political philosophy and economic theory, which once privileged the producer, came to value the consumer. In short, she explains how "freedom from want" came to be a fundamental American right.	1
In this careful intellectual history, Donohue examines the theories of key economists and social commentators who lived and wrote between 1870 and 1940. She first lays out the producer-centered vision that dominated nineteenth-century economic thought. Whether on the right or the left, thinkers ranging from William Graham Sumner to Henry George and Richard T. Ely shared a belief that producers created value and wealth, and gave scant attention or respect to consumers, who they variously portrayed as the decadent elite or the profligate poor. Consumers were tainted economic actors, wasteful and nonproductive.	. . .

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