Scarcity and Modernity

Nicholas Xenos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351622912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Originally published in 1989. In this book Nicholas Xenos argues that the assumption that scarcity is a universal human condition is far from universal but rather a product of western influence. Informed by the work of Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Girard, and Sahlins, this historical narrative of scarcity incorporates interpretations of texts and practices from eighteenth-century London to contemporary New York. Lucid and elegant in style, Scarcity and Modernity will appear to those with interests in social and political thought and cultural criticism.

1

Inventing scarcity

The European eighteenth century saw the invention of the steam engine, the jigsaw puzzle, and the toothpick. It also witnessed the invention of scarcity. The materials that were employed in the construction of this phenomenon had been at hand since the Greeks, but the moderns refashioned these materials into something new. The relationship between needs and desires – indeed, the very definitions of these things – was at the heart of the new conception, but so were thoughts and observations on the human propensity for emulation and the pleasure of gaining recognition, on the workings of envy and invidious distinction. A few writers, Rousseau foremost among them, saw this invention for what it was, but most believed instead that they had made a discovery, revealing what had previously been shrouded in false conceptions influenced by muddled moral notions that could now be discarded as the mystifications they were. It was, after all, the period we call the Age of Enlightenment.

The quotidian experience of these writers was shaped not only by the concepts with which they sought to make sense of it, but also by long-term and large-scale transformations in social life affecting European civilization – the great commercial expansion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the democratization of politics conveniently symbolized in the English, American, and French Revolutions, and the less easily conceptualized but perhaps equally tangible fluidity of status and class that accompanied commerce and politics. These transformations were particularly acute in northern Europe, were especially obvious in the capital cities, and were most concentrated in London. If, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, Paris can be said to be the capital of the nineteenth century, London is most surely the capital of the eighteenth.

Dr. Johnson’s London presents a microcosm of the conditions that gave rise to the invention of scarcity, and it was in London, or while under the influence of it, that the first systematic theory of scarcity was developed. Eighteenth-century London was a central location of the so-called Industrial Revolution then underway, but more importantly it was also a central location – perhaps the central location – of a related transformation in consumption, a transformation one historian has termed a “Consumer Revolution.”¹ Alongside the evolution of high-volume, standardized production there emerged a pattern of high-volume, standardized consumption driven by the social imperatives of fashion. London combined many characteristics that aided its emergence as a hotbed of fashion. As a capital city, it shared with other capitals the showy ostentation of court life, but to a degree unlike any other capital, this ostentation was close to home. Within easy distance of much of the country, London was a common destination or transit point for a disproportionately high percentage of the English population, 11 per cent of which lived in London in 1750 (up from an already imposing 7 per cent a century earlier), a much higher figure than that for any other European capital. And it is estimated that as much as 16 per cent of the adult population of eighteenth-century England lived in London at some point in their lives.² Undoubtedly, much of this population movement resulted from the Enclosures and consisted of people whose margin of existence was slight. But along with these perhaps unwilling London immigrants came many of the people who had set them on the move in the first place. From the point of view of consumption, the establishment of London residences by the country gentry is particularly important, since this upwardly mobile stratum was especially prone to emulative consumption and conspicuous display as it sought to ape the style of the higher nobility just as it was acquiring their country estates.³ And the gentry’s seasonal migration between their newly built Georgian town houses and country homes provided one of the principal mechanisms for the spread of fashion outward from London, enhancing the capital’s stature as a trend-setting focal point while spreading the experience and expectation of frequent changes in fashion and taste to the hinterland. Not only did the gentry return from London each spring sporting the latest styles and transporting the latest luxury items, their servants returned with less expensive imitations of these fashionable goods, thus spreading them downward in the social order as well as outward in the spatial order.⁴

This spreading effect was not unintended. By the eighteenth century, entrepreneurs had discovered what economic theory calls the elasticity of demand.⁵ Masters of salesmanship were now poised to exploit the idea that domestic markets could be expanded by stimulating the desire for new things and by the introduction of refinement, variety and fashion into objects of everyday use. The desire for new things took several forms: like the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century craze for cheap Indian cotton, it could be both instigator and consequence of increased trade; it could be tempted by the introduction of new products of utility, adornment, or amusement; or it could arise from the gradual seepage downward of luxury items as they descended in social class and declined in exclusivity. In this last case, the items were not, strictly speaking, new, but were previously unavailable to many people who could now acquire them. These things were functionally new, and they encompassed everything from tea to children’s books.⁶

The stimulation of demand for common items such as clothes and pottery was partly bound up with trade as well, since such demand might be provoked by the importation of foreign fabrics or patterns, or materials such as porcelain. The seventeenth century had seen an expansion of demand along these lines, though the scale was relatively small, such items remaining the province of the wealthy, and therefore categorized as luxuries, until late in the century.⁷ But what sets the eighteenth century apart is the purposive role ascribed to fashion and social emulation in the creation of demand for clothes and household goods. Advertisements in local papers placed by merchants recently returned from the capital and the establishment of permanent shops in towns outside London purporting to carry the latest styles abetted the seasonal flow of gentry retinues and increasingly placed high fashion within the grasp of the countryside. Entrepreneurs such as pottery baron Josiah Wedgwood and button magnate Matthew Boulton seized on the potential for emulative buying and made a point of currying favor with London’s fashionable set and foreign aristocrats in order to sell in great quantities to the general public. Boulton held his annual show, complete with special, private viewings for the trend-setters, at Easter, which marked the end of the London season, thus ensuring that his buttons would be treated as up-to-the-minute when the gentry returned to their estates, stimulating an emulative demand for them.⁸ Wedgwood made it a policy to keep his initial prices high on new designs in order to enhance the snob appeal of his goods, reasoning that “a great price is at first necessary to make the vases esteemed Ornaments for Palaces.”⁹ Once a design was well established in this estimation, he would put it into mass production, only then dropping the price, while simultaneously introducing a new design to the fashionable. Thus would begin another cycle of prestige consumption and emulative buying.¹⁰

The techniques and innovations employed by Boulton, Wedgwood, and their contemporaries to exploit the new-found elasticity of demand thus helped to solidify the expectation of changing fashion, of frequent if sometimes subtle shifts in taste and style. An environment was thereby created in which people were increasingly confronted by things they desired but did not have. The spreading of commercial relations through English society, symbolized most clearly in the Enclosures and their effects, established money as the mediator of desire, helping to fix it upon things that could be purchased, particularly upon the vastly expanding world of fashionable things. Because these things had a price, all that was needed to possess them was money – not family name or breeding – and so they were at least theoretically within reach, making them possible objects of desire. The thinking that was done about needs was adjusted accordingly. Needs that are conceived to be naturally based, such as needs for food, shelter, sex, etc., can be approached discretely. That is, the need for food can be met, or not met, independently of the need for shelter. This is consistent with the notion of discrete scarcities discussed in the previous chapter. But when these needs become intertwined with a fluid, ever-changing social world of emulation and conspicuous consumption, they become transformed into an indiscrete desire constantly shifting its focus from one unpossessed object to another. Thus while seventeenth-century writers, preoccupied by a series of poor harvests, could still concern themselves with cyclical scarcities, their eighteenth-century counterparts moved in a world of dramatically increased excitation and frustration of desire, and therefore in a world of perpetual scarcity.¹¹

The dynamics of such a world were well understood by two of the greatest intellects of the age, and the two central figures of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith. Though Smith’s language in his Lectures on Jurisprudence is one that employs concepts of necessity and taste rather than need and desire, his analysis is consistent with the notion that by the eighteenth century it was possible to see no significant difference between human needs and desires. Smith argues that the human being, unlike other animals, is not content with what is given in nature for the satisfaction of needs, since the human being is governed in part by taste – by a preference for beauty and variety. It is thus the case, he observes, that

the whole industry of human life is employed not in procuring the supply of our three humble necessities, food, cloaths, and lodging, but in procuring the conveniences of it according to the nicety and delicacey of our taste. To improve and multiply the materials which are the principal objects of our necessities, gives occasion to all the variety of the arts.¹²

Such a view of the restlessness of human desire had been expressed earlier, in the 1690s, in the context of debates over the consumption of imported luxury goods.¹³ But Smith and his Scottish contemporaries built an elaborate theory of “civil society” upon it, a theory which discerned the movement of history in the refinement of taste.

A key element in the view of civil society that frames the reflections of Smith and Hume is the functional role attributed to the concept of luxury. While some Scottish Enlightenment writers, such as Adam Ferguson, continued an older tradition of associating luxury with corruption,¹⁴ Smith and Hume saw that once need and desire become conceptually indistinguishable, it becomes equally difficult to separate, morally or conceptually, needs and luxuries – the movement of desire ensures that old luxuries will become new needs as desire, ever dissatisfied, shifts its focus to new luxuries. Feeding desire with new luxuries helps to move humanity along a trajectory defined by the refinement of taste and the development of new needs. “And this perhaps is the chief advantage which arises from a commerce with strangers,” Hume claims. “It rouses men from their indolence; and presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury, which they never before dreamed of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed”¹⁵ Once exposed to new objects of desire, Hume goes on to argue, the demand thus stimulated will encourage the imitation of imported luxuries by domestic manufacturers, and encourage as well the likes of Boulton and Wedgwood

towards some refinement in other commodities, which may be wanted at home. And there must always be materials for them to work upon; till every person in the state, who possesses riches, enjoys as great plenty of home commodities, and those in as great perfection, as he desires; which can never possibly happen.¹⁶

It can never happen because the insatiable quality of desire ensures that demand is infinitely elastic.

Hume’s reflections on the benefits of trade are consistent with his friend Adam Smith’s formulation of the concept of wealth as “the produce of the land and labour of … society,” understanding that produce to include “all the necessaries and conveniences of life.”¹⁷ Given the views they shared on the inherent impulse toward refinement of taste, they could not with any consistency maintain a functional distinction between necessary and superfluous goods. All goods must count as wealth. So, by Hume’s reasoning, trade, by introducing new things as luxuries, stimulates emulative desire, which in turn stimulates the creation of wealth. The creation of wealth, in turn, is a measure of the degree of refinement achieved by a society – the wealthiest societies will be the most refined because they will have provided the greatest range for the exercise of desire. This is one of the reasons why Hume argued for the superiority of modern over ancient society: the spread of commerce among the moderns had expanded the arts and given greater range to human potential.¹⁸ The evidence would have been apparent to Hume and Smith, an...