A Democracy of Good Dinners: E. R. A. Seligman and the Democratic Consumption of Luxury

Abstract

Today’s “democratic ideal,” claimed Columbia University economist E. R. A. Seligman, was nothing more and nothing less than the “socialization of luxury,” the opportunity for everyone to find pleasure and contentment in the world around them. In early twentieth-century America, an era of growing material abundance, democratic life required that “leisure and culture will no longer be the possessions of the favored few” but be available to everyone in the course of daily life. Seligman’s insistence that democracy was as much in the streets as in the voting booth was far from novel, as he surely knew. Seligman lived in New York City, where working-class men and women made the same point every day. They laid claim to the new abundance of American life, an abundance they helped create, each time they put on fancy hats, went to Coney Island, strolled through Central Park, listened to opera, or laughed at vaudeville. Seligman translated their actions into economic prose and made a theoretical, as well as practical, argument for pleasurable consumption as a basis for modern democratic life.1