Enlightenment

There are many ways to define the Enlightenment, and identifying a distinct set of characteristically Enlightenment ideas is notoriously difficult. Though dispute exists over the boundaries of what might properly claim inclusion in the Enlightenment, its core identity is relatively uncontested. The Enlightenment was a movement devoted to rational meliorism. It was committed to the notion that collective application of reason could improve the conditions of life. Distinctive styles of consumption and debate on consumption formed an important part of that movement.

The histories of consumption and the Enlightenment intersect in two domains. New sites of consumption, in particular the coffeehouse and the salon, as well as new objects of consumption, such as journals and newspapers, offered the material ground for the Enlightenment as a social movement. Consumption was also the object of sustained intellectual attention. The ubiquity of consumption in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries provoked the luxury debate. Consumption was one of the central pillars around which political economists and social theorists constructed their account of the new commercial civilization they saw being built around them. The two threads, material and intellectual, came together at the end of the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of new kinds of objects—colonial consumption goods, such as sugar, as well as capital goods, such as the machines so lovingly described and illustrated in the supplementary volumes of the Encyclopédie—created a new idea of “the improvement of humanity.” Everyday life could be transformed, it was argued, not through moral and political reform alone, but through the dissemination and use of things. This technological ideal was not universally endorsed. “The system of the moderns” was condemned in principle by Rousseau and for its reliance on slavery and exploitation in the Histoire des Deux-Indes, Diderot and Raynal's best-selling critique [Page 530]of the commercial empires that sustained commercial society and “polished manners.” By the late-eighteenth century, the debate on consumption formed one element of the wider cultural crisis of European states that foreshadowed the French Revolution.