Buying Happiness
304 pages, 6 x 9
11 illus.
Paperback
Release Date:01 Nov 2018
ISBN:9780774835145
Hardcover
Release Date:01 Jun 2018
ISBN:9780774835138
EPUB
Release Date:01 Jun 2018
ISBN:9780774835169
PDF
Release Date:01 Jun 2018
ISBN:9780774835152
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Buying Happiness

The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada

UBC Press

The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption and consumer behaviours.

Breaking new ground, Bettina Liverant connects changes in consciousness to changes in the economy and in behaviour. The emphasis is on concepts and categories rather than on the buying and selling of goods. The rise of consumer society, she shows, was not simply the result of economic changes in productivity and affluence; it involved and required changes to how people think. Topics include the creation of Canada’s first cost-of-living index in 1914–15, the development of consumer consciousness during the Great Depression, and the ways in which popular magazines encouraged an ethic of cautious consumerism in the postwar period.

As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination. Consumer society developed as a contested, yet increasingly pervasive, way of thinking about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our relationships with things.

This book will serve scholars of consumer society, history, sociology, political economy, and economics. It will appeal to a wide array of readers interested in modern Canadian history, debates about the rise of consumer society, Canadian thought and culture, and intellectual history.

Liverant makes a complex and insightful argument for a deep but largely unmarked change of perspective. Her synthesis of recent work on consumerism in Canada is illuminating. In highlighting the role of intellectuals and historic publications in constructing and reconstructing the social narratives that Canadians rely on to think about and develop personal and national identities, she gently invites present-day writers to reconsider their impact, and a more general readership to question how and why certain stories are told. V. Michael Roberts, economist and author of The Long Depression, Prairie History
Buying Happiness should be required reading for students of twentieth-century Canada. Katharine Rollwagen, The Canadian Historical Review
The nearest dictionary to hand unhelpfully defines consumer as ‘one or that which consumes’. Bettina Liverant takes us beyond linguistic tautologies to give us a first-rate intellectual history of consumer society in Canada from late Victorian times to the post-war baby boom era. James Hull, University of British Columbia-Okanagan, Canadian Business History Association
In that it looks at the idea of consumer society, Buying Happiness offers a welcome addition to the study of consumption. As such, Buying Happiness helps scholars recognize their own possible prejudices that they bring to the study of consumption. Donica Belisle, American Review of Canadian Studies
The literature on consumer culture for the United States is rich and extensive, but I cannot think of anything that approaches the subject with the distinctive freshness that Bettina Liverant musters in Buying Happiness. This well‐researched, fluidly written, and suggestive study of how leading Canadian thinkers came to understand the emergence of a consumer society is full of surprises and insights. Daniel Horowitz, Smith College, author of Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America
Bettina Liverant is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary. She has written extensively on Canadian consumer history, on corporate philanthropy, and on architecture for both academic and general audiences.

Introduction

1 The Meaning Is in the Spending

2 The Promise of a More Abundant Life

3 Culturing Canadian Patriotism

4 Moralizing the Economy

5 Charting the Contours of Modern Society

6 Regulating the Consumer

7 Buying Happiness

8 Academic Encounters

Conclusion

Notes; Index

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