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A brief history of thrift
A brief history of thrift
A brief history of thrift
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A brief history of thrift

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This book surveys ‘thrift’ through its moral, religious, ethical, political, spiritual and philosophical expressions, focussing in on key moments such as the early Puritans and Post-war rationing, and key characters such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Smiles and Henry Thoreau. The relationships between thrift and frugality, mindfulness, sustainability, and alternative consumption practices are explained, and connections made between myriad conceptions of thrift and contemporary concerns for how consumer cultures impact scarce resources, wealth distribution, and the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the book returns the reader to an understanding of thrift as it was originally used - to ‘thrive’ - and attempts to re-cast thrift in more collective, economically egalitarian terms, reclaiming it as a genuinely resistant practice.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 4, 2019
ISBN9781526128850
A brief history of thrift
Author

Alison Hulme

Alison Hulme teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from where she gained her PhD in Cultural Studies in 2011 and her MA in Anthropology in 2006. She also has a BA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. She has previously taught intensive courses in contemporary China at the University of Iceland and Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her work focuses on media culture with an emphasis on China (film, TV, state-produced poster campaigns, imagery of cities, etc.), the history of entrepreneurialism in China, and material culture. These strands are linked by a concern with theories of the commodity and consumption. Alison also takes on social research consultancies. Prior to entering academia, Alison was a radio and TV presenter for many years. In her spare time she jointly runs a film club and has a particular interest in 1930s Chinese leftist cinema and the French films of Jacques Tati.

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    A brief history of thrift - Alison Hulme

    A brief history of thrift

    A brief history of thrift

    Alison Hulme

    Manchester University Press

    Copyright © Alison Hulme 2019

    The right of Alison Hulme to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

    Published by Manchester University Press

    Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

    www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

    ISBN 978 1 5261 2883 6 hardback

    First published 2019

    The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

    Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

    Printed in Great Britain

    by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

    For Ada

    Contents

    List of figures

    Preface

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction

    1 Towards a theory of thrift

    2 Religious thrift: Puritans, Quakers and Methodists

    3 Individualist thrift: Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Smiles and Victorian moralism

    4 Spiritual thrift: simplicity, sensuality and politics in Henry Thoreau

    5 Nationalist thrift: making do, rationing and nostalgic austerity

    6 Consumer thrift: Keynes, consumer rights and the new thrifty consumers

    7 Ecological thrift: frugality, de-growth and Voluntary Simplicity

    Conclusion: Thoreau in the city

    Afterword

    Notes

    References

    Index

    Figures

    4.1Thoreau’s cabin as drawn by his sister Sophia for the original title page of Walden (public domain)

    5.1‘Dig for victory’ poster from the Second World War (public domain)

    5.2‘Make do and mend’ poster from the Second World War (public domain)

    6.1Members of the Brains Trust pictured with Roosevelt in 1932 (public domain)

    7.1The Global Village Construction Set: the fifty machines needed to build a small civilisation (public domain)

    Preface

    When I was a child we used dusters cut from our old clothes, made worn-out trousers into shorts, and collected the tin-foil milk bottle tops for recycling. Bed sheets were ‘side to middled’ when they wore out; leftovers were always cooked up the next day; even Christmas wrapping paper was carefully saved for the following year. This was not because I came from a particularly mean, moral or even poor family – although money was always a background concern – it was simply because in our house that was how things were done. Whilst some of my friends with younger parents grew up with a far greater engagement with the consumer culture of the 1980s, the influence of wartime thrift on the generation of my parents had been strong and irreversible. It did not dissipate simply because the rationing and making do put in place during the Second World War had stopped, and economic conditions improved. Their parents had passed on thrifty habits to them, and their young lives had been affected by the rationing that continued after the war. Thrift was a way of life, a principle, and it came with its own small senses of pleasure. My mum still enjoys being thrifty in small ways; enjoys the feeling that she has made everything useful and wasted nothing, for its own sake, not even to save money really, as the difference would be negligible. For her and many others, being thrifty is about a sense of self-sufficiency more than anything; a comforting sense of not needing too much, of being able to be happy making do. Perhaps what lies behind this for many people is a sense that one is in control as much as is possible of one’s situation; a sense that fluctuations in one’s economic situation would not necessarily hit one too hard; and a sense of a kind of freedom and therefore happiness that comes with that. Certainly, for my mum, and many like her, thrift has become an embedded part of her identity; the principled, practical habit of a lifetime, despite the changes in attitudes towards consumerism in the postwar era.

    Of course, this inevitably had an effect on me. When I was a child, my mum often said (and still does), ‘I wouldn’t buy that/waste that even if I had a million pounds’, and I feel exactly the same. I too take pleasure in making use of every last bit of something, and of re-using things in new ways if at all possible. Throughout my life so far, I have often needed to be extremely thrifty for financial reasons, but this does not go far enough in explaining the real reasons I do it, and certainly does not explain why I get so much pleasure from it. That, I am sure, comes from the same sense of freedom and the associated happiness I mentioned above, and is broadly aligned to the motivations of the many people across the Western world who attempt to simplify, downsize and become self-sufficient. However, it does not explain things enough and, in writing this book, I have been forced to consider my own attitudes and behaviour when it comes to thrift more deeply, and in light of various powerful historical strands. I am painfully aware that on one hand I take a harsh attitude towards the preaching of thrift to the less well-off and indeed towards any moralising discourse of it. I resent those in positions of greater economic or political power telling others (whose lives they usually have little to no understanding of) how to live – especially when that telling is for the success of the nation as part of an apparently collective effort, falsely sold. It seems to me that the effort frequently falls to those least able to realistically make it, whilst nothing is required of those for whom it would be easiest. On the other hand, I myself come from, and perpetuate, a thinking and practice which cannot help but be embedded to some extent in moral discourses. I do tend to think that many people would be happier, and the world would be on a better ecological footing, if we wasted less/needed to buy less and therefore earn less/had more time to enjoy life, and I cannot really deny that this is in some way a moral stance.

    So where does that leave me? In many ways, as the introduction of this book will explain, this uneasy position is thrown up by the changes in the way the word thrift is used. The thrift I enjoy is based on the older etymological understanding of the word – that of thriving. The thrift I resent is based on the more recent usage of the word – that of frugality (especially that placed on people for false reasons). Even then, I still find myself wriggling around uncomfortably with my own rationale for enjoying thrift. Thrift as thriving tends to be such a singularly individual pursuit, and one that only those who already have enough can engage in. This thrift, whilst garnering the support of sizeable pockets of people across the Western world, is unlikely to challenge the way society is run. It is a luxury pursuit in many ways, and it makes me slightly uneasy. The emphasis on personal happiness is perfectly valid, but it is not enough. It is precisely related to a sense of personal freedom, but has little to do with challenging societal inequality and a wider sense of freedom for the many. Those who adhere to it like to imagine that if they lead by example, others will follow, but even if this were the case it would not lead to wide-scale wealth redistribution. It is essentially a thrift based on individual choice and too easily hijacked by the logic of neoliberal economics.

    What this book hopes to expose is how thrift as thriving became quite so wholeheartedly embroiled in thrift as a capitalistic practice of frugality. In doing so, it explores key historical strands of thought, and certain historical characters who have been amongst the finest purveyors of thrift (of both the thriving and the frugal variety), attempting to sift through these with the aspiration of finding a thrift more committed to solidarity rather than individualism, and more able to change everyday life for the many. From analysing this strange and wonderful array of people and ideas, it turns out that it is perhaps not a ‘romantic ethic’ of hedonistic desire to consume that has fed the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (as Colin Campbell famously argues), but rather a pragmatic ethic of desire for economic freedom through thrift. Thrift has at once defined itself against capitalism and for capitalism and regardless has in reality ended up working for it on almost all occasions. But this is not to say the idea is unsalvageable – far from it. For example, radical ecologists are making great strides towards a more collectively defined thrift that carves out new structures and ways of being. And history reveals subtleties within the work of more conventional thrift advocates that are useful for an alternative future conception of thrift. There is, then, a slightly utopian aspect to this book (for which I am unapologetic), or at least to the place it ends up, in that it is attempting to draw together a way forward for thrift that has practical implications – that is, if you like, a blueprint for a way of living. The blueprint itself is certainly a whole other project, but for now, I hope this book pulls apart logics that have been wrongly glued together for far too long and challenges in a small way some of the long-held ‘truisms’ about the nature of capitalism.

    Acknowledgements

    Thanks as always to close friends and family for love and laughter and the maintenance of sanity.

    Introduction

    At the conclusion of my last book – On the Commodity Trail – I asserted that consumptive thrift (i.e. that which essentially still encourages spending, but as part of seeking a ‘bargain’) was, in the current age, the only type of thrift fully condoned by those in positions of power in the West. Furthermore, I argued, it was used to obscure the fact that trickle-down economics have failed both the developed and the developing world. Consumptive thrift, I argued, required people to consume; insisted upon itself as an activity engaged in, not in order to save money by not spending, but in order to save money on purchases by being a wise consumer. It is, essentially, Keynesian thrift. In addition, this ability to be ‘wise’ in one’s consumptive choices has been extended to goods and services that people had previously not been ‘customers’ of, but rather, students, patients or tenants, for example. It has been used as a tool in the plotted gradual decline of welfare provision and any attempt at genuinely collective responsibility. In many ways, this book follows on from where that one left off – by looking exclusively at the concept of thrift and the way it has been used politically to encourage and discourage certain socio-economic behaviours throughout history. It seeks to understand how the concept of thrift has been used and abused over time, and how the thrift-seeking/thrift-avoiding individual subject has been celebrated and chastised accordingly. It is then, part archaeology of thrift – mining into the uses of a concept; and part anthropology of thrift – exploring how interpretations of the concept have resulted in specific forms of everyday life. More crucially, it attempts to pick apart the relationship between capitalism and thrift and assert thrift, as its own practice, in its own right, not only as capitalism’s handmaiden (although acknowledging this role), but as its historically ever-present Other.

    This book is not a historical treatise, robustly covering all periods. Experts on any of the historical periods or characters that feature in it will have little to gain from it in terms of furthering their historical knowledge. It is not chronological in any strict sense. And it leaps across geographic boundaries without worrying too much about a ‘scientific’ tracing of influence. Instead, it attempts a thematic exploration of the concept and practice of thrift via influential characters and specific eras and movements in which it has proved a particularly potent concept. This is to address Lendol Calder’s suggestion that in attempting to chart the history of thrift, historians (which I am not!) would ideally ‘find it possible to move beyond familiar rise and fall narratives in which parsimonious saving is invented by the Puritans, achieves its greatest influence among the Victorians, and then in the late twentieth century withers away and dies’. He asks that we propose ‘more complex narratives of institutional and cultural realignment in which the meaning and practice of thrift ebbs and flows across time and form place to place, buffeted by historical transformations yet capable of being revived and realigned in manifold, often cross-cutting ways of restraint and release’ (2013:363).

    As a result, this book considers thrift through movements as diverse as Puritanism, Keynesianism and Voluntary Simplicity, and through characters as unaligned as Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Thoreau. Yet, it finds, in tracing these strands of thought, that sometimes ideas end up in unexpected places and have effects in the present that could never have been predicted. Who would have thought, for example, that the transcendentalists of the nineteenth century would have been the influence behind both Samuel Smiles and Henry Thoreau – two characters that could not appear more different from each other? Who would have predicted that John Wesley’s belief in working hard, saving and giving away would inform much of the US Voluntary Simplicity movement? Who could have foreseen that a discourse beset by the individualism and charitable awareness of the Victorian era would rear its head in new forms today as a rationale for the destruction of the welfare state?

    Such apparent anomalies are testament to the way in which thematic trends enter and exit history at various unexpected points, and actors consistently borrow (often without even realising they are doing so) from their predecessors. So, this book is historical, but not a work of history in the traditional sense; rather, it is of overlapping lines of historical influence in which thrift(s) become entwined in unusual and unlikely ways. As Yates and Hunter argue, there was no simple ascent and decline of thrift; they emphasise instead the complexities of institutional and cultural realignment that enabled it to survive in various forms throughout history. For them, thrift has proved itself to be a remarkably dynamic and versatile concept and practice, concerned at various historical moments with ‘human survival, religious calling, political independence and self-rule, environmental conservation, racial hegemony, philanthropy, manhood and womanhood, collective security, and social protest’ (2011:10). Regardless, Calder’s contention remains true – ‘no concept has been more important than thrift for shaping the moral culture of economic life under capitalism’ (2013:363).

    It is also worth noting that this book is largely about Western thinkers on, and versions of, thrift. There is a tangible historical conversation between the Western and the non-Western world, and Western and non-Western thinking do get blurred now and again along the way (Thoreau’s influence on Gandhi being a classic example), so now and again, non-Western thinkers have small walk-on parts. However, the specific shifts from thrift as thriving to thrift as frugality, and vice versa, are intricately linked with Western thought, largely due to the way in which thrift has played such a specific part in the development of Western capitalism. Thrift, on the whole, cannot be understood in the same way when viewed from a non-Western context. Therefore, this book only attempts to deal with thrift in the Western context, although future writings may well attempt to delve into those non-Western thinkers for whom thrift played an important role as there is undoubtedly a very interesting history of thrift to be written based on non-Western thinking and practice.

    The Oxford English Dictionary gives various definitions of the word thrift. The first, and oldest, describes it as a ‘fact or condition of thriving [my italics] or prospering; prosperity, success, good luck’. The most recent explains thrift as ‘economic management, economy, sparing us or expenditures of means, frugality [my italics], saving’ – a meaning with which we are now more familiar. The word itself comes from the same root as thriving, but the emphasis has gradually been placed on management and frugality. From as early as the fourteenth century onwards, the meaning of thrift (as thriving) began to be distorted and utilised as part of various economic and theological discourses, and came to be understood as an economic and cultural practice based on frugality and frequently linked to respectability. In the nineteenth century, the British pastor and thrift advocate, William Blackley, described the change in the meaning of thrift from thriving and good fortune, to careful spending and providence, as a shift from an emphasis on the human condition, to the human character or ‘habit’ (1885). The choice of such words as character and habit was typical of an increasingly individualistic morality of the era that was quick to judge society’s subjects, far less the mechanisms of state and society itself. (For example, Blackley’s sentiments echo those of fellow Victorian Samuel Smiles.)

    In fact, David Blankenhorn describes the ‘gradual but steady evolution, largely completed by the mid nineteenth century’ in how writers commonly used the word ‘thrift’, arguing that use of the word in its classical sense of growing and thriving increasingly gave way to referring to a set of habits and values, or character traits (Blankenhorn, 2008:19). Thrift, for many, stopped being an ethical discourse, and became a narrowly moral one (often prescribed by those in power). As Blankenhorn says, ‘in brief, the word thrift is being gradually moralized … Instead of referring to life as a whole, life in all its flourishing … thrift in this new emphasis increasingly comes to mean first and foremost economic prosperity, or prosperity primarily in the material sense’ (2008:19). Not by coincidence, this shift from one meaning to the other happened contemporaneously to changes in economic rationale and moral beliefs due to the increasing prominence of capitalism. In many ways this book, in attempting to analyse the relationship between capitalism and thrift, is precisely interested in an examination of this shift in meaning and the way in which thrift has been used by those with influence to enhance or rally against capitalism(s).

    A by-product of this shift from thrift as thriving (ethical thrift), to thrift as frugality (moral thrift) is that (with a few exceptions) it has gradually been prised away from actually belonging to people as a practice of everyday life that can be used wilfully, tactically and sometimes as resistance. Instead, it has become rationalised as

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