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The Birth of the Neoliberal Sovereign Consumer

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Book cover The Sovereign Consumer

Part of the book series: Consumption and Public Life ((CUCO))

Abstract

This chapter describes the prehistory of the idea of the neoliberal sovereign consumer from 1700 to the emergence of the figure in the interwar period. The chapter seeks to offer a broad introduction to some of the themes, arguments, and contexts that are central to understanding the making of the sovereign consumer and the renegotiations of the figure that are elaborated on in later chapters. Ultimately, the chapter stresses the key role played by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in inventing the sovereign consumer and the ideational framework within which neoliberalism has been negotiated ever since. This includes the idea of the market as the pre-eminent forum for democracy and of the sovereign consumer as the personification of democratic action.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    William H. Hutt, Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936).

  2. 2.

    Austrian economics is a school of thought that is based on the notion of methodological individualism and rejects economic empiricism in the form of modeling. It originated in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Vienna with the work of Carl Menger, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser. For various perspectives on Austrian economics, see Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  3. 3.

    Excellent perspectives on the contributions of Austrian economists to the invention of the sovereign consumer can be found in Stefan Schwarzkopf, “The Consumer as ‘Voter’, ‘Judge’ and ‘Jury’: Historical Origins and Political Consequences of a Marketing Myth,” Journal of Macromarketing 31, 1 (2011): 8–18, and Stefan Schwarzkopf, “The Political Theology of Consumer Sovereignty: Towards an Ontology of Consumer Society,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, 3 (2011): 106–129. The two articles also explore the ways in which Austrian economists reinterpreted notions of democracy and sovereignty in constructing the figure of the consumer. However, the articles primarily focus on notions of consumer sovereignty within marketing and in relation to consumer theology and only cursorily relate the history of the sovereign consumer to the crisis of liberalism and the birth of the neoliberal political paradigm.

  4. 4.

    The following draws extensively on Frank Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy of the Consumer: Meanings, Identities and Political Synapses,” in Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, eds., Frank Trentmann and John Brewer (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 19–69 and Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: Harper Collins, 2016).

  5. 5.

    Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 26–37.

  6. 6.

    Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 29, and Trentmann, Empire of Things, 155–156.

  7. 7.

    Peder Alex, Den rationella konsumenten: KF som folkuppfostrare 1899–1939 (Stockholm: Brutus Östlings bokf Symposion, 1994).

  8. 8.

    Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  9. 9.

    Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 43, and Trentmann, Empire of Things, 274–276.

  10. 10.

    Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 43–53.

  11. 11.

    Lawrence Glickmann, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 189–218.

  12. 12.

    Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2003), 17–61.

  13. 13.

    Pamela E. Sweet, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

  14. 14.

    Trentmann, Empire of Things, 292–296.

  15. 15.

    Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 28.

  16. 16.

    See first of all P. Meyer-Dohm, Sozialökonomische Aspekte der Konsumfreiheit (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Rombach Freiburg, 1965), 40–90; Mary Jean Bowman, “The Consumer in the History of Economic Doctrine,” The American Economic Review 41, 2 (1951): 1–18; Trentmann, Empire of Things, 151; Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 26–31.

  17. 17.

    Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977 [1904 edition]), 877.

  18. 18.

    Quoted from Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 64, note 90. See also Meyer-Dohm, Sozialökonomische Aspekte, 52.

  19. 19.

    Bowman, “The Consumer,” 9.

  20. 20.

    Meyer-Dohm, Sozialökonomische Aspekte, 44. One exception is another often-quoted sentence from Smith , The Wealth of Nations, 184: “The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is not that of his corporation, but that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.”

  21. 21.

    Trentmann , “The Modern Genealogy,” 27. For a more detailed analysis of the consumer in classical economic thought, see Donald Winch, “The Problematic Status of the Consumer in Orthodox Economic Thought,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power, and Identity in the Modern World, ed., Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 31–51.

  22. 22.

    Roger E. Backhouse, The Penguin History of Economics (London: Penguin, 2002), 166–184.

  23. 23.

    Christopher Payne, The Consumer, Credit and Neoliberalism: Governing the Modern Economy (New York: Routledge, 2012), 20–32; and Mary S. Morgan, “Economic Man as Model Man: Ideal Types, Idealization and Caricatures,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 28, 1 (2006): 1–27. See also Winch, “The Problematic Status,” 38–47 and Backhouse, The Penguin History, 167–173. Chapter 4 discusses the notion of neoclassical economics in more detail.

  24. 24.

    Backhouse, The Penguin History, 170–173; Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism—the Life of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 173–177.

  25. 25.

    Winch, “The Problematic Status,” 39; Trentmann, Empire of Things, 151.

  26. 26.

    Winch, “The Problematic Status,” 41–42; Trentmann, Empire of Things, 151–152.

  27. 27.

    Fawcett, Liberalism, 173–180; Backhouse, The Penguin History, 171–172.

  28. 28.

    Winch, “The Problematic Status,” 40–42.

  29. 29.

    See also Payne, The Consumer, 23.

  30. 30.

    Backhouse, The Penguin History, 167–181.

  31. 31.

    Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30–35; Backhouse, The Penguin History, 174–177.

  32. 32.

    Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge, 33.

  33. 33.

    Morgan, “Economic Man,” 19.

  34. 34.

    Charles Gide, “Has Co-operation Introduced a New Principle into Economics?,” The Economic Journal 8, 32 (1898), 499. Interestingly, in the article, Gide coined the concept of neoliberalism for the first time. However, using it to describe a “return” to the classical liberalism of Adam Smith, he defined it differently than it is customarily used today.

  35. 35.

    Backhouse, The Penguin History, 195–198.

  36. 36.

    Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (London: Macmillan, 1899).

  37. 37.

    Through her work for government agencies, and as chief economist of the Bureau of Home Economics, Kyrk linked her scholarly analysis to political work in the 1930s and 1940s. Robert A. Dimand and Richard Lobwell, “Kyrk, Hazel, 1886–1957,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, eds., Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (London: Palgrave, 2008, 2nd ed.), 776. See also Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 48–49.

  38. 38.

    Stuart Chase and Frederick J. Schlink, Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar (London: Macmillan, 1927).

  39. 39.

    Glickmann, Buying Power, 189–218.

  40. 40.

    Fawcett, Liberalism, 137–274; Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 7–48; Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); Arthur Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 284–308.

  41. 41.

    For the emergence of “new” liberalisms in Great Britain and the United States , see, respectively, Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) and Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Random House, 1995).

  42. 42.

    As Hobson’s theory did not match mainstream economic thought, he was sidelined in the profession.

  43. 43.

    Thompson, Social Opulence, 60–62, 88–92, 200–201; Michael Freeden, “J.A. Hobson as a New Liberal Theorist: Some Aspects of his Social Thought until 1914,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34, 3 (1973): 421–443.

  44. 44.

    Leonard T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964 [1911]), 53. For consumer discussions among American social liberals in the first decades of the twentieth century, see Kathleen G. Donahue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2003).

  45. 45.

    Frank A. Fetter, The Principles of Economics: With Application to Practical Problems (New York: The Century Co, 1905), 154 and 212.

  46. 46.

    Fetter, The Principles of Economics, 376, 212, 212.

  47. 47.

    Fetter, The Principles of Economics, 410.

  48. 48.

    Fetter, The Principles of Economics, 376 and 410.

  49. 49.

    Perspectives on the invention of the sovereign consumer among Austrian free market economists can be found in Schwarzkopf, “The Consumer as ‘Voter’, ‘Judge’ and ‘Jury’.”

  50. 50.

    Details about Mises’ life and work can be found in the “insider” biography—Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007). See also the detailed accounts in Slobodian, Globalists.

  51. 51.

    It was the German neoliberal Alexander Rüstow who initially labeled Mises a “paleo-liberal.”

  52. 52.

    See firstly Nicholas Gane, “The Emergence of Neoliberalism: Thinking Through and Beyond Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture and Society 31, 4 (2014): 3–27; Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2013); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jamie Peck, “Remaking Laissez-Faire,” Progress in Human Geography 32, 3 (2008): 3–43. Quinn Slobobian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) also assigns Mises a key role in the development of early neoliberalism.

  53. 53.

    Gane , “The Emergence of Neoliberalism,” 6.

  54. 54.

    Ludwig von Mises, Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (München-Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1912).

  55. 55.

    Ludwig von Mises, “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im Sozialistischen Gemeinwesen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47, 1 (1920): 86–121; Die Gemeinwirtschaft. Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922).

  56. 56.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 435. Mises also referred to a section in the book Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1912), in which Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter argued that the consumer directs the production (32). The argument ran counter to the famous critique that Schumpeter began to launch at the neoclassical emphasis on the demand side, arguing instead that forces in the productive apparatus primarily prompt change and innovation in the economy. Nathan Rosenberg, “Joseph Schumpeter: Radical Economist,” in Schumpeter in the History of Ideas, eds., Yuichi Shionoya and Mark Perlman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 41–58.

  57. 57.

    Müller, Contesting Democracy.

  58. 58.

    Timothy Stanton, “Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Mass Democracy: Politics, Parliament and Parties in Weber , Kelsen , Schmitt and Beyond,” in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, eds., Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 320–358.

  59. 59.

    Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1923] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

  60. 60.

    Schwarzkopf, “The Political Theology of Consumer Sovereignty.”

  61. 61.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 436.

  62. 62.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 374–382.

  63. 63.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 258.

  64. 64.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 440.

  65. 65.

    As such, Mises was an early advocate of what Thomas Frank has termed “market populism” to describe the mode of support for the free market manifesting in the United States in the 1990s. See Thomas Frank, One market under God, extreme capitalism, market populism, and the end of economic democracy (London: Vintage, 2000).

  66. 66.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 434.

  67. 67.

    See also the comments in Gane, “The Emergence of Neoliberalism,” 10.

  68. 68.

    William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (London: Sage, 2014), 4.

  69. 69.

    Mises first justified the liberal order through the argument that it promotes the interests of individuals as consumers in Ludwig von Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, Beiträge zur Politik und Geschichte der Zeit (Wien: Manzsche Verlags- und Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1919), 163. Mises’ justification reached a climax in his magnum opus Human Action, a Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949) to which we will return toward the end of the chapter.

  70. 70.

    Dieter Plehwe, “Introduction,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds., Phillip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009), 10–11; Bernard Walpen, Die offenen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft: eine hegemonietheoretische Studie zur Mont Pèlerin Society (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2004), 66–73.

  71. 71.

    It should be mentioned that in his The Case for Capitalism (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1920), chief editor of The Economist, British Financial journalist Hartley Withers, launched a criticism of socialism and defence of capitalism that was identical to Mises ’. “Capitalism,” Withers stated, “puts the real power in the hands of the average consumer, and so suffers from and rejoices in all the weakness and force, all the hopefulness and despair, that are associated with democracy.” He added: “With regard to the consumer’s freedom, it [capitalism] beats State Socialism and Guild Socialism so hollow that they are hardly to be seen on the course.” Withers, The Case for Capitalism, 40–41, 42, and 244. It is thus fitting that, in the English translation of the second edition of Die Gemeinwirtschaft from 1932 Mises inserted a sentence referring the reader to the “striking remarks in Withers’, The Case for Capitalism” next to his reference to Fetter’s The Principles of Economics. Ludwig von Mises: Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), 442, note 1.

  72. 72.

    Lawrence H. White, The Clash of Economic Ideas: The Great Policy Debates and Experiments of the Last Hundred Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 32–67; Sonja M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 88–100; Joseph Persky, “Consumer Sovereignty and the Discipline of the Market,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 96 (1993): 13–28; Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  73. 73.

    The concept is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), who coined the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution.

  74. 74.

    See Persky, “Consumer Sovereignty,” 13.

  75. 75.

    Friedrich A. Hayek , ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935).

  76. 76.

    Friedrich A. Hayek , “The Present State of the Debate,” Friedrich A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), 214 and 219.

  77. 77.

    Hayek, “The Present State of the Debate,” 214.

  78. 78.

    Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge, 205–231. See also Andrew Gamble, “Hayek on knowledge, economics, and society,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, ed. Edward Feser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 111–131.

  79. 79.

    For Robbins’ relations to and reception of Mises and Hayek, see Susan Howson, Lionel Robbins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  80. 80.

    Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression (London: Macmillan, 1934), 148. In the accompanying footnote, Robbins specified that his argument owed much to Mises ’ Die Gemeinwirtschaft. See also the comments on Robbins’ book in Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 26–27.

  81. 81.

    Wilhelm Röpke, “Fascist Economics,” Economica 2, 5 (1935), 93, and Wilhelm Röpke, Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft (Wien: J. Springer, 1937), 167.

  82. 82.

    German neoliberalism is the topic of the following chapter.

  83. 83.

    Schwarzkopf, “The Consumer as ‘Voter’.”

  84. 84.

    Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 56–61.

  85. 85.

    Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 4, 8, 9, 13–4, 16, 103, 106.

  86. 86.

    Müller, Contesting Democracy, 49–90.

  87. 87.

    Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1937). For the Colloque Walter Lipmann, see François Denord, “Aux origines du néo-libéralisme en France. Louis Rougier et le Colloque Walter Lippmann de 1938,” Le Mouvement Social 195, 2 (2001): 9–34.

  88. 88.

    Walpen, Die offenen Feinde; Phillip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason; Burgin, The Great Persuasion; Daniel Steadman Jones , Masters of the Universe. Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2014).

  89. 89.

    Plehwe, “Introduction,” 1.

  90. 90.

    Ben Jackson, “At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930–1947,” The Historical Journal 53, 1 (2010): 129–151.

  91. 91.

    Hutt’s notion of consumer sovereignty has been given little attention in the historical research on the idea of the sovereign consumer. Most importantly, it is absent from Payne , The Consumer and only briefly mentioned in Schwarzkopf , “The Consumer as ‘Voter’ ” and in Schwarzkopf , “The Political Theology of Consumer Sovereignty.” For brief but very insightful comments on Hutt’s notion, see Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: Consumer Sovereignty,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, 1 (1993): 183–191, and Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 44–45.

  92. 92.

    Hutt did not attend the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society but joined at the 1949 meeting in Seelisberg and remained an enthusiastic contributor to the proceedings of the Society. For Hutt’s contributions to the meetings, see “Mont Pèlerin Society (1947–…): Inventory of the General Meeting Files (1947–1998),” Liberaal Archief, accessed 1 January 2018, http://www.liberaalarchief.be/MPS2005.pdf. In 1965, Hutt moved to the United States, where he first served as visiting professor at various universities and spent the last 16 years of his career at the University of Dallas. Hutt was never a widely famous scholar. Today, he is primarily remembered as a critic of Keynes and of strike-enforced collective bargaining as well as for having invented the notion of consumer sovereignty. For details on Hutt’s life and work, see his unpublished autobiography The Autobiography of an Economist (1984, Hoover Institution Archives, Box 70, Folder 6) and Morgan O. Reynolds, ed., W. H. Hutt: An Economist for the Long Run (Washington DC: Regnery Gateway, 1986).

  93. 93.

    For Hutt’s friendship with Hayek , see Hutt, The Autobiography, 85. Here, Hutt also talks of Hayek’s “long and fruitful influence on the form of my intellectual development.”

  94. 94.

    Hayek also pondered this theme in his contributions to the calculation debate. See Friedrich A. Hayek , “The Nature and History of the Problem,” in Collectivist Economic Planning, ed., Friedrich A. Hayek (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), 8–11.

  95. 95.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 257. Careful not to claim credit for the notion of consumer sovereignty, in a later article, Hutt pointed to earlier uses of the notion among other free market economists and in marketing literature. About his own initial use of the notion, he wrote: “I first used the term in its present sense in an unpublished article which I circulated in 1931. It first appeared in print, I believe, in an article which I published in March 1934.” William H. Hutt, “The Concept of Consumers’ Sovereignty,” The Economic Journal 50, 197 (1940), 66, note 2.

  96. 96.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 257.

  97. 97.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 270.

  98. 98.

    As phrased by Schwarzkopf, “The Consumer as ‘Voter’,” 12.

  99. 99.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 262.

  100. 100.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 9.

  101. 101.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 216 and 270.

  102. 102.

    Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 101–120.

  103. 103.

    See the comments in Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 44.

  104. 104.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 262 and 258.

  105. 105.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 252–253. A philosopher, theologian, and economist, Wicksteed wrote on economic method and the theory of marginal productivity, emphasizing the subjectivism of costs. He influenced several twentieth-century economists, particularly those working in the Austrian tradition, including Ludwig von Mises and Lionel Robbins.

  106. 106.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 265.

  107. 107.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 305–306.

  108. 108.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 264–265.

  109. 109.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 282–283.

  110. 110.

    Persky, “Retrospectives,” 188.

  111. 111.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 273–281.

  112. 112.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 293.

  113. 113.

    Trentmann, “The Modern Genealogy,” 45.

  114. 114.

    Müller, Contesting Democracy, 91–124.

  115. 115.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 275.

  116. 116.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 273–370.

  117. 117.

    Hutt, Economists and the Public, 298.

  118. 118.

    Along with extracts from reviews of the book, these “opinions” appear on promotional material enclosed in the copy of Hutt , Economists and the Public that I have bought second-hand.

  119. 119.

    Ludwig von Mises, Liberalismus (Jena: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1927), 35.

  120. 120.

    Mises, Liberalismus, 40.

  121. 121.

    Mises, Liberalismus, 45.

  122. 122.

    Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Ludwig von Mises Institute: Auburn, 2007), 684. For more critical accounts of Mises’ political attitudes and commitments, see Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 46–48; Claus-Dieter Krohn, Wirtschaftstheorien als politische Interessen: Die akademische Nationalökonomien in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1981), 33–38 and 111–117; Perry Andersson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (Verso: London, 2005), 13. For a sympathetic analysis (and defense) of Mises’ attitudes toward Fascism, see Ralph Raico, “Mises on Fascism, Democracy, and Other Questions,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, 1 (1996): 1–27.

  123. 123.

    Mises, Human Action, 258.

  124. 124.

    Mises, Human Action, 321.

  125. 125.

    Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 24.

  126. 126.

    In line with this, the tensions of Hutt’s ideological visions, with its passionate plea for laissez faire and demand of a thorough revision of laissez faire, was pointed out in the review of Economists and the Public authored by Chicago-economist Jacob Viner, “W. H. Hutt , Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion,” Journal of Political Economy 46, 4 (1938): 571–575. The book also received a number of more positive reviews. See, for example, G. W. Daniels, “Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion by W. H. Hutt ,” Economica 4, 13 (1937): 93–96. See also the enthusiastic comment “Dictatorship of the Proletariat or Consumers’ Sovereignty?” and review “Economic Harmonies” authored by Arthur Slaberdain and Brinley Thomas, respectively, in the London School of Economics student paper, Claire Market Review XXXIII, 2 (1938) 32–35 and 38–39. Slaberdain, who studied at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, changed his surname to Seldon in 1939 and became famous for his role in setting up and directing the British Institute of Economic Affairs. Brinley Thomas was a lecturer at the London School of Economics between 1931 and 1939 and was appointed to the chair of Economics at University College Cardiff in 1946, where he remained until 1973. Professor of Political Economy at Aberdeen University, L. M. Fraser discussed Hutt’s use of the notion of consumer sovereignty in more detail in a review essay that he authored in the late 1930s. L. M. Fraser, “The Doctrine of Consumers’ Sovereignty ,” Economic Journal 49, 195 (1939): 544–548. We will return to the reviews of Hutt’s book in Chap. 5.

  127. 127.

    The above builds on Payne , The Consumer, 21–43 and Peter Guerney, The Making of Modern Consumer Culture in Modern Britain (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2017), 155.

  128. 128.

    As illustrated by Quinn Slobodian, Hutt also emerged as an apartheid apologist by proposing to weigh franchise according to income so as to avoid the transfer of power to a black parliamentary majority. See Slobodian, Globalists, 172–178.

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Olsen, N. (2019). The Birth of the Neoliberal Sovereign Consumer. In: The Sovereign Consumer. Consumption and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89584-0_2

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