Description
Book SynopsisBuying Happiness explores the different ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption, which shaped economic and social policy and influenced behaviour.
Trade ReviewLiverant 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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
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
