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Published by EH.NET (June 2004) 
 
Kathleen G. Donohue, _Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea 
of the Consumer_.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii + 
326 pp. $45.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8018-7426-2. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Larry G. Gerber, Department of History, Auburn 
University. 
 
Kathleen G. Donohue, assistant professor of history at the University of 
North Carolina, Charlotte, has written an ambitious book exploring the 
evolution of modern American liberalism from 1870 to 1940 by concentrating 
on changing conceptions of consumption and consumers. Donohue is not the 
first historian to consider the ways in which the development of a 
consumer-oriented society transformed American liberalism, but her 
carefully focused reading of a large and diverse group of economic and 
social theorists sheds new light on the intellectual underpinnings of 
post-New Deal liberalism. 
 
Donohue begins by describing the “producer paradigm” that dominated 
American thinking about the political economy in the late nineteenth 
century.  She observes that “classical liberals” assumed that only those 
responsible for the production of wealth were entitled to enjoy its 
benefits and that consumption was at best an unfortunate necessity because 
it represented the destruction of wealth.  Donohue points out that going 
all the way back to the Puritans, Americans had consistently viewed 
consumption as a vice, but that only with the development of classical 
economics in the nineteenth century did the producer come to be seen as the 
embodiment of all that was good.  Late nineteenth- century radicals and 
socialists may have differed sharply with liberals about the desirability 
of capitalism, but they shared the belief that the producer, whether worker 
or entrepreneur, ought to be at the center of the political economy and 
that the interests of consumers and producers were, in many ways, 
incompatible.  Theorists as diverse as William Graham Sumner, Henry George, 
Richard Ely, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the early Thorstein Veblen all 
adopted a producerist worldview that assumed an individual’s identity and 
worth derived from his or her role as a producer. 
 
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, according to Donohue, a 
number of influential writers began to challenge the negative view of 
consumption and consumers that had become so widespread.  Even though 
intellectuals such as Simon Patten and Edward Bellamy continued to view 
production as the key element of the economy, they began to lay the 
foundation for a more positive view of consumption that divorced the right 
to consume from the individual’s role as a producer.  The Progressive era 
subsequently proved to be a “turning point” in the development of a 
consumerist perspective as Veblen and consumer advocates such as Florence 
Kelley began to associate the public interest with the interests of 
consumers and to undermine the positive connotations that had long been 
associated with the category of producer. 
 
It was not until the final years of the Progressive era and the 1920s, 
however, that a new generation of social theorists, including Walter 
Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Stuart Chase, Robert Lynd, and Rexford Tugwell, 
completed the theoretical reconstruction of classical American liberalism 
by arguing that the nation’s political system should be organized around 
the consumer rather than the producer.  Although the new consumer-oriented 
liberals offered a variety of prescriptions as to how government might most 
effectively intervene in the economy to safeguard the interests of the 
consuming public, they all assumed that a strictly market-based, 
producer-oriented, system no longer promoted the well being of society. 
 
Such ideas, Donohue admits, had little impact on American politics until 
the Great Depression created a radically new political environment. Even at 
the outset of the New Deal, consumer-oriented liberals had to contend with 
advocates of a more traditional producer-oriented approach for influence 
within the Roosevelt administration.  However, the failure of the NRA 
helped pave the way for the triumph of a consumerist approach.  Ultimately 
“consumerist left liberals” such as Tugwell, Chase, William Trufant Foster, 
and others who at one time worked within the Agricultural Adjustment 
Administration played a key role in making “freedom from want” a central 
tenet of American thinking.  They thus prepared the ground for the triumph 
of a Keynesian approach to the economy that was based on the premise that a 
consumption-oriented economy best served the public interest. 
 
_Freedom from Want_ is a well crafted example of traditional intellectual 
history.   Donohue’s close reading of the works of a variety of economic 
and political theorists not only provides interesting new insights into the 
thought of the individuals she examines, but also allows her to construct a 
compelling narrative of the dramatic change that occurred over a span of 
half a century in liberal thinking about the role of consumption and 
consumers in the political economy.  Her analysis effectively highlights 
the way in which the development of a consumer-oriented approach to the 
political economy undercut the potential appeal of socialism, which 
continued to place the producer/worker at the center of the political and 
economic universe. 
 
However, Donohue’s history of ideas does have some self-imposed 
limitations.  Although Donohue acknowledges the significance of the Great 
Depression, for most of her study she does little to relate the theoretical 
works she examines to actual changes in the American economy.  It would, 
therefore, be useful to read Donohue’s book in conjunction with James 
Livingston’s _Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 
1850-1940_ (UNC Press, 1994), which examines many closely related issues 
while attempting to link the concerns of more traditional intellectual 
history to a sophisticated treatment of economic developments. 
 
In addition, except for her discussion of the NRA and AAA, Donohue rarely 
makes any effort to connect her analysis of what intellectuals wrote about 
the idea of the consumer to actual public policy developments.  Moreover, 
her emphasis on the significance of the AAA for the subsequent emergence of 
a consumption-oriented New Deal liberalism offers a less complete and less 
convincing account of the triumph of Keynesian welfare state liberalism 
within the New Deal than does Alan Brinkley’s _The End of Reform_ (Knopf, 
1995). 
 
Such criticisms are not meant to detract from the value of Donohue’s work.  
Her principal objective is to trace the gradual development of the 
intellectual foundations upon which modern liberalism was built, and in 
this regard she makes a significant contribution.  No one narrative can 
portray all the dimensions of this story, but Donohue deserves praise for 
dealing in depth with so many diverse thinkers.  At times, her distinctions 
between “left liberals” and “consumerist left liberals” and “new liberals” 
as opposed to “corporate liberals” or “Veblenian liberals” can be 
confusing.  Yet, the confusion may well be an accurate reflection of the 
fact that the development she traces from the producerist worldview of 1870 
to the consumer-oriented consensus that had emerged by mid-century was not 
unilinear. 
 
Larry G. Gerber is the author of _The Limits of Liberalism_ (NYU Press, 
1983) and numerous articles in such journals as _Business History Review_ , 
_Journal of Policy History_, _Journal of Economic History_, and _Social 
Science History_.  He has just finished a book manuscript entitled “The 
Irony of State Intervention: American Industrial Relations Policy in 
Comparative Perspective, 1914-1939.” 
 
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