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This book analyses the idea of luxury, shows how its evaluative meaning has changed, and explores its role in the determination of social order.
In popular morality luxury implies an idea of blame. The economic definition of "luxury" is quite different from the moral. In economics luxuries are contrasted with necessities on the one hand and with decencies or comforts on the other. Things belonging to the class last mentioned are such as have come into general use and serve to mark our social position. They are as essential to us as members of a social organism as the necessities are to us as individuals. Luxuries in this classification denote the articles that are somewhat strange to the average man or those he does not use regularly. Luxury often means merely the use of articles that to other persons or in other places would be comforts or necessities. Again it means the satisfaction of desires that are recognized as perfectly legitimate but are out of the reach of most persons. -Simon N. Patten, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 578-579* * *Where there is great wealth, making possible a high degree of general cultivation and refinement, it seems that a certain amount of waste (and worse than waste) expenditure is inevitable, and perhaps a certain amount of admiration for mere luxury. If, when the loss of happiness produced by luxury is weighed against the gain, the former is found to preponderate, luxury of such kind and degree is to be condemned. But if the luxury of individuals brings on the whole a gain to the community, such luxury is not to be condemned. In fact, to put the matter paradoxically, luxury is only desirable when it is not luxury. - E. E. C. Jones, International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 129-132
Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.
Matt Erlin considers books and the culture around books during this period, focusing specifically on Germany where literature, and the fine arts in general, were the subject of soul-searching debates over the legitimacy of luxury.