American intellectual historians are no strangers to argument. But few have been as defined by contrarianism as James Livingston. Where others have mourned the early twentieth century defeat of the Populists and the Wobblies, he has made a career extolling the radical potential of the corporate order which emerged at the same time. He has hailed the volunteer army as an outstanding example of progressive politics, and defended John Dewey’s World War I hawkishness against Randolph Bourne’s tragically heroic opposition. In his first non-academic book, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul, Livingston argues that a bias against consumerism mars not only academia but American moral common sense more generally. “We’re afraid,” he writes, “that we consume too many resources, that we save too little of our incomes, and that meanwhile we produce almost nothing of real value.” Americans are neurotic about our consumption, he claims, and his book is the therapy that can help us get over it.

But why is thrift a habit we need to break? Livingston’s argument has both economic and cultural aspects. Like other Marxist analysts, including David Harvey and Robert Brenner, he explains our present crisis as the result of “huge shifts in income shares away from labor, wages and consumption toward capital, profits, and corporate savings.” Productivity gains in the last few decades have gone almost entirely to the rich. Their surplus profits, lacking profitable avenues for investment, are channeled into whatever bubbles are at hand. He goes farther than others in claiming that the reinvestment of profits is no longer even necessary for economic growth. This argument is difficult for non-specialists to evaluate, but Livingston documents his case with graphs showing a growth in GDP despite declining net investment. He argues that the superfluity of private investment licenses us to tax and redistribute corporate profits without fear of destroying our economic future. Instead of generating crises, our social wealth can underwrite a reduction of working time and an expansion of income and leisure for workers.

According to Livingston, our unfortunate economic orthodoxy is bound up with anachronistic moral commitments. He accuses most Americans, left and right, of being stuck in a mindset from the 1890s, one that favors production, work, and restraint over consumption, leisure, and indulgence. The tendency to attack bankers through moralistic categories, the anti-monopoly faith in small business, nostalgia for the “real economy” of manufacturing jobs — all this, he argues, is a Populist hangover inadequate to the present moment. Opposition to consumer culture is fundamentally rooted in the conviction that moral worth comes from socially productive labor, not parasitic prodigality. These beliefs made sense in a time of scarcity. But now that our productive advances have made widely shared abundance possible, the demand that consumer culture be checked is a demand for unnecessary privation.