Today’s “democratic ideal,” claimed Columbia University economist E. R. A. Seligman, was nothing more and nothing less than the “socialization of luxury,” the opportunity for everyone to find pleasure and contentment in the world around them. In early twentieth-century America, an era of growing material abundance, democratic life required that “leisure and culture will no longer be the possessions of the favored few” but be available to everyone in the course of daily life. Seligman’s insistence that democracy was as much in the streets as in the voting booth was far from novel, as he surely knew. Seligman lived in New York City, where working-class men and women made the same point every day. They laid claim to the new abundance of American life, an abundance they helped create, each time they put on fancy hats, went to Coney Island, strolled through Central Park, listened to opera, or laughed at vaudeville. Seligman translated their actions into economic prose and made a theoretical, as well as practical, argument for pleasurable consumption as a basis for modern democratic life.Footnote ¹

Seligman is best known today as the great proponent of progressive taxation, but his advocacy of the income tax was only one part of his lifelong effort to understand what might constitute democratic life in the age of mature industrial capitalism. His conviction that material comforts, leisure, and culture—or, in Seligman’s shorthand, “satisfactions”—should be widely enjoyed in a democracy came in part from his own experiences. Seligman’s parents were German Jewish immigrants. His father worked first as a peddler, prospered, and became a successful banker in New York. His parents were staunchly antislavery and proud Lincolnites; they gave Edwin the middle names Robert and Anderson after the commander of Fort Sumter at the beginning of the Civil War. “Ed” Seligman grew up in comfort, surrounded by books and art but also committed like his parents to social reforms of all stripes. Instead of going into the family banking business, Ed got a doctorate and a law degree from Columbia University. Along the way, he studied in Germany, where, like so many other economists of his age, he converted to historical economics. He taught at Columbia for his entire career, was a founder of the American Economic Association, a longtime editor of Political Science Quarterly, a strong advocate for social reform (everything from a living wage to compulsory workmen’s insurance to academic freedom), a frequent policy advisor at all levels of government, and an avid and knowledgeable collector of eighteenth-century art and rare books. He was heterodox in his reading and sources; he might well happily cite William Stanley Jevons and Karl Marx in the same article. He remained consistently committed to historical work throughout his long and prolific career.Footnote ²

In the early 1900s, Seligman was asked to “contribute to a series on American problems” by writing the Principles of Economics. He did. The book, he explained in his autobiography, “sought to combine the historical and comparative approach” with the most useful bits of marginalism, all the while putting “emphasis on the social implications of the problem.”Footnote ³ He insisted that the book was not original in any way, merely “a synthesis of existing doctrines,” which is sort of true (he recycled his own work and built on that of other economists and social scientists), but it also made esoteric economic writings “standard” fare. Principles is remarkably easy to read; it went through multiple editions.Footnote ⁴

In Principles, Seligman wrestled directly with how the transition from an economy defined by scarcity to one defined by abundance would change the practical meanings of democratic life. Democracy, he believed, had been and continued to be “the result of economic conditions.” Now, “the content of our democracy is changing,” in response to the “new industrial order,” and understandings of what makes a society democratic must change too.Footnote ⁵ Seligman here meant content literally as well as abstractly. Content meant the new and growing “social surplus,” economists’ term for the increasing abundance available thanks to mass production and mass distribution. What did that social surplus look like to an economist in 1905, in a world of increasingly efficient mass production?Footnote ⁶ A really good dinner. After all, Seligman explained, “It need not cost more effort to cook a good dinner than an unpalatable one, and yet the surplus of satisfaction over sacrifice is greater” when eating that good dinner.Footnote ⁷ Why? Because a good dinner tastes better, of course. And now, in the early twentieth century, more people could have good dinners for the same cost as bland ones. Refrigerated beef from Chicago, oranges from California, apples from Washington State—all were now widely available at reasonable prices for diners nationwide.Footnote ⁸ A good thing, for sure.

But consuming a great variety and higher quality food, while good, was not good enough in the early twentieth century. The mere availability of Chicago beef did nothing to further improve society after dinner was over. A good dinner for the same cost as a dull dinner is certainly an improvement, but once it is eaten, society is “no better off than before,” said Seligman. Society only benefited if good dinners were available at a lower cost. “If the dinner which originally cost one dollar can now be supplied for fifty cents,” Seligman explained, “we shall have to work less for that dinner,” and “as soon as we can satisfy an old want with some smaller total effort, the surplus is increased because some of the efforts previously devoted to the satisfaction of the old want are now set free for the attainment of the new object.” In other words, diners would now have “extra” money to spend on something else. They were free to imagine new wants—and to satisfy them.Footnote ⁹

In the early twentieth century, it really was possible to imagine better dinners for less money. Capital was able to reap the benefits of its investment in the means of production and watch productivity per labor hour rise dramatically. Cost of production decreased, thanks to those previous investments, economies of scale, the managerial revolution, distribution networks, technological innovation, and rationalization of the work process. The lower cost of production, driven here by capital investments, was the force that created the social surplus and its democratic promise. But production costs dropped not because production was cheaper, argued Seligman. They dropped because less expensive production meant less expensive goods so that more people, maybe most people, could now experience the “multiplication of wants” and, even more importantly, satisfy those wants. Seligman had just described mass consumption.Footnote ¹⁰

In the awkward phrase “multiplication of wants,” Seligman pointed to two factors that defined early twentieth-century mass consumption and made mass consumption potentially democratic: mass consumption was widespread and it was not utilitarian or “necessary.” Consumption of nonessential goods or services was hardly new, but their mass consumption was. In the Middle Ages, Seligman reminded readers (he wrote his dissertation on medieval guilds), nonessential consumption was the exclusive privilege of the elite. At the start of the twentieth century, though, it could not be; mass production required wide consumption in order to generate wealth, and not just some consumption but ever-increasing consumption. More important to Seligman, though, consumption now does not need to be—and indeed should not be!—just useful, essential, or necessary. It should be pleasurable, and in 1905, it could be.Footnote ¹¹

This emphasis on pleasurable consumption might be the most radical of Seligman’s arguments, and in it, we see that his focus on dinner was not arbitrary.Footnote ¹² Socialists are mistaken, Seligman said, in thinking that “a mere change in the distribution of wealth [will] suffice to bring about prosperity.” The socialist, grumped Seligman, would “reduce economic life to the hopeless level of a dull and low uniformity” in the name of equality.Footnote ¹³ Human life requires caloric intake, so food is an absolute necessity for survival. But any calories will do. Dinner does not have to be enjoyable to be useful. For society to survive, calories merely need to be readily available to everyone. But that was not sufficient for Seligman. He wanted to imagine readily available good dinners.Footnote ¹⁴ An equitable (but not equal) distribution of wealth, in other words, only matters if the distributed wealth brings happiness. Seligman was quite insistent.

To make his point, Seligman turned to a discussion of “luxury.” Why focus on luxury rather than the blander “wealth”? Luxury denotes the inessential, the extravagant. The Latin luxus means excessive, unnecessary. In Middle English, the term connoted lasciviousness and lechery. By the nineteenth century, it meant “something desirable but not indispensable” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but the word retained more than a hint of “vicious excess.” Luxury does not sound very democratic. But Seligman argued that luxury should be at the heart of democratic life. He had little patience for “the self-indulgent luxury of the mere sensualist,” and even less for one (Louis XIV was his easy target) who makes his own luxurious life into “a heavy burden for the people.”Footnote ¹⁵ Seligman also stridently rejected puritanical arguments against luxury. “‘Plain living and high thinking,’” he concurred, may stand as “a most admirable moral precept” in theory, but “plain living may be carried to an extreme.” Yes, he conceded to the antiluxury proponents, hard work and prudent savings promote progress. “But,” and you can almost hear his exacerbation rising, “it is equally evident that while a population every member of which is devoted entirely to wheat-raising or to the making of rough clothes or shelter may be very estimable,” these men and women will lead sad lives indeed.Footnote ¹⁶

Unlike Frederick Jackson Turner (dutifully cited in the bibliography of chapter seven), Seligman did not celebrate the small proprietor, the rugged farmer, the rough frontier. If, as Turner claimed, the frontier “was the home of democracy, because the frontier is the home of economic equality,” that equality was an equality of deprivation.Footnote ¹⁷ Life on the frontier was hard and impoverished, he pointed out, as many “pioneers,” especially women, attested.Footnote ¹⁸ There was no surplus, and thus there was no pleasure. “Where the energy of society is entirely occupied with procuring the bare means of subsistence,” he explained, “there can be no opportunity for the higher life.” “The whole domain of art, in some respects the supreme achievement of the human race” he concluded sadly, remained outside their reach.Footnote ¹⁹

Art—by which Seligman meant high art, museum art, Great European Art—is most certainly a luxury. Good dinners at least give utilitarian calories as well as pleasure. Art gives only pleasure. But pleasure itself was a democratic goal for Seligman, one that was now possible in the age of surplus. The “real economic ideal,” he insisted, “is the socialization of luxury” and the “creation of a surplus of satisfactions.” A social surplus of art? Yes, said Seligman. “The free citizen of the modern industrial state wants, and wants justly, to participate in the spiritual as well as the material benefits of modern civilization.” This participation in the luxuries of modern life is what Seligman called “the democratic ideal.”Footnote ²⁰

Widespread participation in pleasurable activities, whether dinner or art, was the key to Seligman’s idea of social democracy. If the social surplus “remain[s] in the hands of a favored few … while the mass of the community may be largely shut out” from the table, then there can be no democracy at all. The social surplus must be distributed throughout society.Footnote ²¹ Seligman was no socialist. He did not advocate for the forced redistribution of property and wealth by the state.Footnote ²² “Not every man is the equal of every one else,” he quipped. But Seligman also rejected an older, Horatio Alger-esque notion of distribution: that everyone’s share of the surplus should reflect the effort they had put into creating it. Seligman consistently refused to quantify what “a share” of the surplus should be, or how it might be determined, because he believed the surplus was for everyone, regardless of whether or not they were “productive members of society.” In modern democracy, Seligman believed each person should be able to enjoy a good dinner and fine art; he would not quantify enjoyment but insisted it was qualitative, social, and fluid. Social democracy, said Seligman, “seeks here to level up, not level down.” Everyone should have that “surplus of satisfactions.”Footnote ²³

Democratic promise does not necessarily become democratic practice, as the twentieth century made abundantly clear. Everyone did not, and does not, have that surplus of satisfactions. People have been, and are, excluded on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, where they come from, what they do, where they live, by law, and by social practice. But it might be worthwhile to return now to what Seligman believed was the democratic promise of a good dinner. Today, as at the turn of the twentieth century, we are bombarded with the language of scarcity, the seeming need for efficiency, for less spending, and specifically for less spending of the social surplus on the social, that is, on society. But we are not without a social surplus. North Americans and Europeans do not live in a time of scarcity. Words and phrases like efficiency, personal responsibility, self-control, a little bit of pain, economic detox—these are all words that mean more for me and none for you and you and you. Those are words of discrimination and of exclusion masquerading as moral virtue. Seligman gives us the opposite of those antidemocratic words. He gives us the democratic potential of good dinners for all, the hope “that private luxury should give way to public luxury.”Footnote ²⁴ Seligman’s celebration of the surplus of satisfactions, or rather his celebration of its potential for real reform, was a Progressive Era response to the Gilded Age, to the transition to a mass production/mass consumption society. Might this be a point of departure for a response to our own ever-increasing unequal distribution of capital, of pleasure, of satisfactions? Perhaps.