THE CONCEPT OF LUXURY IN BRITISH POLITICAL-ECONOMY - SMITH,ADAM TO MARSHALL,ALFRED

In the discourse of 18th-century British intellectuals the term 'luxur y' held a well-recognized and much disputed place. Dispute arose chief ly around the problem of disentangling the economic, moral-theological and political strands of the term. The object of the present paper is to trace forward the history of debate over the concept along one dev eloping line of specialization - that of 19th-century political econom y. It will be seen how the term luxury (and related terms: necessity, decency, productive, unproductive, etc.) adjusted meaning(s) as the ec onomic, social and intellectual contexts in which it was embedded them selves mutated. In particular, it is argued, the changing significance attached to the term illustrates the extent to which a key 19th-centu ry intellectual elite managed to accommodate the implications of a tra nsition from a society based on assumptions of scarcity and hierarchy to one that was beginning to contemplate the possibility of mass marke t abundance. While the profession's leaders did develop a sharpened in terest in aspiration to luxury consumption as a legitimate motor of ec onomic growth, all registered their disapproval of certain forms of th e aspiration, revealing in the process a variety of class, gender and 'race' preoccupations - including (from J. S. Mill onwards) a particul ar distaste for positional or status-related consumption.