{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":195,"pdf_page":203,"physical_index":203,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e30fd1d240fb8fa6a315cf2f6580dac5ef6318b13fe11975b512607fb468d128"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"In this sense, the legal concern to protect consumers was continuous with that of the broader sociological jurisprudence movement, which was influential in the early and middle decades of the century. Led by prominent legal thinker Roscoe Pound (1911a, 1911b, 1912), sociological jurisprudence advocated a pragmatic, consequentialist approach to legal reasoning.\n\nThe preoccupation with safeguarding consumer rights, and protecting consumer interests, indicates the growing influence of the concept of the consumer citizen (L. Cohen 2003). The importance in the twentieth-century political imaginary of consumers was reflected in the creation of a number of government bodies with specific concern for consumer interests. During the Depression years, these included, among others, the Consumer’s Counsel Division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Consumer’s Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration. The Ofice of Price Administration, which had a central role in running the consumer economy during the Second World War, was also perceived as advocating for consumer interests.33 In the postwar years, the concern to represent consumer interests continued at the highest political levels. Calls for consumer protection, which had been relatively muted since the reforms of the Progressive era, became commonplace from the 1950s onward, as did demands for cabinet-level representation for consumers (Glickman 2009). John F. Kennedy went so far in 1962 as to float the idea of a consumer’s bill of rights.34 The emergence of the implied product warranty was thus not an isolated legal development but rather part of a constellation of institutional developments the point of which was to ensure that consumers were fairly treated in the marketplace—with fairness understood as obtaining where consumers receive a fair amount of use value in exchange for their wages.\n\nUpholding consumer rights was important for the legitimacy of capitalism, especially in the era of mass production, because through those rights, a connection was forged between wage labor and fundamental tenets of capitalist ideology. Consumer rights are an extension of rights attached to self-ownership, which can ultimately be traced to the possessive individualism that constitutes the deep normative ground for capitalism—articulated by liberal thinkers from Locke onward (MacPherson 1962). The moral force behind substantive (as opposed to formal) consumer rights is grounded in the right to commensurate compensation for having sold one’s (alienated) labor. For wage earners to have consumer rights is precisely to underline the fact that they are something other than slaves, despite the quite significant degree of economic coercion involved in the commodification of labor. As a free seller of labor, the wage laborer is entitled not just to arbitrary nominal compensation, set by the capricious workings of the labor market, but to substantive compensation in the form of a certain quantity of real buying power—which in turn is measured by the notional use power contained in commodities. As the legal and commercial developments discussed in this chapter safeguarded the use value of consumer commodities, so wage labor itself became more imaginable as an exchange of commensurable substances.\n\nStandardizing Utility\n\n195","previous_page":194,"next_page":196}