Social Opulence and Private Restraint The Consumer in British Socialist Thought Since 1800

Social Opulence and Private Restraint is a study of the place of the consumer and consumption in the political economy of British socialism, from its early-nineteenth-century origins, through 'New Times' Marxism, to the consumer-focused New Labourism and political economies critical of consumerism that can be found in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Left. Noel Thompson identifies and explicates recurrent themes which cross the boundaries of the conventional periodisation of the history of British socialist thought; themes which illustrate the sustained nature of the multifaceted ideological challenge presented by the accommodation of the consumer within socialist political economy.

This challenge necessitates an engagement with the character and priorities of a future socialist society. As such it touches on some of the key issues which socialists have confronted in pursuit of their vision of a good society: issues with a strong contemporary relevance such as the desirability of private as against social opulence; the relationship between consumption and happiness; the need to educate and/or to liberate desire; and, in particular, the environmental and social consequences of rising levels of consumer expectation and consumption. The study also throws light on how the disparate ways in which these issues were addressed reflected and shaped the socialist political economies that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while also engendering tensions between them.

Noel Thompson graduated from St. Andrews University in 1974, and pursued a Masters degree in Economic and Political Thought at Queen's University Belfast, before undertaking research leading to the award of a doctorate by the University of Cambridge. He was appointed to a lectureship in Swansea University in 1979, was awarded a personal chair in 1999, and has been Head of its Department of History, School of Humanities, Acting Head of the School of Law, and of the College of Business, Economics and Law. He was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) in 2008 and resigned from that post to take up a Visiting Fellowship at St. Catherine's College, Oxford in 2014.

His research is focused primarily on the history of British anti-capitalist and socialist political economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and his most recent monographs include Political Economy and the Labour Party: the economics of democratic socialism, 1884-2005 (2006), Left in the wilderness: the political economy of British democratic socialism since 1979 (2002), and The Real Rights of Man: political economies for the working class, 1775-1850 (1998).