[Marxism] Irresistible Empire

[Louis Proyect]

Victoria de Grazia. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 
Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 2005. 586 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 
(cloth), ISBN 0-674-01672-6.
Reviewed by: Max Paul Friedman, Department of History, Florida State 
University.
Published by: H-German (June, 2006)

Babbitt vs. Buddenbrooks: A Clash of Civilizations?

Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire is a dazzling work that aims to 
reassess the American impact on Europe in the twentieth century. De Grazia 
has produced a fine-grained history of key aspects of late modern 
capitalism. De Grazia depicts the triumph of scientific marketing and 
distribution techniques as American innovators imposed their "Market 
Empire" on Europeans, who reluctantly gave up their old-fashioned, 
inefficient forms of commerce. Based on prodigious research in underused 
non-governmental archives of businesses and civic organizations in France, 
Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States, this study--nearly 600 
pages of often wonderfully crafted sentences--is in its own way an homage 
to the European style that de Grazia mourns one as displaced by American 
effectiveness: culturally rich and aesthetically pleasurable, it may be 
inefficient but it is beautiful to behold.

De Grazia's argument is that the industrialized United States in the 
twentieth century became a Market Empire, "a great imperium with the 
outlook of a great emporium" (p. 3). To sell their wares in Europe, 
American entrepreneurs backed by the U.S. government not only demanded 
access, but sought to refashion the very structure of the European economic 
system. Members of voluntary associations, social scientists and 
businesspeople crossed the Atlantic to supplant European practices with 
their own. They brought the creed not only of mass production, but of mass 
consumption, "challenging Europe's bourgeois commercial civilization and 
overturning its old regime" (p. 5).

full: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=235741159818672

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