Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

By Victoria de Grazia

Book Overview

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire , Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674016726
• ISBN13: 9780674016729
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 2.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.5" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

A cleverly constructed book

This is a very clever book. The author pinned her explanation of American influence in Europe on canny business practices. The service ethic. Big-branding. Supermarkets. These are some of the themes that are worked over to make the case. The book is delighfully stuffed with anecdotes, vignettes and odd facts and statistics to lend it the feel of visiting a large emporium of ideas. Personally, I liked this 'shelf browsing' feel to the chapters. The book has a few serious downsides which marr its central argument. First and foremost, the author takes little cognisance of the influence of WWII on shaping European attitudes towards American culture. Secondly, in the two generations after WWII more Europeans (percentage) speak English in order to accommodate their ambitions. The author attributes the creeping growth of English pre-WWII to business needs (strange to me that she singles out the Rotarians as particularly influential). However, that does not explain its widesprgead endorsement by the general citizenry after WWII. This brings me the third issue, the lack of attention paid to the rise of youth culture - largely driven by perceptions of American youth in the fifties. Music, rock'n'roll and the drug culture were directed to a large extent by American tastes. Consumerism is too broad a concept to explain the uptake of American habits. Despite these lacunae, the book is a a thought-provoking exercise and though the prose is bit attenuated at times, it is overall readable and stimualting.

Exquisitely Written

What the other reviews fail to convey about this wonderful book is that the writing is exquisite. Each chapter uses real-life examples, ironies and juxtapositions to vividly evoke contrasts between America and Europe and demonstrate the course of change. When the chapters arc to their conclusion, you feel a real emotional and intellectual punch. History writing just doesn't get any better than this.

BRAVO de Grazia!

As someone who reads for a living, let me commend the work of Professor Victoria de Grazia: Irresistible Empire. You see, to write a review, one must not only READ the book, but UNDERSTAND what's read! Professor de Grazia makes reading her book an educational,enlightening pleasure.I read Irresistable Empire prior to interviewing Prof.de Grazia on my radio show. My producer Bun-E and I select books/interviews that will enlighten and entertain our diverse audience. The book MUST be 'readable', for which Irresistable Empire receives an A+AND relevant, another A+!!We've been told by listeners that this book's a great choice for Christmas lists! The entertaining style that Victoria de Grazia writes enhances the reader's ability to understand the "Americanization of Europe" - as much has been written about the subject but little has been understood prior to this book. A book that educates in a very entertaining style?-that's Irresistable Empire!!!

A terrific book on the origins of global consumerism

De Grazia shows that the triumph of American-style consumption in Europe -- from supermarkets to Hollywood movies -- wasn't automatic; there were alternatives, there was resistance, there was a history. The book is full of fascinating surprises: Woodrow Wilson's speech to the first World's Salesmanship Congress in 1916; the Duluth-Dresden connection; Hitler promising to protect Europe from American economic domination. This may be the best book we have on the history of consumption in the 20th century.

Are You Trying to Seduce Me?

A well-written, well-documented, colorful, and entertaining account how American consumer culture came to dominate Europe by the force of seduction. In asking how it is that Europeans came to be so enamored with the American way, De Grazia shows the integral part that the shaping of desire plays in domination.