Reply to Gayle V. Fischer, by Michael Zakim

Gayle V. Fischer keenly observes that _Ready-Made Democracy_ is not grounded
in - or even particularly concerned with - the historiography of dress.
The book is, alas, far more engaged in the works of Adam Smith, Tocqueville,
Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin than in those very worthy studies
written by Claudia Kidwell, Margaret C. Christman, David Kuchta, and Shaun
Cole and cited in her review.  I'm sorry for the frustrations this has
evidently caused.  But the subject of _Ready-Made Democracy_, albeit
unremarked by Professor Fischer, is actually a central problem in American
political life, and one that I think has been woefully misconstrued by
social and labor historians writing over the past several decades:  namely,
how did capitalism and democracy emerge as twin, and even synonymous,
systems of governance in the nineteenth century?  A history of dress
provides an excellent opportunity to ask this question because - and here I
am quoting myself - "clothing has consistently served as both material and
metaphor for the social question."  That is to say, the ready-made acquired
a powerful democratic resonance at the same time that men's suits became one
of the country's earliest mass industrial commodities.

Allow me, however, to take issue with one of the review's conclusions.  I do
not agree that _Ready-Made Democracy_ has little to offer historians of
clothing.  In fact, judging from my own rather extensive acquaintance with
this very particular branch of academe, I think that some clothing scholars
might profit from reading a study written so far outside the regular
confines of their field.  Its account of how "getting dressed proves to be a
central event in modern life" - I'm quoting myself again - offers a
distinctly different view of clothing's relationship to political
philosophy, to the construction of labor markets and the invention of
sweating, to the cultural practices born of metropolitan life and commodity
exchange, to gender's creation of power relations in a democracy, to the
rise of business as a social paradigm, to the changing meaning of
technology, work, and the male body, and, finally, to the changing
relationship of persons with their material world.  As such, I would even
recommend _Ready-Made Democracy_ to scholars of clothing, as well as to
those more interested in "political, social, and economic history."

In short, I'm afraid that H-SHEAR has mis-assigned this review, which is too
bad since the list's subscribers might have welcomed an opportunity to
discuss my ambitious attempt to retell the history of capitalism in America.

Michael Zakim
Tel-Aviv University
zakim@post.tau.ac.il

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS