Introduction : inventing citizenship in the revolutionary marketplace -- The Dames des Halles : economic lynchpins and the people personified -- Embodying sovereignty : the October days, political activism, and maternal work -- Occupying the marketplace : the battle over public space, particular interests, and the body politic -- Exacting change : money, market women, and the crumbling corporate world -- The cost of female citizenship : price controls and the gendering of democracy in revolutionary France -- Selling legitimacy : merchants, police, and the politics of popular subsistence -- Commercial licenses as political contracts : working out autonomy and economic citizenship -- Conclusion : fruits of labors : citizenship as social experience

Protest Politics in the Marketplace examines how social media has revolutionized the use and effectiveness of consumer activism. In her groundbreaking book, Caroline Heldman emphasizes that consumer activism is a democratizing force that improves political participation, self-governance, and the accountability of corporations and the government. She also investigates the use of these tactics by conservatives. Heldman analyzes the democratic implications of boycotting, socially responsible investing, social media campaigns, and direct consumer actions, highlighting the ways in which such consumer activism serves as a countervailing force against corporate power in politics. In Protest Politics in the Marketplace, she blends democratic theory with data, historical analysis, and coverage of consumer campaigns for civil rights, environmental conservation, animal rights, gender justice, LGBT rights, and other causes. Using an inter-disciplinary approach applicable to political theorists and sociologists, Americanists, and scholars of business, the environment, and social movements, Heldman considers activism in the marketplace from the Boston Tea Party to the present. In doing so, she provides readers with a clearer understanding of the new, permanent environment of consumer activism in which they operate.

In contemporary life, the marketplace has emerged as an important arena for the practice of politics. Concerns about personal and family well-being as well as ethical or political assessment of favorable and unfavorable business and government practices become part and parcel of the marketplace of politics. This volume describes this phenomenon as political consumerism, reflecting an understanding of politics as a product embedded in a complex social and normative context. Politics, Products, and Markets is the first general study of political consumerism. It asks fundamental questions, including what is new and what is old about the phenomenon. The authors discuss the mediating role of political consumerism in the problematic relationship between markets and morality. They explore whether institutional arrangements have been developed to permit consumers and producers to assume ethical responsibility for their choices and behavior. They ask why political consumerism is presently on the rise. And they investigate the relationship between globalization and political consumerism. Part 1, "Making Money Morally," discusses how political consumerism challenges the perceived division between private interests pursued by private actors in the market and public interests pursued through political means. Part 2, "Consumer Choices and Setting of the Agenda of Politics," contains examples of how political consumerism sets the agenda of politics and discusses its democratic quality. Part 3, "Building Responsible Institutions in Multi-Risk Society," has as its central theme the development of new political consumer institutions. Part 4, "Politicizing Consumers and Change in Politics," studies the characteristics of political consumers and raises the question of whether political consumerism really is politics. This volume will be of interest to social scientists, social activists, and policy institutes.

This book introduces a theory for how the state shapes private governance, leveraging data from informal markets in Lagos, Nigeria.

"How much does it cost?" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, as Pocketbook Politics dramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern. In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them. This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Pocketbook Politics offers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.

Citing evidence from museum collections, colonial wills, newspaper advertisements, and archaeological sites, argues that the increasing availability of British consumer goods into the colonies help set off the American Revolution.

As of the latest national elections, it costs approximately $1 billion to become president, $10 million to become a Senator, and $1 million to become a Member of the House. High-priced campaigns, an elite class of donors and spenders, superPACs, and increasing corporate political power have become the new normal in American politics. In Capitalism v. Democracy, Timothy Kuhner explains how these conditions have corrupted American democracy, turning it into a system of rule that favors the wealthy and marginalizes ordinary citizens. Kuhner maintains that these conditions have corrupted capitalism as well, routing economic competition through political channels and allowing politically powerful companies to evade market forces. The Supreme Court has brought about both forms of corruption by striking down campaign finance reforms that limited the role of money in politics. Exposing the extreme economic worldview that pollutes constitutional interpretation, Kuhner shows how the Court became the architect of American plutocracy. Capitalism v. Democracy offers the key to understanding why corporations are now citizens, money is political speech, limits on corporate spending are a form of censorship, democracy is a free market, and political equality and democratic integrity are unconstitutional constraints on money in politics. Supreme Court opinions have dictated these conditions in the name of the Constitution, as though the Constitution itself required the privatization of democracy. Kuhner explores the reasons behind these opinions, reveals that they form a blueprint for free market democracy, and demonstrates that this design corrupts both politics and markets. He argues that nothing short of a constitutional amendment can set the necessary boundaries between capitalism and democracy.