The Socialist Good Life

"The Socialist Good Life is a first-class, rigorously researched, richly documented, and thought-provoking book, which will make a significant contribution to scholarship in its field."—Graham H. Roberts, author of Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things Values, Identities

"The time is ripe for this volume of essays, given climate change, escalating socio-economic inequalities, and now the radical effects of the novel coronavirus. These studies offer a nuanced picture of the modern "good life" that emerged in state-socialist Eastern Europe, with new perspectives on its successes and failures. There are surprises here. Who would have predicted the convergence among economists in east and west on supply-side theory by the 1970s? There are also provocations. Practices we might consider desirable today arose, ironically, from what were understood at the time as the failures of state-socialist consumer regimes: reuse and recycling, D.I.Y. skills for adapting, repairing and caring for the mass-produced goods available. In the years ahead, we may have much to learn from this exploration of the state-socialist experience."—Krisztina Fehervary, author of Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary

"This trailblazing book examines the achievements and real pleasures of the socialist good life. Mobilizing their deep knowledge of state socialist Eastern Europe, the authors upend our assumptions and offer us new coordinates for understanding consumption, politics, and the good life. They question how socialist consumption has been measured and ask whether it had any relation to a 'social contract,' whether it resulted in consumerist apathy, and whether it may have, in fact, escaped alienation and offered a missed post-materialist future."—Johanna Bockman, author of Markets in the Name of Socialism

"This is a thought-provoking and enlightening, if in places frustrating, collection of interdisciplinary essays that will be of benefit to social scientists interested in consumer lifeworlds under communist rule."—Gediminas Lankauskas, University of Regina, The Russian Review

"The volume is a useful study of Eastern European consumption during socialism and an invaluable tool with which to think about writing the histories of consumerism and state socialism in general. The provocative conclusions regarding socialism's failures as reverse echoes of our world today, with its own tortured relation to consumption, should, one hopes, resonate beyond the confines of the fields of Eastern European and socialist history."—Victor Petrov - University of Tennessee, H-Net (Socialisms)