The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts.

Buying Happiness explores the ways public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption and consumer behaviours. Topics include the state’s creation of the first cost-of-living index in 1914–15, the development of consumer consciousness during the Depression, and the ways in which popular magazines encouraged an ethic of cautious consumerism in the postwar period.

Bettina Liverant’s fresh approach connects changes in consumer consciousness with changes in the economy and behaviour. As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination.

In that it looks at the idea of consumer society, Buying Happiness offers a welcome addition to the study of consumption. As such, Buying Happiness helps scholars recognize their own possible prejudices that they bring to the study of consumption.

The nearest dictionary to hand unhelpfully defines consumer as “one or that which consumes”. Bettina Liverant takes us beyond linguistic tautologies to give us a first-rate intellectual history of consumer society in Canada from late Victorian times to the post-war baby boom era.

Liverant makes a complex and insightful argument for a deep but largely unmarked change of perspective. Her synthesis of recent work on consumerism in Canada is illuminating. In highlighting the role of intellectuals and historic publications in constructing and reconstructing the social narratives that Canadians rely on to think about and develop personal and national identities, she gently invites present-day writers to reconsider their impact, and a more general readership to question how and why certain stories are told.