LUXURY. - It is not the use of expensive things, which may even be prudent and controlled by intelligent and progressive taste: but it is the lack of control and the habit of spending on unproductive goods, aimed at satisfying rather the capital vices than healthy and understandable aesthetic or comfort needs. It does not so much consist in the material expenditure of money as in the use of things and labor without a corresponding and proportionate utility.
The term does not have an absolute value; it is largely objective, inasmuch as luxury is often initially an exception, then a rule, and finally a necessity. In the preface to the Chronicles of Hollinshed, of 1577, the substitution of oak wood for willow in the construction of houses is criticized as scandalous luxury: “When our houses were of willow, our men were of oak; today the houses are made of oak, but our men are no longer even of willow, but of straw. And this is indeed sad.” One must not, however, forget that the entirety of the judgment is limited to the zone of contact between the necessary and the superfluous: so that the bulk of the phenomenon is always perfectly identifiable and admits of no doubt or indulgence. In the reprobation of useless luxury, economic and moral reasons converge. From an economic point of view, luxury diverts capital from truly useful labor, and time and products from necessary consumption: it thus keeps prices high, while fostering luxury industries, with inflationary consequences, and unproductive trades: servitude, entertainment, grooming, jewelry, smoking, gambling, gluttony, and the like. Even in terms of income redistribution, luxury represents the least fortunate of spontaneous forms, the least rational and the least edifying. Some economists (e.g., B. Franklin) believed that luxury contributes to the dynamics of trade and even to civil progress; this opinion, somewhat exaggerated, does not convince the majority of modern economists, who condemn luxury as a destroyer of savings and a cause of poverty.
From a moral point of view, luxury does not educate character and will: in the face of unemployment and the deadly miseries of so many people, especially in difficult or painful times, customary luxury, and worse, the ostentation of luxury, constitute a provocation to the indignation and hatred of the suffering toward the wealthy classes.
Because of its economic and moral consequences, the disorder and corruption it brings to custom, and given that luxury is very often a sign of ill-gotten wealth, it has been condemned and regulated by political authorities in the past and repeatedly (sumptuary laws and taxes among the Romans, in the Middle Ages, the courts of France and England, the Republic of Venice, etc.); today it may be considered free from any discipline, except in exceptional moments, but it serves as a reminder of fiscal severity, which rightly undertakes to make it a forced instrument of income redistribution.
In its most disordered and thoughtless aspect, it degenerates into waste (perpero or iperpero—from the Greek “brilliant”—was the name in the Middle Ages of a Byzantine gold coin and then, figuratively, of money in general and all wealth): while luxury may sometimes be linked to vivacity of character and to original and distinguished personalities, waste is characteristic of the scatterbrained and the weak.
The struggle against luxury and waste is almost exclusively the prerogative of fiscal measures imposed on those who indulge in them: the moral remedy lies, in addition to a complete education of the spirit, in stripping it of prestige as a motive for consideration and esteem in social relations. With regard to immodesty in dress, V. MODE; MODESTY.