LUXURY. - It is not the "use of costly things," which can also be prudent and controlled by an intelligent and progressive taste: but it is the lack of control and the habit, formed at unproductive expense of goods, aimed at satisfying the capital vices rather than sound and understandable needs of aesthetics or comfort. It consists not so much in the material outlay 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 subjective, inasmuch as often luxury is at first an exception, then a rule, and finally a necessity. In the preface to the Croniques de Hollinshed, of 1577, the substitution of oak wood for willow wood in the construction of houses is censured, considering it a scandalous luxury: "When our houses - we read there - were of willow, our men were of oak; today houses are made of oak, but our men are no longer even of willow, but of straw. And this is truly sad." It must not be forgotten, however, that the uncertainty of 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 reasons and moral reasons converge. From the economic point of view, luxury withdraws capital from truly useful labor, and time and products from necessary consumption: it therefore keeps prices high, while it increases luxury industries, with inflationary consequences, and unproductive trades: servants, entertainments, hairdressing, jewels, smoking, gambling, gluttony and the like. Also as regards the redistribution of income, luxury represents the least happy among spontaneous forms, the least rational and the least edifying. Some economists (e.g., B. Franklin) held that luxury contributed to the dynamics of commerce and to civil progress itself; the opinion, somewhat exaggerated, does not convince the majority of modern economists, who condemn luxury as a destroyer of savings and a cause of misery.
From the moral point of view, luxury does not educate character and will: in the face of unemployment and the deadly miseries of so great a part of the people, especially in difficult or painful moments, habitual 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, because of the disorder and corruption it brings into custom, and given that very often luxury is a sign of wealth ill acquired, it was in the past and on several occasions condemned and regulated by political authorities (sumptuary laws and taxes among the Romans, in the Middle Ages, the courts of France and England, the Republic of Venice, etc.); today it can be considered free from all discipline, except in exceptional moments, but it serves as a call to fiscal severity, which rightly undertakes to make it serve as a forced instrument of the redistribution of income.
In its most disorganized and inconsiderate aspect, it degenerates into squandering (perpero or hyperpero - from the Greek "brilliant" - was the name in the Middle Ages of a Byzantine gold coin and then, figuratively, of money in general and of every wealth): while luxury can sometimes be traced to vivacity of character and to original and distinct personalities, squandering is proper to the scatterbrained and the weak.
The struggle against luxury and squandering is almost exclusively the prerogative of fiscal measures charged to those who abandon themselves to them: the moral remedy lies, beyond a complete education of the spirit, in removing prestige from luxury as a motive of consideration and esteem in social relations. As regards immodesty in dress, v. MODA; MODESTIA.
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Mario Baroni