LUXURY. – It is not the “use of costly things,” which may also be prudent and controlled by an intelligent and progressive taste; rather, it is the absence of control and the habit of expending goods unproductively, in ways aimed at satisfying the capital vices more than sound and understandable aesthetic or comfort-related needs. It consists not so much 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 subjective, since luxury is often at first an exception, then a rule, and finally a necessity. In the preface to the Croniques de Hollinshed, of 1577, the replacement of willow wood by oak in the construction of houses is censured, being regarded as a scandalous luxury: “When our houses,” it says, “were made 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.” It must not, however, be forgotten that uncertainty of judgment is confined to the area of contact between the necessary and the superfluous: hence the greater part of the phenomenon is always perfectly identifiable and allows neither doubt nor indulgence. Economic and moral reasons converge in the condemnation of useless luxury. From the economic point of view, luxury diverts capital from genuinely useful work, and time and products from necessary consumption; it therefore keeps prices high, while increasing luxury industries, with inflationary consequences, and unproductive occupations: domestic service, entertainments, hairdressing, jewelry, smoking, gambling, gluttony, and the like. Also as regards the redistribution of income, luxury represents the least satisfactory of spontaneous forms, the least rational and the least edifying. Some economists (e.g., B. Franklin) held that luxury contributed to the dynamism of commerce and to civil progress itself; this somewhat exaggerated opinion 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 or the will: in the face of unemployment and the deadly misery of so large a part of the people, especially in difficult or painful times, habitual luxury and, worse still, the ostentation of luxury constitute a provocation to the indignation and hatred of the suffering toward the well-to-do classes.
Because of its economic and moral consequences, the disorder and corruption it introduces into custom, and given that luxury is very often a sign of ill-gotten wealth, it was formerly and on repeated occasions condemned and regulated by the political authorities (sumptuary laws and taxes among the Romans, in the Middle Ages, at the courts of France and England, in the Republic of Venice, etc.); today it may be regarded as free from every form of regulation, except in exceptional moments, but it serves as a reminder of fiscal severity, which rightly undertakes to make it serve as a forced instrument of income redistribution.
In its most disorganized and thoughtless form, it degenerates into waste (perpero or ipèrpero—from the Greek “brilliant”—was the name given in the Middle Ages to a Byzantine gold coin and subsequently, figuratively, to money in general and to every form of wealth): whereas luxury may sometimes be attributed to vivacity of character and to original and distinctive 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 give themselves over to them: the moral remedy lies, beyond a complete education of the spirit, in depriving luxury of prestige as a motive for consideration and esteem in social relations. With regard to immodesty in dress, V. MODA; MODESTIA.