The Price of Prestige: Conspicuous Consumption in International Relations.

• Author: Darden, Jessica Trisko
• Position: Book review

* The Price of Prestige: Conspicuous Consumption in International Relations

By Lilach Gilady

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. iii, 227. $45 cloth.

In his surprise announcement of a Space Force--a sixth branch of the U.S. military--on June 18, 2018, President Donald J. Trump argued that its establishment would be "great not only in terms of jobs and everything else, it's great for the psyche of our country" (quoted in Katie Rogers, "Trump Orders Establishment of Space Force as Sixth Military Branch," New York Times, June 18, 2018). This move harkens back to the arms and space races of the Cold War, when the United States poured its considerable resources into being more technologically advanced and militarily prepared than its main competitor, the Soviet Union, and gloried in this fact.

Lilach Gilady's book The Price of Prestige: Conspicuous Consumption in International Relations offers significant insight into President Trump's decision to endorse an exceptional, new, and expensive branch of the military while concurrently targeting the U.S. international affairs budget (which supports diplomacy and foreign assistance) for significant cuts. Gilady uses a rational-choice framework and the work of Thorstein Veblen to develop a theoretical foray into the role that considerations of prestige play in shaping states' behavior on the world stage.

The originator of the idea of "conspicuous consumption," Veblen published his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. Gilady's theoretical innovation is to import Veblen's ideas into the realm of international relations, where "policy decisions are not only a means for achieving specific material goals but are also a gesture to be observed by other peers" (p. 2). Gilady uses the Veblenian framework to examine a wide range of international luxuries in order to unpack conspicuous consumption as a specific form of prestige-seeking behavior in international relations. In doing so, she argues for a differentiation between the concepts of power and prestige, wherein the latter is a social, hierarchical, and positional concept with important normative dimensions (p. 7). Gilady draws on a wide body of literature to illustrate her theory, ranging from the works of Rudyard Kipling and Rabbi Hillel to anthropological studies of indigenous populations and contemporary political science scholarship. The result of this effort is that positionality and hierarchy emerge as essential...