Analyses of post-World War Two Western Europe have mostly adopted an international perspective whose main argument, in comparison with the failures of the interwar years, focused on the links between economic growth and democratic stabilization, highlighting the acceleration of modernization, the enormous improvement in living standards, and above all the rising post-war consumerism.

This book explores the question of affluence in Europe from the early 1950s, when the years of reconstruction and austerity gave way to optimism and economic growth, up to the crisis of the late 1970s, when the European economic and political miracle was in profound crisis