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From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs. By Joshua Clark Davis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 336 pp. Figures, notes, index. Cloth, $35.95. ISBN: 978-0-2311-7158-8.
In this essential contribution to new histories of capitalism, Joshua Clark Davis offers a novel perspective on a much-explored era of American history by focusing on the ways in which business and activism thrived in concert in the 1960s and 1970s. Those whom Davis dubs “activist entrepreneurs”—the term's acknowledged anachronism does not detract from its concise usefulness—“re-envisioned the products, places, and processes of American businesses” (p. 6). Rigorous research and skilled writing helps Davis avoid either claims of unfettered success or simplistic declension tales. Instead of providing one-tone answers, the book illustrates a long-term shift in priorities, showing how surviving businesses came to respect profit and expansion over original aims of community engagement and the maintenance of “free spaces”—safe zones where people could gather to exchange ideas, organize, and consolidate otherwise diffused political power.
Davis's examples include African American bookstores, “head shops” selling drug-related accessories, and natural food stores, each of which has its own chapter. Such businesses were forged in the service of activism, but over time, many of those aims diffused into vague rhetoric designed to assuage consumer guilt. The birth, growth, and massive mainstreaming of Whole Foods Market best illustrates this process, even prior to the company's recent sale to Amazon resulting in “a neoliberal offspring that its forbears would not recognize as legitimate” (p. 5). Similar dilution of original purpose afflicts...