As its title indicates this study is a mixture of historical investigation and conceptual analysis. The focus of the latter is upon the interplay between the notions of ‘need’ and ‘desire’. The former limns out certain crucial episodes in the intellectual career of the idea of luxury. To say that the investigation is ‘episodic’ is to admit, implicitly, that no attempt at an exhaustive survey is being attempted. Baudrillart tried that in the late nineteenth century and produced four enormous volumes of which, even if it is a truculent exaggeration, Sombart's judgment that one learns from it almost nothing, does suggest that both a more selective and more focused approach is warranted. My conceptual analysis is intended, in part, to assist to that end. Of course, any ‘episodic’ treatment leaves itself open to cavils about inclusions and exclusions; certainly a strong case can be made for giving Aristotle and, especially, Rousseau more prominence than they will actually receive in what follows.

One other book deserves a mention at this point. John Sekora has written a good book on the idea of luxury to which I am indebted more than my relatively few references might indicate. My task, however, is different from his. Sekora's own agenda was to fill in the intellectual/historical background to a study of Smollett; my concerns are less chronologically specific as well as being in a general sense more ‘political’.