Social Vision

Schocken was a self-made builder of retail and publishing empires, cut in the mold of the 20th century’s greatest business titans. At the same time, he was deeply imbued with a strong and proactive social agenda. Throughout his career, Schocken sought to educate his customers’ taste and raise their standard of living. He derided overpriced, imitation goods, arguing that middle-class kitsch keeps the masses from enjoying the fruits of modern science and technology. He went on to mass-produce and market sensible, high-quality products, designed in the Werkbund and Bauhaus tradition. No other department store titan embraced the mission of educating consumers and improving their lot with such fervor.

With one leg in retail and the other in publishing, Schocken found a readily available platform for disseminating his ideology: the chain’s book departments. To help guide buyers through the maze of new ideas in the 20th century, Schocken hired scholars to compose guides about numerous trends of interest, from history and natural sciences to psychotherapy and sexual hygiene. Some of these booklets were surprisingly radical. For example, Self-Education for the Active Citizen was a socialist text, written by a pacifist and anti-nationalist scholar. The booklet argued that states must protect individuals from unfettered market forces.