Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

by Benjamin R. Barber

Overview

"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book." —Jackson Lears

A powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers—and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. Disturbing, provocative, and compelling, this book examines phenomena as seemingly disparate as adolescent fashion trends for adults, megachurches, declining voter participation, the privatization of the public sphere, branding, and the rise of online shopping to show how the freedoms of the free market have undermined the freedoms of the deliberative adult citizen. Barber brings together extensive empirical research with an original theoretical framework for understanding our contemporary predicament.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393330892
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	8.26(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Benjamin R. Barber (1939—2017) was an American political theorist and author, perhaps best known for his 1995 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
The Birth of Consumers
Capitalism Triumphant and the Infantilist Ethos     3
From Protestantism to Puerility     38
The Eclipse of Citizens
Infantilizing Consumers: The Coming of Kidults     81
Privatizing Citizens: The Making of Civic Schizophrenia     116
Branding Identities: The Loss of Meaning     166
Totalizing Society: The End of Diversity     213
The Fate of Citizens
Resisting Consumerism: Can Capitalism Cure Itself?     257
Overcoming Civic Schizophrenia: Restoring Citizenship in a World of Interdependence     291
Notes     341
Index     383

Editorial Reviews

"Barber delivers a frightening analysis of the way consumerism is vitiating shoppers in the United States and around the world."— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This lifelong study of the effects of capitalism and privatization reveals a pervasiveness of branding and homogenization from which there is no turning back."— Booklist

"A remarkable book about the shifting nature of capitalism…Beguiling."— Financial World

"[Barber's] thesis has genuine bite."— Denver Post

From the Publisher

With his latest book, Barber, a political theorist at the University of Maryland, returns to familiar territory. But if Jihad provided an answer to the ubiquitous post-9/11 question “Why do they hate us?,” the question behind Consumed seems to be “Who wouldn’t?”

Barber, for one, is put off by much of what global capitalism has wrought. Hollywood movies are cartoonish and trashy; kids reared on video games and fast food miss out on childhood’s meaningful pleasures; life at the mall is soulless; much of popular culture is dreck. How all this came about takes up the bulk of his book.
— The New York Times

Pamela Paul

Barber is a distinguished political theorist who for years has been writing about the deterioration of "civil society" and what must be done to reclaim it. Many others have criticized our obsession with materialism and consumption, a theme he explored in Jihad vs. McWorld, but Barber's aim is not to be a scold. The Reagan revolution convinced us that turning the market loose would be good economics and good politics. Barber, in contrast, argues that "Once upon a time, capitalism was allied with virtues that also contributed at least marginally to democracy, responsibility, and citizenship. Today it is allied with vices which -- although they serve consumerism -- undermine democracy, responsibility, and citizenship." In other words, in the modern era, it's not so much democracy and capitalism as it is democracy or capitalism.
— The Washington Post

Barry Schwartz

Barber, the prophetic author of Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), delivers a frightening analysis of the way consumerism is vitiating shoppers in the United States and around the world. Once upon a time, Americans were obsessed with being productive; now, we're obsessed with consuming. The consumerism that has infected society, Barber charges, both fosters and requires an "enduring childishness." Corporations vie for ever younger consumers, and marketers understand that in order to keep people buying things they don't need, potential consumers must be kept in a state of childishness that emphasizes play, impulse and entitlement over work, deliberation and responsibility. Some of Barber's analysis feels a little banal-as when he points out that people buy goods hawked by celebrities because purchasers believe that Michael Jordan-endorsed shoes will make them like Jordan. But most of his thinking is fresh. One of the problems of consumerism, to which Barber devotes an entire chapter, is that it homogenizes an otherwise diverse population. He speaks of a kind of "market totalism," if not totalitarianism, in which the consumer market is addictive, ubiquitous, omnipresent, self-replicating and self-justifying. But this is not an anti-capitalist screed. Rather, much of it is a history lesson. The culture of capitalism, Barber explains, has changed. In an earlier century, capitalism met the "real needs of real people," and it fostered both freedom and citizenship. Today, capitalism meets only the needs of corporations looking to make a buck. Yet capitalism need not lead to unchecked consumerism. It can be made to promote equality, and not just profit. Barber concludes with a call to temper capitalismand renew a sense of civic belonging-not just nationally, but globally. Perhaps his next book will explain how we might heed that urgent calling. Significant work.

Kirkus Reviews