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S O C I E T Y: A B I B L I O G R A P H I C R E V I E W
Edward Song
the market itself, but these worries appear to have grown with the
increasingly consumeristic character of contemporary society and the
remarkable social changes of the last ten years. With the political revolutions of the last decade, free markets have replaced command
economies in the former communist states, and even in the advanced
capitalist nations, we have seen a remarkable social transformation as
commodification and the ethos of consumerism have become dominant cultural forces. A wider range of goods are being bought and sold,
and market-talk is being applied to areas where it had previously been
foreign. Virtually anything can become a commodity now, and nothing
is unaffected by the markets logic and categories of thought.
The recent intensification of commodification has prompted a corresponding growth in the scholarly literature that seeks to evaluate its origins, nature, and social effects. This literature is, of course, diverse in its
methods, approaches, interests, and conclusions. Many welcome the
tendency towards commercialization and commodification, trusting in
the markets potential to eliminate inefficiencies, produce wealth,
extend human freedom, open new possibilities, and unleash the potential of human creativity. Others are far less sanguine and worry about
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This basic mode of analysis is extended by a variety of twentiethcentury neo-Marxists, most notably those associated with critical theory
and the Frankfurt School. One of the central texts of this mode of
analysis is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos Dialectic of
Enlightenment, which attempts nothing less than explaining why
humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new
kind of barbarism.1 Tying this collapse to the self-destructive tendency
of the Enlightenments understanding of rational calculability and technology, they presciently argue that this dynamic will ultimately produce a debased mass culture where the desires and fancies of passive
consumers are easily manipulated by producers for their own ends.
Two other prominent accounts of commodification that focus on the
producers ability to manipulate consumers are John Kenneth
Galbraiths The Affluent Society and Betty Friedans The Feminine
Mystique. Galbraiths work highlights the ways that producers, through
advertising and salesmanship, produce desires for the goods they manufacture. Similarly, Friedan focuses on how the ideal of the housewife was
manipulated to create a stable and sizeable market of willing buyers.
Max Weber attempted to amend Marxs exclusive focus on material production by introducing the importance of social prestige or status in
addition to wealth and ownership of the means of production. These
factors play an important role in Thorstein Veblens analysis of consumption, which argues that consumption is driven by the desire to
accrue prestige through conspicuous displays of leisure and consumption. Weber also highlights the ever increasing bureaucratization of society and the inexorable progression to ever more rationalized and
dehumanized modes of lifea theoretical approach recently put to use
in George Ritzers McDonaldization of Society, noted in the next section.
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Carson, Cary, et al., eds. Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the
Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1994.
Glickman, Lawrence B. A Living Wage: American Workers and the
Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a
New American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 18801920. New York:
Pantheon, 1981.
McKendrick, Neil, et al. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1982.
Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern
Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at
the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso, 1996.
Shammas, Carole. The Preindustrial Consumer in England and
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late
Nineteenth Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981.
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Consciousness offers one of the sharpest polemics against modern advertising, arguing that through sophisticated marketing techniques, advertisers have effectively created a system of social control that creates
artificial desires and frustrates our ability to find happiness and selfrespect. Michael Schudsons Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion offers a
more nuanced appraisal of the influence and power of advertising in
American society. Schudson argues that, in fact, an advertisement probably has very little influence on sales, but that it tends to promote attitudes and lifestyles which extol acquisition and consumption at the
expense of other values.3 Another attempt to make sense of the social
cost of modern marketing techniques is offered by Joseph Turow, who
argues that increasingly detailed demographic and buying information
allows marketers to appeal to more homogeneous sub-sections of the
consumer markets in ways that encourage self-centered individualism
and exclusivity.
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Paul, Ellen Frankel ,et al., eds. Ethics and Economics. New York:
Blackwell, 1985.
Radin, Margaret Jane. Contested Commodities. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996.
Sen, Amartya K. On Ethics and Economics. New York: Blackwell, 1987.
Wilbur, Charles K., ed. Economics, Ethics and Public Policy. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
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Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How
They Got There. New York: Touchstone, 2000.
Cowen, Tyler. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998.
. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing
the Worlds Cultures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal
Statement. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1994.
Lebergott, Stanley. Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the
Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Twitchell, James. Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American
Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
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