Consumer Society

The notion of ‘consumer society’ emerged after the Second World War and was made famous by authors such as Arendt, Marcuse, Galbraith, Packard and Baudrillard. It was used to suggest that the society which we live in is a late variant of capitalism characterised by the primacy of consumption over production. At that time, the label ‘consumer society’ constituted an attack on so-called ‘consumerism’: a continuous and unremitting search for new, fashionable but superfluous things, which were branded as causing personal discontent and public disengagement. Such a moralistic connotation masks both important differences and substantial continuities between our society and other social formations. In contemporary societies, because of the disentanglement of production and consumption we find ourselves confronted with objects whose meaning is beyond our everyday life and yet we are mobilized as ‘consumers’ to use these objects in meaningful ways. Increased globalization furthers disentanglement and allows consumers’actions and desires to be increasingly framed as a battlefield .