Consumption

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Mark Hudson. Consumption

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Guide

Pages

Series Title. What is Political Economy? series

Consumption

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1The Meanings of Consumption

What Are We Talking About? Consumption and Political Economy

Competing Themes in the History of Consumption

The Rest of the Book

2An Aspiration for All the World: Championing Individual Freedom of Choice

Introduction

From Classical to Neoclassical Economics: Consumers as Rational Maximizers

Friendly Amendments: Alterations to the Theory with Similar Implications

Conclusion

3The System: Capitalist Consumerism. Introduction

Capitalist Commodity Production: Naming the System

Commodity Fetishism

Consumption and Jobs

The Evolution of Capitalist Commodity Consumption in the US after World War II

Conclusion

4Private Choices, Social Problems. Introduction

What You Don’t Know Might Hurt You: Information Asymmetry

You’re Not as Clever as You Think: Behavioural Economics

Relative Consumption

Created Wants

The Androcentric Consumer

Conclusion

5The Shopocalypse?

“Ten Ways to Reduce Your Impact”

Blindfolded

Bloated: The Problem of Scale

Embedded Consumption and the Limits of Consumer Environmentalism

Conclusion: Consumption as Ecological Practice

Note

6Consumption, Power and Liberation

Class and Consumption

Consumers of the World, Express Yourselves!

Consumption and Gender

7Shopping Police

Shopping as Power

Easy on the Surface, Hard Underneath

Terror of the CEO?

Saviour of the Worker, Farmer or Forest?

Too Much to Bear: The Trials and Tribulations of a Label

The Commodification of Politics?

Conclusion

References

Index

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Ian Hudson

Mark Hudson

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Consumerism was also often at odds with the strong influence of tradition, often reinforced by legal constraints on consumption (Stearns, 2001: 4–9). Sumptuary laws that restricted what people were allowed to own were placed on a shockingly wide range of goods: in fourteenth-century Venice, tapestries could not measure more than 1.5 meters and gilded fireplace furnishings were outlawed; in the late 1500s in England, “gentlemen entering London had their swords measured and broken if they were too long for their status” (McCabe, 2015: 24). Depending on your interpretation, these laws were in place either to protect people from overspending on fads or to ensure that consumption was a visible marker of the existing social hierarchy (Shammas, 2012: 212). The justification for sumptuary laws often used the anti-consumption language of the “sin of luxury” and the economic dangers of “extravagance” (Hunt, 2003: 64). By the seventeenth century these laws gradually began to disappear. Although some types of consumption (for example, drugs and prostitution in many countries) are still outlawed, these restrictions are rarely designed to reinforce social hierarchies. A consumer society was not present before the 1700s for three reasons: consumers were a small minority, new items were not consistently generated, and consumerism was criticized as a moral failing because it ran counter to tradition (Stearns, 2001: 8–9).

Transformationists can make similar claims about the changes surrounding consumer credit. While credit has a very long history, the social attitudes about both lending and borrowing have changed drastically. Charging interest on loans – called usury – was frowned on by most religions. It was punishable by excommunication in the Catholic Church and is still forbidden in Islam. Judaism permitted charging interest to those from other religions, and so some Jews (who were often banned from other occupations) earned their income by lending money, a practice that was often viewed by Christians with considerable distaste. Christianity gradually relaxed its strict prohibitions so that usury came to mean charging unreasonably or immorally high interest rates (Wiedenhoft-Murphy, 2016). On the borrower side, although aristocrats would frequently go into debt using the collateral of their good name and the poor were often forced into debt to purchase staples, in the nineteenth century being a debtor was seen as a bit shameful (Stillerman, 2015). As we will discuss in chapter 3, the negative stigma of borrowing began to wane in the twentieth century, so that one might argue that, currently, it is completely acceptable never to be free of debt.

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