Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann · 1 Dec 2015 · 1,213pp · 376,284 words
and that exerted by luxury brands, however seductive. More interesting is to explore how such thinking travels in the furrows ploughed by earlier thinkers. The critique of consumerism as a new fascism goes back to the 1960s, to Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film director and writer, and the Marxist émigré Herbert Marcuse
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social control and repression may have gone out of fashion, a good deal of today’s public debate continues to take its lead from the critique of consumerism that flourished during the post-war boom. No single book has cast as long a shadow as John K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, first
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of consumption and its underlying causes, and the first step before we can evaluate what are more or less promising remedies. In recent discourse, the critique of ‘consumerism’ has, notably, come in two guises. For the first, the root of the problem is a social and moral failure: people want constantly more than
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey · 15 Nov 2011 · 1,205pp · 308,891 words
, Yvonne, 675n10 Fulton, Robert: monopoly, 40, 176 Fussell, G. E.: Loder’s calculations, 679n20 Fuzhi, Wang: Confucian, 476 Galbraith, John Kenneth: countervailing power, 175, 304; critique of consumerism, 610 Galilei, Galileo, 419 Galileo (Brecht), 582 Gallagher, Catherine, 595 Gallego, Francisco: human capital as cause, 662n7 Galor, Oded: early growth, 15 Gandhi, Mahatma: betterment
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, 421, 524, chaps. 25–26, chap. 51; Marxist theory of, 359 Lapore, Jill: ideas in history, 516 Larkin, Philip: sophistication in art, 680n23 Lasch, Cristopher: critique of consumerism, 610 Laski, Harold, 501, 625 Lattimore, Owen: Central Asian raiders, 656n22 Lauck, Jon K.: Midwestern towns, 672n23 Lavocat, Françoise: on Japanese poet, 676n18 Lavoie, Don
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, 624 Schlesinger, Stephen: United Fruit, 661n16 Schmidtz, David: trade and liberty, 562 Schneider, Anna: temple theory of Mesopotamia, 549 Schoeck, Helmut: entrepreneurship, 471 Schor, Juliet: critique of consumerism, 610 Schramm, Carl, 510 Schuchardt, Beatrice: on Spanish editions of The London Merchant, 675n10 Schumpeter, Joseph Alois: and Austrian economics, 646; capitalist achievement, 37; causes
Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson · 8 Dec 2016 · 573pp · 115,489 words
warmth of their reception remains a vital resource for me in setting this work in perspective From the hospice manager who drew parallels between my critique of consumerism and the challenge of those entering his care, to the Augustinian sister who wrote to me about Thomas Aquinas’ views on the common good; from
The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott · 14 Apr 2016 · 287pp · 80,050 words
to the outlook they recommend (and my family can vouch for my being certifiably tightwadish), this book is not a polemic. Readers expecting a searing critique of consumerism will be disappointed. Although in places, particularly in the final two chapters, I defend some of the tenets of the “philosophy of frugality” against possible
The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne · 15 Nov 2015 · 336pp · 83,903 words
concern but also to the more self-regarding gratifications of consuming differently’ (Soper, 2008: 571). To fellow authors, her call is not for a convoluted critique of consumerism based on developing an apparently higher knowledge of what people ‘really’ need (something other than what they ‘think’ they need), but for a more grounded
One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility
by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness · 28 Mar 2010 · 532pp · 155,470 words
of automobility as well as the prevailing wisdom, practices, and behaviors promoted by mainstream bike culture. They contextualize the bicycle as part of a radical critique of consumerism and embrace a Diy paradigm that is less escapist than it is a “life experiment, a form of resistance, and a way, a form of
How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky · 18 Jun 2012 · 279pp · 87,910 words
by those who experience it directly as by those who seek to profit from its emergence.”43 This thought became the basis of Marcuse’s critique of consumerism, examined in Chapter 2, and also of J. K. Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (1967), which argued that producers, not consumers, initiate the production
Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan · 28 Jan 2020 · 218pp · 62,889 words
economic thought. His writing style is archaic, quite convoluted and always political. His legacy is mostly associated with The Theory of the Leisure Class, a critique of consumerism and social divisions in capitalism which he published in 1899. Today, Veblen’s theories are rarely taught in university programmes; global search engines yield many