ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the idea that consumption is now fundamental to any understanding of everyday life. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, two sociologists, Thorstein Veblen writing in 1899 in the United States and Georg Simmel writing in 1903 and 1904 in Germany, published work that discussed new everyday patterns of urban middle-class consumption. Conspicuous consumption is the chosen means to communicate this fact to other social classes. The social display of conspicuous consumption is the very pageant of power; from its prestige grows authority. The practice of consumption is a joint production, with fellow consumers, of a universe of values. Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid processes of classifying persons and events. Little wonder then that the coming to dominance of neoliberalism included it reaching beyond economic relations and into everyday life more generally.