ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the spread of mass consumption as well as critical responses to it. It focuses on the development of the idea of addiction as a disease of the will, which was argued to be a concept that linked ideas about vulnerable wills and physical pathology with the irresistible temptations of commodity culture. The chapter argues that these ideas about addiction as a disease of the will were part of a 'great technology of power' that acted as a way of governing the consumption of the population, particularly the poor, immigrants and women. In the nineteenth-century period of classical laissez-faire liberalism, industrialisation, urbanisation and immigration brought about new social relations based around social class, ethnicity and gender. Whereas the tropes of luxury had expressed mercantilist fears over dangerous, usually foreign, commodities, the period of industrial capitalism saw the locus of the problem move deeper into the individual, and in particular, into their wills.
