ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book describes how the translation of needs into desires and desires into needs has been effected in social practices and understood by social theorists of various persuasions over the past 250 years. It first discusses an interpretation of the concept of scarcity as it emerges from the eighteenth-century writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, and, as critique, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The book then discusses the concept of abundance via such nineteenth-century authors as Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Ruskin. It further examines the scarcity postulate as formulated by marginal utility economics later in the century and of the economizing rationality that issues from it. The book finally turns to the nature and character of consumption in the modernity of Paris during the nineteenth century.
