ABSTRACT

What is the impact of consumer culture on well-being and civic culture? The debate about this question tends to dead-end in two rival, polar-opposite points of view. One position focuses on the pathologies of affl uence. The 2008 –2009 recession has given this critique a new urgency-the crisis, it is said, demonstrates the moral bankruptcy and public as well as personal costs of our lifestyle addiction to shopping, brands and conspicuous consumption (Lawson 2009; Ashley 2008; Williams 2009). In instinct and direction, however, this view follows an older critique, reaching back to J. K. Galbraith’s The Affl uent Society (1958) and beyond (see also Bauman 2007, 1998). In this view, the spread of a seductive world of goods and of a consumerist lifestyle after the Second World War has had devastating civic, psychological and environmental consequences. Wealth and well-being became divorced, a disjuncture that has been traced in a variety of indicators, from those on happiness and declining membership in associations to those on the rise in recorded mental illness and divorce. An excess of choice, we are told, has made us sick and depressed. Consumerist habits and aspirations, from television watching to a drive for conspicuous consumption and ever bigger houses and cars, are blamed for eroding the family, associational life and political participation (Schor 1999; Schwartz 2005; Layard 2005; Offer 2006).