Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (review)

Since Francis Fukuyama touted the "end of history" in 1989, scholars have debated the durability and isomorphous nature of democratic governments, their citizenry, and their culture. Western neoliberal democracies and the capitalistic economies that they share have come under attack for their failure to remain politically active domestically and culturally distinct internationally. The United States of America, in particular, often stands as the shallow, materialistic, politically ignorant poster child for the horrors of capitalism and Western Democracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, its democratic citizenry is prone to self-indulgence and alienated from their communities, families, and political systems. U.S. citizens exist as individuals with civil rights and freedoms, but no social or cultural obligations to tie them to others. A plethora of literature has erupted critiquing the dangers that laissez-faire liberalism and invasive marketing have on both democracies and their citizens.

Benjamin Barber joins this array of literature with his recent book Consumed. Barber asserts that consumer culture has weakened the American citizenry; he contends that the market's constant creation of supposed "needs" for consumers to demand has created an "infantilist ethos" that corrupts people's ability to be good citizens. When we identify ourselves as a consumer or individual instead of as members of a political public, we forget to think in the best interest of the group. Barber describes this ethos through specific observations of American life. For example, children today are expected to "mature," to be rampant consumers at increasingly early ages. Conversely, marketing departments are struggling to keep adults in a persistent state of adolescence to perpetuate the fad spending of youthover decades. Americans, and implicitly for Barber, other neoliberal democracies, want products but they do not need them; they want them easier rather than harder, simple rather than complex, and faster rather than slower. In essence we become infants in our self-absorbed, reflexive demand for what we want.

Barber blames this infantilist ethos on the market's evolution from a needs-based to a wants-based system. For Barber, the first few decades of capitalism were "purer" and more supportive of the Protestant ethos that melded with capitalism so well. Later, however, only the work habits of the Protestant ethos survived, and the "ethical heart" of capitalism was removed for robber barons to make more money faster. Once the "every man for himself" mentality became entwined within U.S. culture, people began breaking down their social and cultural ties in an attempt to get ahead and please themselves. Thus Barber's infantilist ethos was born. The market's insatiable need for more consumers and higher demand led to the creation of demands for a surplus of useless, luxury products. By forcing the markets to cater to imaginary demands, the whole economic system has become inflated to almost unimaginable heights, which Barber claims are dangerously unsteady, both economically and politically.

In the end, Barber calls for a "transformation of capitalism back into a needs-satisfying economic machine, and a transformation of democracy back into the sovereign guarantor of all domains private, the market domain included" (290). Barber is painfully silent on how this regression of 100 years of socioeconomic evolution is to take place except to say that it will have to come from industries themselves. Readers are left with a chicken-and-egg scenario that Barber never clears up. Barber sees corporate responsibility as stemming from civic consumerism, but he does not say how consumers are to break the marketing spells that, as he claims earlier in the book, cripple them as wise consumers and as citizens. Which will come first: the spontaneous civic consumerism, or corporate responsibility?

Although Barber's premises are clear and his observations are undeniable, his conclusions and solutions are idealistic at best. Some of Barber's examples are weak, and the conclusions that are drawn from them are even worse. For example...