Synopses & Reviews
A piercing and vital look at how capitalism is consuming U.S. society.
An apt sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a wrenching portrait of how adult consumers are infantilized in a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers. Driven by a frantic imperative to sell, consumer capitalism specializes today in the manufacture not of goods but of needs.
This provocative culmination of Barber's lifelong study of democracy and capitalism shows how the infantilist ethos deprives society of responsible citizens and displaces public goods with private commodities. Traditional liberal democratic society is colonized by an all-pervasive market imperative. Public space is privatized. Identity is branded. Our world, homogenized. With brilliance and depth, Barber confronts the likely consequences for our children, our liberty, and our citizenship, and shows finally how citizens can resist and transcend the civic schizophrenia with which consumerism has infected them.
Review
"Barber concludes with a call to temper capitalism...not just nationally, but globally. Perhaps his next book will explain how we might heed that urgent calling. Significant work." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"With the call to arms of grassroots resistance, he does offer a glimmer of hope; despite the heavy weight, Barber's work deserves and surely will find its audience." Booklist
Synopsis
A provocative examination of the effects of capitalism on American culture and society reveals how consumer capitalism overproduces goods, targets children as consumers, and infantilizes adult consumers in an economy that deprives society of its responsible citizens and replaces public goods with private commodities. By the author of Jihad vs. McWorld.
About the Author
Benjamin R. Barber is Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society and the Wilson H. Elkins Professor at The Maryland School of Public Affairs at University of Maryland. He is also the author of Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (1984) and The Conquest of Politics (1988).