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Summary
Summary
This provocative culmination of Benjamin R. Barber's lifelong study of democracy and capitalism shows how the infantalist ethos deprives society of responsible citizens and displaces public gods with private commodites.
Author Notes
Benjamin Reynolds Barber was born in Manhattan, New York on August 2, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree in political science from Grinnell College in 1960 and a master's degree in government in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966 from Harvard University. In 1969, he began teaching political science at Rutgers University, where he was the director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy for many years. In 2001, he joined the University of Maryland as the Kekst Professor of Civil Society.
He was a political theorist and author. His books included Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House, Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, and Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming.
In addition to his books, Barber was a frequent contributor to several magazines including The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times. In 1974, he helped found the journal Political Theory, which he edited for the next decade. He coauthored the prize-winning, ten-part PBS/CBC television series The Struggle for Democracy. He died from pancreatic cancer on April 24, 2017 at the age of 77.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barber returns to the clashing models of civilization of his earlier Jihad vs. McWorld, focusing this time on the expanding global culture of market forces he claims will destory not only democracy but even capitalism, if left unchecked. He warns of a totalitarian "ethos of induced childishness" that not only seeks to turn the young into aggressive consumers but to arrest the psychological development of adults as well, "freeing" them to indulge in puerile and narcissistic purchases based on "stupid" brand loyalties. The increasing drive toward privatization compounds the problem, generating a "civic schizophrenia" where everybody wants service but nobody wants to serve. His complaint is so broad that it occasionally edges into crankiness, as he blames infantilization for ruining everything from Hollywood movies to NBA basketball; even other liberal cultural commentators, especially Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You), come in for much criticism. Barber recognizes that the "Jihadist" rejection of consumer culture is equally undemocratic, but still believes the system can be changed from within, citing the corporate responsibility movement and activist boycotts. His dense analysis can be a tough slog in spots, but the provocative attacks on capitalism's excesses will resonate with many. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Barber, the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, has devoted much of his life to the study of the effects of the consumer market on individuals and society as a whole. His hypothesis that consumer culture has turned adult citizens into children by catering to the lowest common denominator rings only too true, even if the sheer density and obsequiousness of this examination are likely to turn off much of the popular readership. Therein lies the conundrum of reviewing this impressive piece of work, wherein Barber proves his theory that the market imperative has conditioned us to lap up the easy offerings and reject hard, complicated works. This lifelong study of the effects of capitalism and privatization reveals a pervasiveness of branding and homogenization from which there is seemingly no turning back. 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. --David Siegfried Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the aftermath of Sept. 11, when publishers scrambled to provide explanations for the attacks, Benjamin R. Barber's 1995 book, "Jihad vs. McWorld," an examination of the tensions between consumer capitalism and religious fundamentalism, was dusted off, rushed back to press and propelled to best-sellerdom. Around that time, Barber also released a memoir of his stint as a freelance intellectual in the Clinton White House, a melancholy rumination on the failures of that administration as well as his own failure to be named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With his latest book, Barber, a political theorist at the University of Maryland, returns to familiar territory. But if "Jihad" provided an answer to the ubiquitous post-9/11 question "Why do they hate us?," the question behind "Consumed" seems to be "Who wouldn't?" Barber, for one, is put off by much of what global capitalism has wrought. Hollywood movies are cartoonish and trashy; kids reared on video games and fast food miss out on childhood's meaningful pleasures; life at the mall is soulless; much of popular culture is dreck. How all this came about takes up the bulk of his book. According to Barber, global inequality has left the planet with two kinds of potential customers: the poor of the undeveloped world, with vast and unserved needs but not the means to fulfill them, and the first-world rich, who have scads of disposable income but few real needs. While an earlier capitalist economy, backed by a Protestant ethos, was built around selling goods like timber and buckwheat that served people's needs, today's consumerist economy sustains profitability by creating needs, convincing us that Wiis and iPhones are necessary. It has done so by promoting what Barber calls an ethos of infantilization, a mind-set of "induced childishness" in which adults pursue adolescent lifestyles, as evidenced by their tastes and spending habits. In other words, in order to sell superfluous stuff, the market must foster a permanent mentality of "Gimme" and "I want it now!" The resultant "radical consumerist society" has set capitalism and democracy against each other, undermining both. Capitalism, Barber writes, "seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain." Children's lives are reduced to shopping excursions in which their identities are subsumed by brands - they're the Nike generation, Abercrombie kids, iPod addicts. Meanwhile, the grown-ups have become so focused on the private "me" sphere, they've withdrawn from the public "we." Our political culture compounds this by elevating the private sector over the public, encouraging Americans to believe that anything the government can do, private enterprise can do better (for example, prisons-for-profit are preferable to those run by the state, mercenaries trump the Marines, and so on). Left unchecked, Barber warns, "infantilization will undo not only democracy but capitalism itself." If this sounds like a bit of a stretch and a lot of muddle, it is. Yes, marketers target children. Yes, consumer capitalism infantilizes adults. Yes, the private sector is overvalued. All this is scary. But ultimately, Barber fails to tie the disparate strands into a coherent argument. Much of the book feels as if it were cobbled together by a series of grad students with a Nexis account. A chapter using mini-bios of Jakob Fugger (known as Jakob the Rich in 16th-century Germany), John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates to illustrate the history of capitalism would read like a sophomore-year textbook, were the source material not so shallow (in the case of Rockefeller, Barber relies almost exclusively on Ron Chernow's "Titan"). Marginally relevant filler - like a chart of Google's top queries from 2001 to 2005, a list of Howard Hughes's lovers, and a rundown of reality TV shows and their earlier televised sources - pads the text, seemingly to generate book-length proportions. Reading "Consumed" is like opening up and actually reading the contents of a direct-mail brochure sent by a politician whose campaign you support. You may agree with the guy, but must his message in written form - overblown, repetitive, clichéd - be so bad? One suspects that like most campaign advertisements, this book is not meant to be read at all; it's an example of what James Fallows has called the "op-ed book": an argument, even a valuable one, that could do in 900 words what it does in 400 pages. Then there are the careless errors. Quoted writers and thinkers are misidentified or not identified at all. At one point Barber refers to a Hollywood tabloid couple, "Jennifer Lopez and Brad Pitt" (hello?!). Later, he accuses Steven Soderbergh of directing "Batman II." Barber might consider such pop drivel beneath him - but then why write about it, let alone devote lengthy tangents to the Sims and Shaquille O'Neal? This is a shame, because the messages contained in "Consumed" are important. Barber makes points that need to be made - about the excesses of consumer capitalism, the pernicious effects of creeping libertarianism and the cheapening consequences of omnipresent branding. Barber, who apparently aspires to the life of a public intellectual, with its talk show appearances and lecture circuits, could serve as the anti-Thomas L. Friedman, offering a decidedly less rosy view of life behind the Lexus wheel. If only he wrote a book half so well. Children's lives, Barber says, are reduced to shopping excursions; their identities are brand names. Pamela Paul is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author, most recently, of "Pornified." Her next book will be about the business behind child rearing.
Choice Review
Barber (Univ. of Maryland) critiques global capitalism as a threat not only to democracy, but to capitalism itself. Through privatization of the public domain, branding, and "consumer totalitarianism," capitalism sustains itself through the creation of false needs. He contends the market turns ever-younger kids into brand-loyal shoppers and adults into "kidults" who seek all that is simple, quick, and easy. Rather than false consciousness, consumerism creates "civic schizophrenia," where private wants clash with public needs. Barber concludes by suggesting ways consumerism can correct itself from within. See related, Arthur Asa Berger's Shop 'til You Drop: Consumer Behavior and American Culture (CH, Nov'05, 43-1671). A timely, thought-provoking work. Summing Up: Recommended Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. Gilman Tulsa Community College
Guardian Review
George W Bush's infamous response to 9/11 was to order citizens to show their patriotic backbone by getting on with the business of shopping. But the imperative to shop is not as straightforward as it looks. It turns leisure into fetish and obligation, and a paradox of consumerism is that it is also a form of denial. Society now faces Debord's ceaseless manufacture of "pseudo-needs"; Marx's subservience to "inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites"; and what the present Pope has called modernity's "dictatorship of relativism", whose highest goals are to serve personal ego and desire. There are 24 million compulsive shoppers in the US. According to a study commissioned by Yahoo!, members of the My Media generation can, by multi-tasking, fit up to 44 hours of activity into one day. With desire propelled in excess of the speed of light anything is possible, hence the growing number of internet addiction disorder clinics in the US. Shopping also functions like pornography, another form of accelerated desire with an emphasis on repetition. For the first time in history, a society has felt its economic survival demands a kind of "controlled regression, a culture that promotes puerility rather than maturation". Simplifications were made to a popular Sony/LucasArts online game because it was felt there was too much reading involved and, according to its senior game director, "We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat". Watching a four-year- old wrestle with consumer choice, when faced with the "kidquake of kid-directed goods and services", is to see a child confused by being asked to behave like an adult. In a declining global consumer economy, children have become necessary targets. Benjamin Barber fears that this process of infantilisation, combined with the associated practices of branding and privatisation, threatens democracy. Privatisation has merely privatised corruption and inequality without providing more adequate supplies or even turning much of a profit. True, but Barber undermines his argument with his susceptibility to pseudo- profundities, such as the idea that conspicuous consumption stems from a fear of death, and sentimental nonsense such as, "All of Hollywood at its best is not the equal in variety or originality of a single summer day's walk in a public park". When he turns to Hollywood, the wheels fall off his argument altogether. He likens the increasing speed of cutting in film and video to a form of addiction, then compares it with the slower Hollywood films of the 1930s without grasping that such rapid cutting and camera movement were technically impossible then; or that, thanks to the VCR and remote control, we have become capable of absorbing information at much faster rates. Barber, of course, disapproves of fast food and the decline of the seated meal but his language is so coagulated that it makes you want never to sit down at table again and "break bread together or dine or share a repast". What he fails to take into account is changing domestic practice, and, in his alarm, he misses the obvious mutation. If capitalism continues uninterrupted, then the cure of self-restraint will become another commercial facet of consumerism, like weight-watching or dieting or healthy eating - just another giant business in its own right. Chris Petit's The Passenger is published by Simon & Schuster. To order Consumed for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-consume.1 George W Bush's infamous response to 9/11 was to order citizens to show their patriotic backbone by getting on with the business of shopping. But the imperative to shop is not as straightforward as it looks. It turns leisure into fetish and obligation, and a paradox of consumerism is that it is also a form of denial. Society now faces Debord's ceaseless manufacture of "pseudo-needs"; Marx's subservience to "inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites"; and what the present Pope has called modernity's "dictatorship of relativism", whose highest goals are to serve personal ego and desire. Simplifications were made to a popular Sony/LucasArts online game because it was felt there was too much reading involved and, according to its senior game director, "We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat". Watching a four-year- old wrestle with consumer choice, when faced with the "kidquake of kid-directed goods and services", is to see a child confused by being asked to behave like an adult. In a declining global consumer economy, children have become necessary targets. - Chris Petit.
Kirkus Review
Barber, the prophetic author of Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), delivers a frightening analysis of the way consumerism is vitiating shoppers in the United States and around the world. Once upon a time, Americans were obsessed with being productive; now, we're obsessed with consuming. The consumerism that has infected society, Barber charges, both fosters and requires an "enduring childishness." Corporations vie for ever younger consumers, and marketers understand that in order to keep people buying things they don't need, potential consumers must be kept in a state of childishness that emphasizes play, impulse and entitlement over work, deliberation and responsibility. Some of Barber's analysis feels a little banal--as when he points out that people buy goods hawked by celebrities because purchasers believe that Michael Jordan-endorsed shoes will make them like Jordan. But most of his thinking is fresh. One of the problems of consumerism, to which Barber devotes an entire chapter, is that it homogenizes an otherwise diverse population. He speaks of a kind of "market totalism," if not totalitarianism, in which the consumer market is addictive, ubiquitous, omnipresent, self-replicating and self-justifying. But this is not an anti-capitalist screed. Rather, much of it is a history lesson. The culture of capitalism, Barber explains, has changed. In an earlier century, capitalism met the "real needs of real people," and it fostered both freedom and citizenship. Today, capitalism meets only the needs of corporations looking to make a buck. Yet capitalism need not lead to unchecked consumerism. It can be made to promote equality, and not just profit. Barber concludes with a call to temper capitalism and renew a sense of civic belonging--not just nationally, but globally. Perhaps his next book will explain how we might heed that urgent calling. Significant work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Capitalism wants more and more shoppers, and its final goal is not to give us what we want but to make us want what it gives us. Consuming arguments from the author of Jihad vs. McWorld; with a four-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Part 1 The Birth of Consumers | |
| 1 Capitalism Triumphant and the Infantilist Ethos | p. 3 |
| 2 From Protestantism to Puerility | p. 38 |
| Part 2 The Eclipse of Citizens | |
| 3 Infantilizing Consumers: The Coming of Kidults | p. 81 |
| 4 Privatizing Citizens: The Making of Civic Schizophrenia | p. 116 |
| 5 Branding Identities: The Loss of Meaning | p. 166 |
| 6 Totalizing Society: The End of Diversity | p. 213 |
| Part 3 The Fate of Citizens | |
| 7 Resisting Consumerism: Can Capitalism Cure Itself? | p. 257 |
| 8 Overcoming Civic Schizophrenia: Restoring Citizenship in a World of Interdependence | p. 291 |
| Notes | p. 341 |
| Index | p. 383 |
