Summary
Contents
Subject index
Jean Baudrillard’s classic text was one of the first to focus on the process and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. Originally published in 1970, the book makes a vital contribution to current debates on consumption. The book includes Baudrillard’s most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure, and anomie in affluent society. A chapter on the body demonstrates Baudrillard’s extraordinary prescience for flagging vital subjects in contemporary culture long before others. This English translation begins with a new introductory essay.
Towards a Theory of Consumption
Towards a Theory of Consumption
The Autopsy of Homo oeconomicus
A fairy story: ‘Once upon a time there was a Man who lived in Scarcity. After many adventures and a long journey through Economic Science, he met the Affluent Society. They married and had lots of needs.’ ‘The beauty of the economic man,’ as A.N. Whitehead remarked, ‘was that we knew exactly what he was after.’1 That human fossil of the Golden Age, born, in the modern era, from the happy union of Human Nature and Human Rights, is endowed with a heightened sense of formal rationality, which leads him to:
- seek his own happiness without the slightest hesitation;
- prefer objects which will provide him with the greatest satisfactions.
The whole discourse, lay and ...
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