Overview
""Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book."" —Jackson Lears A powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber’s best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of an overproducing global economy that targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. To explain how and why this has come about, Barber brings together extensive empirical research with an original theoretical framework for understanding our contemporary predicament. He asserts that in place of the Protestant ethic once associated with capitalism—encouraging self-restraint, preparing for the future, protecting and self-sacrificing for children and community, and other characteristics of adulthood—we are constantly being seduced into an ""infantilist"" ethic of consumption.
Full Product Details
Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 21.10cm
Weight: 0.382kg
ISBN: 9780393330892
ISBN 10: 0393330893
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 20 March 2008
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
His books are about America... but the observations he makes apply to all of us. The Times In this new book the author of Jihad vs. McWorld offers a depressing thesis on why global corporations seek to make us childlike consumers-and why we collude. Financial Times Grown-ups have sunk into what the French call a puericulture and kids are being trained as hyper-consumers from toddlerhood. Judith Woods, The Daily Telegraph Consumerism, in Barber's view exploits the unsophisticated and voracious demands of children and makes adults emulate them. Rafael Behr, The Observer Benjamin Barber fears that this process of infantilisation... threatens democracy. Chris Petit, The Guardian
Barber delivers a frightening analysis of the way consumerism is vitiating shoppers in the United States and around the world. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) This lifelong study of the effects of capitalism and privatization reveals a pervasiveness of branding and homogenization from which there is no turning back. -- Booklist A remarkable book about the shifting nature of capitalism...Beguiling. -- Financial World [Barber's] thesis has genuine bite. -- Denver Post
Author Information
Internationally renowned political theorist Benjamin R. Barber is the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City, where he lives.
