Contents

Part 1 History

Consumption in early modern social thought

The consumer revolution of eighteenth-century England

Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution

Traditional and modern hedonism

Industrialism, consumerism and power

The governance of consumption

Societies of consumers and consumer societies

Part 2 Geography

Night life

What’s modern about the modern world-system?

The Empire’s old clothes

Plurality of taste

The world on a plate

The ‘consumption’ of tourism

A new look at gentrification

Urban lifestyle

Part 3 Subjects and identity

Consumer sovereignty

The consumer’s revolt

Subculture and style

Subcultures or neo-tribes?

Consumption and class analysis

The body in consumer culture

Commerce and femininity

The three-body problem and the end of the world

Part 4 Objects and technology

The genealogy of advertising

Where are the missing masses?

Rodchenko in Paris

Tovs

The Hoover in the garden

The two-way mirror

‘We know who you are and we know where you live’

Part 5 Theory

The gift and potlatch (by Marcel Mauss)

Sacrifices and wars of the Aztecs (by Georges Bataille)

Pecuniary emulation (by Thorstein Veblen)

The philosophy of fashion (by Georg Simmel)

Classes and classifications (by Pierre Bourdieu)

Production, consumption, distribution, exchange (circulation) (by Karl Marx)

The ideological genesis of needs (by Jean Baudrillard)

The practice of everyday life (by Michel de Certeau)