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Concrete, political features of contemporary culture are articulated. A key example is the formation of the community college system in the United States. The political economic character and function of this system is related to the educational psychology of students. Concrete culture today is capitalist. Features of capitalist culture are explored. Its class structure is emphasized. The importance of this for psychology is explored. A concrete feature of contemporary capitalism is consumerism. Consumerism is presented as a concrete cultural factor whose effects on psychological phenomena are explored. Consumer psychology is presented as concrete cultural psychology that recapitulates consumer capitalism. Consumer psychology is shown to include a set of perceptions, sensitivities, sensations, reasoning, memory, self, and sexuality which all bear concrete features of consumer culture.

Fred Thompson's determination to encourage visions of surplus and luxury placed him at the center of the development of early-20th-century consumer capitalism. Between 1890 and 1930, Americans laid the institutional foundation of its economy—department stores, advertising agencies, grand hotels and lavish saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and the great “world's fairs”—which showcased the marvelous array of consumer goods and technologies produced by the new industrial order. The architects of the urban marketplace enlisted these institutions and the social roles and practices associated with them not just to sell goods in new or more-effective ways, but to make consumer goods the very marrow of American life.

This chapter goes on to complicate the idea of thought further, as well as introducing the social element of thinking through discussion of affect and emotional regimes. It also examines the emotional regime instigated by consumer capitalism though the lens of Zygmunt Bauman's concept of unsicherheit.

This chapter examines the conflict between commercial Paris and the civic vision of the French Republic. It discusses the development of new forms of consumer capitalism and the emergence of bourgeois women as the primary consumers in the late nineteenth century. It describes the perception of the modern marketplace and traces the processes the led to the creation of a female commercial culture and the impulse shopper. It explains that as the ethos of the market collided with that of the civic public in late-nineteenth-century France, bourgeois elites found themselves forced to grapple with the question of how to map the boundaries between the market, the political public and the domestic sphere.

Chapter 3 explores the white-collar insurgents’ efforts to create viable alternatives to the culture of consumer capitalism. These impulses found expression in new media ventures that were launched in New York between 1936 and 1940, including Consumers Union, the advertising-free daily tabloid newspaper PM, the weekly newsletter In Fact, and the weekly photo-journalistic magazine Friday. Through these initiatives, radicalized culture workers propagated the Popular Front’s vision of social consumerism by encouraging Americans to purchase union-made goods, participate in consumer cooperatives, harbor deep skepticism toward advertising claims, use graded or generic goods instead of typical branded goods when possible, and demand an increase in the public provisioning of goods and services. In addition, these endeavors also provided writers, artists, and other members of the creative class with opportunities for greater autonomy in their work.

Chapter 7 explores how the ideal of creativity evolved within the postwar culture industries, with a particular focus on developments in advertising and industrial design. Following the defeat of the Popular Front, many culture workers from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s came to believe that their rising affluence set them in a new realm of freedom beyond necessity. Nonetheless, the ethos of creativity in postwar America clashed with the forces of consumer capitalism that still constrained the autonomy of culture workers. This tension was particularly evident in the creative revolution that swept New York’s advertising industry during the 1960s, but, as the chapter shows, it also influenced the evolution of industrial design theory and practice during the heyday of postwar prosperity.

Chapter 1 surveys the growth of the white-collar workforce during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the related development of the culture industries centered in New York. The fundamental relationships that linked advertisers to the media took shape during these years, as manufacturers’ need to reach potential consumers fueled the expansion of existing newspapers and magazines, quickly dominated the new technology of radio, and pushed firms to become more attentive to the design and appearance of products. Even as the culture industries swelled to meet the imperatives of consumer capitalism, economic inequality constrained consumer demand, contributing to the onset of the Great Depression. Although business interests attempted to defend capitalist principles and to maintain their control over the advertising and media enterprises, the severity and duration of the Depression incited radical critiques of both the working conditions within the culture industries and the content that they produced.

This chapter examines some of the best-selling mainstream religion/spirituality titles of the 1990s in light of increasing numbers of self-reported “spiritual seekers”—individuals with fluid, dynamic religious styles who move freely in and out of congregations across the life course, cobbling together a set of spiritual practices by combining elements of various traditions. In particular, it looks at Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul (1992), Karen Armstrong's A History of God (1993), Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk (1996), and Jack Miles's God: A Biography (1996), along with reviews by their readers on Amazon. These religious books have served as resources for spiritual seekers crafting their own religious identity narratives by modeling the formation of alternative spiritual faiths outside formal religious institutions, responding to the ills of consumer culture and consumer capitalism, and celebrating literary or poetic ways of being in the world.

Although Narcissus was a man, narcissism is commonly considered a feminine vice. Over the centuries, several symbolic systems mediate this transfer: the myth of Narcissus evolves to reassign narcissism to women; the image of a woman gazing into her mirror becomes a staple motif of western art; and psychoanalytic theory solidifies the bond between women and narcissism and extends it to gay men. Meanwhile, to satisfy its appetite for expanding markets, consumer capitalism manufactures unattainable, ever‐changing beauty ideals that keep women hooked on self‐beautification products and services. This symbolic and economic legacy encodes a no‐win “feminine” psycho‐corporeal dynamic of eroticized estrangement from self – a subjectivity of self‐doubt, perplexity, and frustration, which I term the psychic‐psyché economy. In contrast, a number of contemporary feminist artists ironically appropriate and critically repudiate conventional woman‐with‐mirror imagery, and five of their self‐visionary projects are explored.

This chapter examines the end of “free trade” in doctoring in the late 1800s and the rise of modern consumer capitalism in the nineteenth century that transformed patients into consumers. It first provides a background on how the free trade in doctoring operated and how it began to be curtailed in the late 1800s. It then looks at the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act that allowed the federal government to get involved in consumer protection. It also explores institutional reforms implemented gradually after the American Civil War that laid the foundation for a much more confident medical professionalism; the emergence of the so-called “pioneers of novelties” that manufacture proprietary drugs; and how medicine figured in the postwar consumption economy. Finally, it reflects on how developments such as the new health dangers posed by prosperity and the increasingly rich variety of information and advertising surrounding every aspect of health fueled the growing expectation that ordinary Americans become more skilled at making medical choices.

This chapter examines how medical care became the “fourth necessity” of modern life—after food, clothing, and housing—during the postwar period. There were disagreements on what shape America's medical order would take after World War II. Some advocated for an American equivalent to Britain's National Health Service, whereas others agreed that a more “free enterprise” system would better suit the nation. In the late 1940s, the business-backed model of free enterprise prevailed, giving rise to a medical economy that moved in the opposite direction from what consumerists had hoped for. In the short run, these free enterprise modifications to the medical economy paved the way for the remarkable expansion of the health care system. This chapter considers how American medicine came into even closer alignment with the dynamics of postwar consumer capitalism, which brought a dramatic increase in the number of medical products and services available to patients but also led to more consumer dissatisfaction.

The chapter examines how the economy has changed during the years when night time industries emerged. The modern times is characterised by the further convergence of cultural and economic spheres. Consumer capitalism is the driving factor behind experiential consumption. Another concept employed in the chapter is the concept of leisure. Its attainment has become so valuable among the youth that it has become how they identify themselves. It also discusses the aspects that define the night time industry and examines how night life has become partnered with commercial interests in order to form lawlessness and disorder in the cities.

This introductory chapter charts a brief history of how American Protestantism had developed in conjunction with modern consumer capitalism. There are many points of entry to this corporate evangelical network, but the story that follows focuses on one of its key institutions, the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago. The MBI was founded by the salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most important evangelical of the late nineteenth century. He ingeniously weaved disparate ideas drawn from business and religion into a compelling, if unstable, form of evangelical Protestantism. After Moody's death in 1899, a second generation of evangelicals led by Henry Parsons Crowell transformed MBI in significant ways. They shifted focus from converting the working classes to influencing middle-class Protestantism and swapped their overarching metaphor of industrial work with modern consumption.

All the indicators of modern “progress” in Infernal Affairs point in a downward direction. Liberation from colonialism, the promise of modern technology, and the potential pleasures of global consumer capitalism fall from the heights as well. Postmodern texts tend to favor allegory. Infernal Affairs also slips among allegorical associations with religion, morality, nation, as well as with a more general condition of postmodern life. It envisions the movement of the global economy from processed raw materials driving imperialism (e.g. opium) to manufactured goods (e.g. electronics like stereos) at the base of postwar neocolonialism to the postmodern “information society” in which communication becomes commodified, and the economy moves from a base in production (of material things) to one based on reproduction (replication of images and information). In many ways, it provides a portrait of the new economy through its depiction of new technologies in action in the marketplace of information.

This chapter charts the key pivot by corporate evangelicals at the Moody Bible Institute (MBI), from religious identities rooted in Christian work to consumer identities branded as “pure religion.” Evangelicals at the MBI had forged a consuming faith from the ideological overlap between modern consumer capitalism and religion—both advertisers and evangelists were tackling the same problem of individual human choice, after all, and both groups welcomed any art or science that gave them an advantage. The ideas that had been lifted from marketing and advertising strategies helped transition evangelicals from Moody's conviction that an authentic faith produced Christian workers to a new ideal embodied by the savvy consumer—a believer who rightly judged and appropriated correct belief and practice from the options in the religious marketplace.

This essay traces the development of fundamentalism in the context of wider changes in evangelical Protestantism and business in the United States. The need for social stability in antebellum America and the role of Protestant religion in maintaining it tamped down the intrinsic individualism of both evangelicalism and business. But a series of social and business transformations after the Civil War, and the growing influence of the state in social and economic life, provided the impetus and opportunity for a fundamentalist movement to emerge in the 1910s. The firm establishment and naturalizing of modern consumer capitalism after World War II allowed a business-infused fundamentalism (known now as “neo-evangelicalism”) to thrive. Throughout its development, fundamentalism borrowed from business ideology and techniques for religious ends.

This chapter argues that Byron's legacy is the oxymoronic paradox of the tasteful cannibal, whose taboo desires resist incorporation into the symbolic economy of consumer capitalism. In particular, it reads the cannibalism episode in canto 2 of Don Juan as a critical moment in the literary history of taste, one that launches a critique of the cultural ideology of taste with its nationalist claims to distinction. While famous for its outrageous depiction of cannibalism, Don Juan rewrites cannibalism as vampirism, a paradoxically tasteful mode of consuming the other. So long as the enemy to aesthetic community was simply precivil appetite, it was possible to locate bad taste out there, in the barbaric hinterland or dark abyss beyond the pale of tasteful society. However, once appetite has been successfully repressed and made a driving force of society, to be aesthetic was to be extraordinary, or defined in ways other than commodity consumption.