Citizenship and Consumption

by Soper, Kate; Trentmann, Frank

• ISBN13: 9780230553460
• ISBN10: 023055346X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book provides a timely forum for current thinking on consumption and citizenship, exploring overlaps, interactions and tensions between them.

Author Biography

KATE SOPER is a Professor of Philosophy in the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University, UK. She is well known for her work on the philosophy of nature and as a theorist of need and consumption, and has recently completed a research project on 'Alternative hedonism' in the ESRC/AHRC 'Cultures of Consumption' Programme. In addition to this volume, she is a co-editor (with Lyn Thomas and Martin Ryle) of Counter-Consumerism and its Pleasures (forthcoming). FRANK TRENTMANN is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Recent publications include Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, edited with John Brewer (2006) and Civil Society: A Reader in History, Theory and Global Politics, edited with John A. Hall (2005).

Table of Contents

List of Plates	p. vii
List of Figure and Table	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Notes on Contributors	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Retrieval	p. 17
Civic Choices: Retrieving Perspectives on Rationality, Consumption, and Citizenship	p. 19
Consumption and Politics in Twentieth-Century China	p. 34
Sartorial Manoeuvres in the Dusk: Blue Jeans in Socialist Hungary	p. 51
Talk and Action	p. 69
Consuming Without Paying: Stealing or Campaigning? The Civic Implications of Civil Disobedience Around Access to Water	p. 71
The Banality of Consumption	p. 87
'Public Connection' and the Uncertain Norms of Media Consumption	p. 104
The Moral Force of Consumption and Capitalism: Anti-slavery and Anti-sweatshop	p. 121
Prospects	p. 137
Exit Homo Politicus, Enter Homo Consumens	p. 139
Consumer Citizenship in Post-national Constellations?	p. 154
Sustainability, Well-Being and Consumption: The Limits of Hedonic Approaches	p. 172
'Alternative Hedonism' and the Citizen-Consumer	p. 191
Notes	p. 206
Index	p. 235
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