CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE LIBERAL EGALITARIAN DEFENSE OF MARKET DEMOCRACY

Waheed HussainAssistant Professor

University of Pennsylvania

667 Huntsman HallUniversity of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, PA 19104

whussain@wharton.upenn.edu

Consumer culture is a widespread feature of social life in market societies. People care a

lot about material goods in these societies, and they collectively spend an enormous

amount of time and energy thinking about them, shopping for them, and working to ac-

quire them. Globalization has made this feature of market societies even more striking.

China and India both have centuries of experience with religious and cultural diversity,

but in the short time since the market reforms of the 80s and 90s, they have both seen a

startling rise in consumerism. Flat Screen TVs, Gucci bags, luxury condos, long hours,

and credit card debt—this is increasingly the world that large segments of these societies

inhabit.1

1 See Deborah S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, Deobrah S. Davis (ed.) (Berkeley:

UCLA Press 2000); Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China, Christophe Jaffrelot and

Peter van der Veer (ed.s) (New Delhi: Sage, 2008); and Steve Derné, Globalization on the Ground (New

Delhi: Sage, 2008).

1

My aim in this paper is to examine the challenge that consumer culture poses to

the liberal egalitarian defense of market democracy. Many liberal egalitarians believe

that existing market democracies do not satisfy the demands of political morality, but that

it is nonetheless possible to combine a market economy with a democratic system of gov-

ernment in a way that will meet these demands. Rawls endorses this view insofar as he

presents a form of market democracy as a “realistic utopia” that we may hope to achieve.2

Other liberal egalitarians hold similar positions.3 An important feature of the liberal egal-

itarian defense is the claim that people in a just market democracy will, by and large,

gravitate to normative outlooks that incorporate a concern for social justice and that this

concern will motivate them in the right way to maintain just relations with each other. If

a consumer culture arises at all in a just market democracy, it will remain a manageable

feature of the public culture.

My claim is that the standard liberal egalitarian responses to the dangers of con-

sumer culture are inadequate. The standard liberal egalitarian arguments show how the

need for self-respect will not lead citizens in a just market democracy to get embroiled in

a destabilizing competition for material goods—a struggle to “keep up with the Joneses.”

2 For Rawls’s idea of a realistic utopia, see Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 2001), 4 and 13. Rawls argues that a form of market democracy could satisfy the principles

of justice and achieve stability in Parts Two and Three of A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1999) (hereafter cited as Theory); and Parts IV and V of Justice as Fairness.

Lectures IV and V of Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) develop an im-

portant component of the overall argument. Rawls calls his preferred arrangement a “property-owning

democracy” (see Justice as Fairness, 135-40; see also Theory, 228-51, especially 242).

3 See, for example, Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) and

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999).

2

But the focus on competition between citizens as consumers overlooks another structural

feature of a market democracy that supports consumer culture, namely competition

among producers. Even in a just market democracy, firms will have to compete with

each other for market share and profits, and this competition will generate a distinct pres-

sure towards consumer culture. It follows that the standard liberal egalitarian arguments

do not show that a just market democracy will control consumer culture simply in virtue

of meeting the requirements of justice.

The conclusion to draw from the argument is that a just market democracy must

be prepared to take more active measures to shape the cultural environment in society.

We cannot expect the right sort of environment to emerge spontaneously, so we must be

prepared to go beyond protections for liberal cultural freedoms and take positive mea-

sures to steer things in the right direction. The positive measures I have in mind belong

to a Rousseauian tradition of democratic thought—two examples I discuss are mandatory

national service and public support for more socially conscious forms of consumerism. I

argue that in the context of a market democracy, we have good reason to side with

Rousseau, against his liberal critics, about the need for institutional measures to foster a

spirit of equality and mutual concern among citizens.

In sections 1-3 of the paper, I formulate a conception of consumer culture, ex-

plaining what it is and why it is important. In section 4, I draw on G.A. Cohen’s work to

distinguish between two different forces that can lead to consumer culture. In section 5, I

consider the central arguments that Rawls offers in response to the threat. After address-

ing some objections in section 6, I discuss the policy implications of the argument in sec-

tion 7.

3

1. What is consumer culture?

As I will use the term, “consumer culture” refers to a certain constellation of beliefs, val-

ues and practices. My conception of consumer culture answers to certain normative

rather than theoretical interests, so it aims to describe a constellation that raises special

moral concerns. The pattern is meant to be an ideal type, so actual societies will exhibit

the pattern to varying degrees.

According to my conception, a consumer culture has three central features.

(1) People are deeply invested in achieving an appropriate material lifestyle. In

any society, people will spend their time and energy on a wide range of projects, such as

writing novels, playing baseball, and raising a family. In a consumer culture, however,

one particular project comes to occupy a very prominent place in most people’s lives,

namely achieving and maintaining an appropriate material lifestyle. By a material life-

style, I mean a culturally related set of goods and services that people can buy in the mar-

ket and consume in their day-to-day activities. Among the material lifestyles in our soci-

ety are those associated with various economic classes and occupational groups. To

achieve a particular material lifestyle, you have to buy and consume the relevant goods

and services, that is, you have to wear the right kind of clothes, live in the right kind of

house, drive the right kind of car, attend the right schools, and so on.

People in a consumer culture are “deeply invested” in achieving a certain material

lifestyle in two senses. First, they care very much about achieving it. When push comes

to shove, they are willing to make substantial sacrifices in terms of other projects and

commitments in order to satisfy the requirements of their material lifestyle. Second, they

4

spend substantial resources on this project. Many will spend 60 to 70 hours a week—

sometimes more—working to earn enough money to achieve their material aims. Of

course, they may have other reasons for working long hours; they may find their work in-

trinsically rewarding, for example. But most people would not do their jobs for free, and

achieving a certain material lifestyle plays an important role in their motivation.

(2) The concern for material lifestyle is rooted in the need for self-respect. Among

our most powerful motivations is the need for self-respect. By self-respect, I mean a

form of self-esteem that consists, among other things, in a feeling that we are valuable,

that our actions matter, and that our goals and plans are important.4 To lack self-respect,

in this sense, is to feel worthless, a condition in which “[a]ll desire and activity becomes

empty and vain, and we sink into apathy and cynicism.”5 In a consumer culture, people

find that their self-respect is sensitive to their material lifestyle. For example, a person in

a consumer culture may live in a large home, a fact that supports his self-respect. He

may also be aware, at some level, that if he were forced to move his family into a small

rental apartment, this would be grounds for strong feelings of failure and worthlessness.

The threat to his self-respect will then play an important role in motivating him to work

4 Theory, 386. Self-respect understood in this way is different from both what Stephen Darwall calls

“recognition respect” and what he calls “appraisal respect” (see his excellent discussion in “Two Kinds of

Respect” Ethics vol. 88, no.1 (October 1977)). Self-respect does not necessarily involve the agent deliber-

ating about herself in certain ways or making certain judgments about herself. It consists primarily in a cer-

tain way of interacting with the world. An agent with self-respect has a kind of confidence: she has a gen-

eral disposition to see some things as being important, to care about these things, and to follow through on

the things that she cares about. Her self-respect may be supported by her judgment that she meets certain

standards of excellence, but it does not consist in these judgments.

5 Theory, 386.

5

hard and to make substantial sacrifices in order to maintain his living conditions. In a

consumer culture, the need for self-respect plays an important role in motivating people

to care about achieving a certain material lifestyle, and to spend substantial resources to

try to achieve it.

(3) Material lifestyle constitutes an important basis for public recognition.

Among the most important factors that affect our self-respect are the attitudes that other

people form and express towards us.6 We feel more secure in our self-worth when other

people appreciate us and support our pursuits, and it is almost impossible to maintain a

sense of our own worth when no one does so. Call the social responses that tend support

or diminish our sense of our own value, “recognition” and “rejection” respectively.7

Different societies have different patterns of recognition and rejection. Some so-

cieties will take a person’s intellectual accomplishments as grounds for recognition or re-

jection; others may emphasize a person’s military record or athletic ability. The third

feature of a consumer culture is that the pattern of recognition and rejection in society at-

taches special importance to a person’s material lifestyle. People who maintain an appro-

priate lifestyle are praised and admired, while those who fail to do so are pitied and

shunned. There may be many factors that sustain the connection between material life-

style and self-respect, but the third feature says that in a consumer culture there is an im-

portant social dimension to this connection. People in a consumer culture find that their

self-respect is sensitive to their material lifestyle at least in part because the public culture

reinforces this connection.

6 Theory, 386.

7 “Rejection” covers a wide range of responses. Active expressions of disapproval can diminish self-re -

spect, but various forms of social neglect and apathy can as well.

6

Putting the three elements together, a society has a consumer culture when (1)

people are deeply invested in achieving a certain material lifestyle, (2) they are invested

in this project in large part because their material lifestyle has a definite impact on their

self-respect, and (3) the connection between their material lifestyle and their self-respect

has an important basis in social patterns of recognition and rejection. Consumer culture

can be more or less intense depending on the how prominently material lifestyle figures

into people’s priorities, the degree to which it affects their self-respect, and the degree to

which it determines their public standing.

2. Some distinctions

A few points of clarification are in order here. First, individuals in a consumer culture

are not necessarily self-centered or selfish. Parents in a consumer culture, such as the one

in the United States today, face recognition or rejection based on what their children

wear, what their children eat, and where their children go to school. But parents also

know that their children will themselves face recognition or rejection on the basis of what

they wear, what they eat and where they go to school. So parents in our society typically

manage the material lifestyle of their children not only out of a selfish concern for their

own self-respect, but also out of a loving concern for the self-respect of their children.

Second, the existence of a consumer culture does not imply that people are all try-

ing to live the same way of life. People in a consumer culture belong to various status

groups that have different views about an appropriate material lifestyle.8 A university 8 See Max Weber, “The Distribution of Power Within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party” Econ-

omy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 926-40; and Pierre Bourdieu Distinc-

tion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

7

professor may acknowledge that a Rolex is prestigious and desirable in some sense, but

reject the idea of owning one because he regards it as ostentatious. What is essential to

consumer culture is not that everyone is trying to consume the same high-status goods,

but that everyone, regardless of his status group, is heavily invested in managing his ma-

terial lifestyle. Even the university professor, who may not want a Rolex, is concerned to

secure the marks of distinction within his status group—season tickets to the symphony,

an appropriate library of books, a sabbatical in Europe, and so on.

Third, the existence of a consumer culture does not necessarily involve “competi-

tive consumerism.” Thorsten Veblen famously argues that people consume conspicu-

ously as a way of showing others that they have more wealth and therefore belong to a

group with higher social standing.9 But consumer culture, on my view, does not neces-

sarily require that people are trying to prove that they are better than everyone else. Fol-

lowing Rawls, I take it that the basis of self-respect is not the envy of others or our sense

of superiority over them, but rather their approval, admiration and support. A religious

community, for example, may have high standards of conduct that are difficult to meet,

but it may be perfectly willing to give the same recognition to anyone who meets these

standards. If so, members of the religious community may have to struggle to achieve

recognition, but they will not have to struggle against each other because recognition

does not depend on relative standing. Similarly, a community may promise recognition

equally to all those who conform to certain patterns for their material lifestyles. If so,

members may have to spend a great deal of time and energy to meet these material stan-

dards. But since the community promises recognition to anyone who conforms to the rel-

9 Thorsten Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

8

evant patterns, members will not have to compete against each other to secure recogni-

tion.

This last point is worth emphasizing in connection with Rousseau. We can under-

stand amour-propre, in its corrupt form, as the need to have others see us as being supe-

rior to everyone else.10 Rousseau believes that the emergence of amour-propre in its cor-

rupt form leads to the malicious patterns of social interaction that he criticizes in the first

and second Discourses. But it is an important feature of my conception of consumer cul-

ture that it does not necessarily involve amour-propre in its corrupt form. We can be in-

volved in a consumer culture, on my view, even if we are not using our material lifestyle

to get others to see us as being better than everyone else. What is essential is simply that

social circumstances channel our need for recognition in a way that sustains an absorbing

concern for our material lifestyle.

10 Here I take the view that amour-propre has both a natural and a corrupt form. See N.J.H. Dent,

Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005), chapters 3 and 4; John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political

Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 198-200; Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s

Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free

Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). My interpretation of amour-propre fol-

lows Neuhouser in particular.

9

3. Why is consumer culture morally objectionable?

Consumer culture is objectionable for several reasons. People in a consumer culture tend

to live lives that are less meaningful because the pursuit of material goods crowds out

other worthwhile projects, such as raising a family, playing a sport, or learning to cook.

People in a consumer culture are also plagued by insecurity about their social status and

an overabundance of consumption choices. These conditions are physically taxing,

harmful to their social relations, and can make it difficult for them to form lasting com-

mitments.11 Consumer culture also contributes to a host of environmental problems.12

All of these are certainly objectionable features of consumer culture, but I want to focus

on a different set of issues that have to do with our sense of justice.

In a reasonably well-functioning democracy, citizens shape society’s laws and

policies through various forms of political participation. Among other things, they follow

public debates, protest, vote, run for office, and write laws when they win elections.

Since citizens are ultimately in charge of laws and policies, the basic institutions of a

democratic society will not remain just for any significant period of time unless citizens

themselves take an interest in social justice.13 For social institutions to remain just, citi-

zens have to care about the social injustices that develop in society, and they have to care

11 See Barry Schwarz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); Tim Kasser, The High

Price of Materialism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006); and John De Graaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor, Affluenza (San Fran-

cisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005). The critical literature on consumer culture is vast and I only mention a few

important recent contributions here.

12 See, for example, Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2010 (Washington DC, 2010).

10

enough to engage in political action to fix these problems. For example, suppose that so-

ciety moves from a mass production economy to an information economy. Suppose that

this change makes large parts of the education system obsolete, which in turn leaves

many groups in society with a less than fair opportunity to succeed in the labor market. If

society is to remain just, these emerging inequalities have to engage people’s moral sensi-

bilities. Citizens have to care about the fact that some of their fellow citizens have a less

than fair opportunity to succeed, and they have to care enough to get informed about the

issue, to speak out about it, and most importantly, to vote on it.

The central problem with consumer culture is that if it becomes intense enough,

the concern for material lifestyle will crowd out the concern for social justice, in much

the same way that it crowds out other concerns. The most obvious way that it does this is

by occupying “mental shelf space.”14 There are a certain number of hours in a day, and

people in a consumer culture spend much of this time thinking of new acquisitions (a va-

cation, an elaborate wedding), researching the alternatives, shopping, making purchases,

and—most importantly—working to earn the money to buy what they want. With most

people absorbed in the cycle of working and spending, it can be difficult for any social

injustice to break through the fog and capture people’s attention.15 A commercial mass

media exacerbates the situation, as television, newspapers and websites cater to the con-

13 Rawls describes the sense of justice as a desire to comply with the rules of a just social arrangement and

a desire “to work for […] the setting up of just institutions, and for the reform of existing ones when justice

requires it” (Theory, 415; my emphasis).

14 I take this term from Robert Frank and Philip Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society (New York: Penguin,

1996).

15 For absorption in the work and spend lifestyle, see Juliet Schor, The Overworked American (New York:

Basic Books, 1992) and The Overspent American (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

11

cerns of the work and spend lifestyle. Even in cases where injustices do come to the pub-

lic’s attention, people in a consumer culture tend to find themselves in physical and emo-

tional surroundings that inhibit their moral sensibility. It is hard to take the injustice of

the education system seriously when you are at the food court at the mall; however, the

US has twice as many shopping centers as it does high schools, and more Americans visit

a mall at least once a week than visit a house of worship.16

Consumer culture also crowds out the concern for social justice by reinforcing the

connection between material lifestyle and self-respect. As economists such as J.K. Gal-

braith and Robert Frank emphasize, allocating resources for spending on public goods re-

quires that we make trade-offs in terms of private consumption.17 Justice in a market

democracy will sometimes require increases in public spending in order to deal with

emerging problems. But the corresponding sacrifices in private spending will require that

citizens adjust their material lifestyles and long-term material aspirations. These adjust-

ments are particularly wrenching in a consumer culture because they involve damaging

an important basis for self-respect. Consider that even relatively wealthy families in the

United States today—who are extremely rich in global terms—can feel overextended in

trying to maintain an appropriate house and to keep their children in expensive private

universities. Most any redistributive policy in this environment can be threatening be-

cause it may require people to endure the shame of moving to a smaller house or taking

their children out of an elite school. Adjusting your material lifestyle is never easy, but in

16 De Graff et. al, Affluenza, 13.

17 J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), chapter 17; Robert Frank, Lux-

ury Fever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 53-63.

12

a consumer culture it is especially difficult because it involves a kind of public humilia-

tion.

To crystallize the point, imagine that we live in a society with a consumer culture

and that changes in the economy leave large numbers of young people with a less than

fair opportunity to succeed in the labor market. These young people must rely on their

fellow citizens to be responsive to their situation and to take political action to address

the injustice. But consumer culture interferes with the process. Social absorption in the

cycle of working and spending keeps people from entering the public forum. Moreover,

social patterns of recognition inflate the importance of material lifestyle, thereby discour-

aging citizens who do enter the public forum from supporting the policies that would re-

store just background conditions. As a result, those with a less than fair opportunity to

succeed will have to wait longer for their grievances to be addressed, and an entire gener-

ation or more may suffer the consequences before citizens take the necessary action.

Notice that the problem with consumer culture that I just described is generic to

cultural patterns that involve activities that are unrelated to social justice. By way of

comparison, imagine a society focused on literary achievement, where self-respect de-

pends on the quality of the novels and short stories that a person writes, and where public

recognition revolves around a person’s literary output. This literary culture might also be

objectionable if the focus on literary success distracts people from emerging injustices

and leads to a pattern of recognition that creates a conflict between addressing social in-

justice and maintaining the bases of self-respect. Any cultural pattern in which social

recognition revolves substantially around an activity that does not have a specific connec-

tion with social justice will be open to the same objections. What gives us special reason

13

to focus on consumer culture is that there are forces deeply ingrained in a market democ-

racy that push society in the direction of this particular pattern.

4. The forces that push us towards a consumer culture

One important force that pushes society towards a consumer culture is amour-propre in

its corrupt form. People have a tendency to want to surpass everyone around them in

terms of their material lifestyle, and as each person tries to surpass the others, society gets

caught in an upward spiral of consumption.18 But I want to draw attention to another

force that pushes towards consumer culture, one that is more specific to market

economies. Call this the output expansion bias. G.A. Cohen describes the bias in the fol-

lowing way.19

18 Standard economic theory explains consumer behavior primarily in terms of exogenous preferences that

are not shaped by social circumstances. But social and relational factors figure prominently in explanations

in sociology, psychology and marketing, as well in certain part of economics. The drive to compare favor-

ably with others is among the most important social factors cited. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Dis-

tinction; James Duesenberry, Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1967); Robert Frank, Luxury Fever; Juliet Schor, The Overspent American; and Thorsten Ve-

blen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. For a useful overview of different approaches see Jonathan Frenzen,

Paul M. Hirsch and Philip C. Zerrillo, “Consumption, Preferences, and Changing Lifestyles” in The Hand-

book of Econonomic Sociology, Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg (ed.s) (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1994).

19 See G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2000) (hereafter cited as KMTH) , 302-6. Galbraith makes a similar argument in The Affluent Society, 124-

31.

14

Market institutions tend greatly to expand the potential output of the economy

over time. One of the ways that they do this is by encouraging technological innovation.

Firms hold most of the productive assets in a market economy, and they are involved in

an intense competition for shares of a relatively fixed amount of total spending power.

This competition creates a powerful incentive for firms to increase productivity through

technological innovation. By innovating, firms can lower the costs of production and in-

crease their share of total spending by lowering prices, improving quality and so on.

They can also return greater profits to investors and offer higher wages to secure more

productive employees. As Cohen says, “Improvement in productivity is a condition of

persistence and success in the multidimensional competition which characterizes capital-

ism in all of its stages.”20 Over time, the pressure to innovate improves the overall tech-

nological capacity of society and thereby increases the range of goods and services that a

society could produce given a constant resource base.

Suppose now that some new technology emerges in society. There are two ways

that we could use this increase in productivity: (1) we could keep output constant and re-

duce the amount of time that we spend working to produce this output or (2) we could in-

crease output. In a market system, technological innovations tend to enter the economy

through individual firms, and firms are biased in favor of the second of these two options.

The firm is out to maximize its profits, but it will not do so by keeping output constant; to

maximize profits, it has to increase output. So when a firm improves the efficiency of its

production process, “it does not simply reduce the working day of its employees and pro-

duce the same amount as before.”21 The firm looks to produce more. The overall result

20 KMTH, 303; emphasis omitted.

21 KMTH, 304-5.

15

is that market economies tend to use increases in productive capacity to increase produc-

tion. This is the output expansion bias.

The output expansion bias naturally gives rise to social pressures that encourage

consumption. After all, firms are not interested in just producing more goods, but in sell-

ing more of them. So when a firm finds itself with greater productive capacity, it looks

for ways to translate this capacity into sales. The easiest case is when customers simply

want more of the same product or when price competition can win the firm a greater

share of the same market. Here the firm can simply produce more of the same product or

lower prices. But consumers are often not interested in more of the same product or it

may not be profitable for the firm to continue to saturate the market. In these cases, the

firm will seek other ways to generate sales: the firm will add features to existing prod-

ucts, make old products obsolete, or develop new products altogether. One of the most

important things it will do, from the standpoint of my concerns in this paper, is that it will

invest in advertising and marketing to stimulate consumer interest.22

Here we see how the output expansion bias has an effect on the public culture of a

market society. Since expanding output—or, more precisely, sales—is essential to their

survival, firms use the resources available to them to flood the popular culture with mes-

sages that encourage the consumption of their products. The result is a public culture in

which the attractions of consumption are constantly reinforced.

Cohen puts the point this way:

…what advertising (etc.) may be said to do, on the most generous account,

is to draw attention to and emphasize (what we have supposed are) the

22 KMTH, 306-7.

16

independently desirable qualities of the products it displays. This is

balanced by no similar campaign stressing the goods of leisure. …There

are no “leisure ads” because firms have no interest in financing them, nor

in paying for public reminders of the unpleasant side of the labour which

buys the goods.23

Cohen’s particular worry here is that the market’s tendency towards expanding

output leads firms to encourage consumption at the expense of leisure. But for my pur-

poses, what is most important is not that firms encourage consumption at the expense of

leisure, but rather that they encourage consumption, mostly without regard for the rea-

sons that might tell against consumption or in favor of some other activity. What firms

care about is maximizing profits. Sometimes this will lead them to pay attention to the

reasons that tell against buying a certain product—for example, when a firm addresses

the safety concerns that consumers have about its products. It may also lead them to ad-

dress broader concerns about the environment and global warming. But when firms ad-

dress these concerns, they are generally driven by the conclusion that addressing these

concerns will serve ultimately to improve sales and increase profits.

We are now in a position to see how the output expansion bias pushes us towards

a disruptive concern for our material lifestyle. Marketing campaigns are mainly sensitive

to profit-considerations, which means that they are designed to increase the consumption

of a firm’s products, but not designed to limit this consumption within the scope of what

is compatible with just social relations. People are simply encouraged to buy the latest

BlackBerry or the condo that fits their “active modern lifestyle.” Everyone is encouraged

23 KMTH, 318.

17

to buy the product, even those who cannot afford it or those who could only afford it if

the principles of distributive justice were violated. Similarly, if there is some issue of

public concern that has a stronger claim on the public’s attention, the advertising cam-

paign will not cease or otherwise make room in the public sphere for the issue to come to

light and grip the public’s imagination. In both of these ways, advertising and marketing

pressure us towards a discordant concern for our material lifestyle. The problem is not

that these campaigns are designed explicitly to encourage people to act in ways that are

inconsistent with just social relations. The problem is that these campaigns are insensi-

tive to considerations of social justice, both in terms of the patterns of conduct they en-

courage and the amount of the public’s attention they occupy.

Recognition plays an important part in the dynamic. One of the most important

ways that firms encourage consumption is by shaping patterns of social recognition.

Consider that marketing campaigns themselves constitute a form of recognition. For ex-

ample, Apple’s marketing campaign for the iPad focuses on presenting the iPad as the

preeminent modern tool for thoughtful and creative activity. This image is widely rein-

forced on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the internet. When somebody

buys an iPad, he finds himself the object of a widely dispersed set of advertising mes-

sages approving of his purchase and the aspirations that lead him to make it. Moreover,

if other people are also influenced by the marketing campaign, he will find himself the

object of a much wider circle of approval, one that includes family, friends and even

strangers. The result is an environment in which owning an iPad becomes a way of elic-

iting recognition and supporting self-esteem.

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The effect is magnified by the fact that advertising and marketing are among a

small number of encompassing cultural forces in society. Advanced market societies

consist of subcultures that have very different ideas about values. But the messages that

firms present in the mass media are “encompassing” in the sense that most everyone is

exposed to them, regardless of subculture, and the exposure starts in early childhood.24

By comparison, institutions such universities and religious associations have a more lim-

ited impact. The encompassing character of advertising and marketing heightens the im-

pact of the output expansion bias because it means that your material lifestyle functions

as a basis for recognition and rejection across a very wide spectrum of subcultures, mak-

ing it something very hard to ignore. Advertising and marketing is one church that we all

attend.

At this point, it may be helpful to have some sense of the scale of the phenome-

non. The 2008 presidential election in the United States was the most expensive in his-

tory. Total spending by the two candidates is estimated to be in the range of US$1.67 bil-

lion. This spending bought near saturation media coverage, and dwarfed the $750 mil-

lion that was spent by the two candidates in the 2004 presidential election. But it is im-

portant to put this spending into perspective. In 2007, a single corporation in the United

States—Proctor & Gamble—spent $2.6 billion on advertising in traditional media.25

Proctor & Gamble spends this kind of money every year, not once every four years, and it

has been doing so for decades. This is just one corporation. To put things further into

24 Children begin to express preferences for branded over generic items in preschool. See Deborah Roedder

John, “Stages of Consumer Socialization” in Handbook of Consumer Psychology, Haugtvedt et. al. (ed)

(New York: Taylor and Francis, 2008); see also Juliet Schor, Born to Buy (New York: Scribner, 2004).

25 Nielson media research: http://www.nielsen.com/media/toptens_yearend_2008.html.

19

context, total advertising spending in the United States for 2008 was estimated to be

around $290 billion dollars.26 We might reasonably think of this as 170 election cam-

paigns, each as big as Obama and McCain combined, running simultaneously, year after

year. This represents an enormous human effort expended daily to encourage us to con-

sume. If the presidential campaign ever seemed more prominent, this reflects the degree

to which our senses have become accustomed to the barrage.

The scale of the social effort to encourage consumer concerns is actually much

larger than the preceding sketch suggests. For example, advertising and marketing ex-

penditures do not include any part of the operating budgets of TV networks, websites,

magazines, and other commercial media enterprises, which produce programming in

large part to deliver viewers to advertisers.27 They do not include any part of the operat-

ing budgets of professional sports leagues, such as the NFL, NBA and NASCAR, which

exist in the form that they do in large part because they serve as good vehicles for compa-

nies to market their products. They do not include the billions of dollars we spend build-

ing stores, shopping malls, roads, and the rest of the infrastructure of consumption. They

do not include the efforts of banks and financial companies to extend credit to consumers

so that they can buy goods. And they do not include government policymaking, which

has played an important role in encouraging consumption in the postwar era.28 Directly

26 The US spends roughly 2% of GDP per year on advertising and marketing. For 2008, see Stuart Elliott,

“Ad Spending Forecast Lowered Again,” New York Times (July 9, 2008).

27 Of course, programming is also intended to entertain and inform, but the commercial interest is signifi-

cant, so the operating budgets of these organizations should be counted in some measure in the total social

effort to encourage consumption.

28 For some recent historical work see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (New York: Vintage,

2004); Lawrence Glickman (ed.), Consumer Society in American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

20

or indirectly, the profit motive bends enormous resources in our society towards the goal

of encouraging consumer concerns.

It is worth emphasizing again that consumer culture is not inherently different

from other cultural patterns that we may find in a market democracy. There may be com-

munities in a diverse society where recognition revolves around religious virtue or

achievement in sports and the arts. Any of these cultural patterns could potentially reach

a point where they are so widespread and command so much attention that popular ab-

sorption in these activities dampens the social response to injustice. What makes con-

sumer culture a special cause for concern is that there is a pulsating engine at the heart of

a market democracy that pushes society towards consumer culture—i.e. competition be-

tween firms. No other institutional mechanism of comparable strength and scope pro-

motes any of these other cultural patterns. This gives us special reason to ask whether a

just market democracy will be able to address the danger posed by consumer culture.

5. The liberal egalitarian response

The standard liberal egalitarian response to the danger of consumer culture is to argue

that a just market democracy would greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the drive towards a

destabilizing concern for our material lifestyle. Here it is helpful to consider Rawls’s re-

sponse since it brings several important arguments together.

1999); and Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 2011).

21

Rawls’s response to the danger of consumer culture focuses on self-respect.29

Self-respect is a central human good, on Rawls’s view, and securing self-respect is an im-

portant part of most any rational plan of life.30 He argues that a just social arrangement

would restrict the ways in which citizens could support their self-respect by improving

their relative standing in terms of material goods, and it would also give them various

nonmaterialistic avenues for securing recognition.31 In these ways, a just arrangement

would channel the drive for self-respect so that it would not lead people into an absorbing

concern for their material lifestyle.

There are three main features of a just market democracy that work together, on

Rawls’s view, to control the drive towards consumer culture. The first is social and eco-

nomic equality. A market democracy that conforms to the requirements of justice as fair-

ness would permit only those inequalities that work to the maximum benefit of the least

advantaged (subject to the constraint of equal basic liberty and fair equality of opportu-

nity). Since people in a just market democracy would be much more similar in terms of

their social and economic resources, there would be less room for anyone to distinguish

herself from everyone else in virtue of her share of these resources. Rawls argues that

this would reduce the potential impact of any tendency for people to feel better or worse

about themselves in virtue of their relative material circumstances.32

29 See Theory §§80-82, especially pp. 468-71 and 476-80. Self-respect figures prominently not only in

Rawls’s response to consumer culture, but in his account of stability more generally.

30 See Theory, 358-9 and §§63-5 more generally.

31 See Theory, 476-80.

32 Theory, 470.

22

The second feature is associational diversity. Rawls argues that the free expres-

sion of human nature under conditions of equal liberty will lead to the formation of a

wide range of social, economic, and cultural associations. Given the array of different as-

sociations that are likely to develop in a reasonably large society, each citizen is likely to

find some community of people who will recognize her and support her self-respect, no

matter what her particular talents, interests and abilities.33 Moreover, this array of associ-

ations tends to be “noncomparing” in the sense that people who belong to one community

of interests typically do not experience the material differences between themselves and

the members of another community as forms of recognition or rejection.

[T]he plurality of associations in a well-ordered society, each with its

secure internal life, tends to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful

visibility, of variations in men’s prospects. For we tend to compare our

circumstances with others in the same or in a similar group as ourselves, or

in positions that we regard as relevant to our aspirations.34

For example, scientists may know that investment bankers make much more money than

they do, but this does not undermine their self-respect because they do not experience this

disparity as a form of rejection.

The third feature that supports self-respect is equal basic liberty. In a just market

democracy, everyone would enjoy the same, fully adequate scheme of civil and political

freedoms. These freedoms define a role that everyone in society occupies, namely the

33 Theory, 387-8.

34 Theory, 470.

23

role of an equal citizen, a sovereign co-legislator in the political community. The differ-

ence principle allows for inequalities in authority in society, which means that citizens

who lack the special talents and qualifications for powerful positions in private firms and

associations may spend much of their lives taking orders from others. But when the po-

litical community comes together to make important decisions about laws and social poli-

cies, “each person is treated with the respect due to a sovereign equal.”35 In the public fo-

rum, everyone has the very same rights and powers, so “everyone has a similar and se-

cure status when they meet to conduct the common affairs of the wider society.”36 Being

entrusted by your fellow citizens with an equal power to make rules that everyone must

follow is a powerful affirmation of your value and so represents an important bulwark for

self-respect.

Rawls believes that the three features of a just market democracy that I described

will create avenues for securing recognition that will prevent citizens from becoming too

concerned with their relative position in the distribution of material goods. As he puts it,

citizens in a just society “are not much affected by envy and jealousy, and for the most

part they do what seems best to them as judged by their own plan of life, and those of

their associates, without being dismayed by the greater amenities and enjoyments of oth-

ers socially more distant.”37 From the standpoint of consumer culture, his argument

shows how a just social order would deal with one important force that pushes in the di-

rection of consumer culture, namely amour-propre in its corrupt form.

35 Theory, 470.

36 Theory, 477.

37 Theory, 477.

24

The problem, however, is that amour-propre in its corrupt form is only one signif-

icant force that may push society in the direction of a consumer culture. The output ex-

pansion bias is another. And there is little reason to think that the features of a just mar-

ket democracy that Rawls describes would regulate this second force.

Take social and economic equality. Even in an egalitarian society, firms may be

very large, and they will certainly compete with each other for customers, shareholders

and skilled workers. In this multi-dimensional conflict, firms have an incentive to maxi-

mize profit and this requires channeling enhanced productivity into increased output and

sales. This leads to massive investments in advertising and marketing. There is little rea-

son to think that social and economic equality among individuals would discourage firms

from flooding the public culture with messages that reinforce the virtues of consumption

and shaping patterns of recognition in ways that reinforce the importance of material life-

style.

What about associational diversity? One of the goals of branding and identity-

based marketing is precisely to take advantage of the diversity of associations in society

to sell goods and services. For example, investment bankers form a community of inter-

est in our society, and firms present goods such as the latest BlackBerry and a gleaming

Manhattan condo as essential elements of the material lifestyle of a banker. People need

to maintain a certain material lifestyle in order to be recognized (both by themselves and

others) as a member of a certain community, so it is not clear how the presence of these

varied communities will put meaningful constraints on consumer culture. Market compe-

tition will simply drive firms to try and manipulate these identities to increase sales.

25

Perhaps the most important feature of a just market democracy that would restrain

consumer culture is the recognition of citizens as sovereign co-legislators. Being recog-

nized as a fully equal citizen in social decision-making, regardless of your material life-

style, will provide independent support for each citizen’s self-respect, thereby making her

less susceptible to materialistic patterns of social recognition.

Here I think it is important to be clear about the way that the basic liberties are

supposed to have an impact on the self-respect of citizens. One view says that it is

enough simply for the basic liberties to be articulated in the law and constitution of a just

society. But Rawls often emphasizes the importance of citizens treating each other as

equals “when they meet to conduct the common affairs of the wider society.” I take it

that this means that we experience the basic liberties as a powerful form of recognition

when we actually meet our fellow citizens in the public forum and find that they ac-

knowledge our status as sovereign co-legislators. If the impact of the basic liberties on

our self-respect requires a more substantial and active form of engagement among citi-

zens, then it is important to pay attention to the effect that consumer culture has on the

public forum. It seems that in our society, with its advanced consumer culture, churches,

town halls and public parks have been replaced by shopping malls and retail websites as

centers of public life. Even newspapers—the preeminent modern venue for the public fo-

rum—often present new products and services as hard news.38 Insofar as the impact of

38 For a particularly blatant example, see: “Amazon in Big Push for New Kindle Model” New York Times

(February 10, 2009); “Amazon’s Sequel to a Best-Selling Thriller” Washington Post (February 10, 2009);

“Amazon Unveils Slimmer Kindle; Will Release Feb. 24” USA Today (February 9, 2009); “For Latest Kin-

dle, A Flow of Adjectives and Speculation” Boston Globe (February 10, 2009); “Amazon Unveils Slimline

Kindle” Financial Times (February 10, 2009).

26

the basic liberties on self-esteem depends on people participating concretely in the public

forum, it is unclear how effective these liberties will be in combating consumer culture

since consumer culture tends precisely to keep people away from the discussion.

6. Objections

I turn now to some objections to my argument. A standard defense of consumer culture

contends that we have good reason to embrace this pattern of activity. Generally speak-

ing, we come to form concrete plans about where to vacation or what career to pursue by

entertaining different fantasies about where we might go and what we might do—a

process sometimes described as “daydreaming.”39 Consumer culture, it is argued, is sim-

ply a form of daydreaming that we carry out collectively, and so we have reason to take

part in consumer culture just as we have reason to daydream.

I agree that consumer culture is like collective daydreaming in some ways. It is

also true that consumer culture may have other attractive features, much as a literary cul-

ture might. My point is not that consumer culture has no merits, but rather that even if it

does have substantial merits, we still have special reason to be concerned about it because

there is an institutional pressure in a market economy that presses us towards an intensi-

fying preoccupation with material goods. It is this institutional pressure that gives us spe-

cial reason to be concerned. Consumer culture could, on my view, be a legitimate ele-

ment in the public culture of a just society, so long as the institutional pressure were re-

moved and other problems were addressed.39 See, for example, Colin Campbell, “Consuming Goods and the Good of Consuming” in Consumer Soci-

ety in American History, Lawrence Glickman (ed.); and James Livingston, Against Thrift (New York: Basic

Books, 2011), chapter 7.

27

A different objection has to do with individual responsibility. Suppose that we

live in a society where large numbers of young people do not have a fair opportunity to

succeed. Suppose also that we have a significant consumer culture. Some may argue

that if citizens fail to address the injustice, succumbing to the pressures of consumer cul-

ture, then they are guilty of violating a moral duty to do their part in maintaining just in-

stitutions. But, the critics will argue, this is simply a violation of individual moral duties,

not a failure of social justice.

Here I would argue that institutions play an important role in shaping the pres-

sures that individuals face. As individuals, we may owe each other a duty to resist perni-

cious social pressures, but as members of a society, we also owe each other a scheme of

institutions that manages these pressures in the right way. So in the previous example,

when citizens fail to take measures to address emerging injustices, I take it that the vic-

tims of injustice can raise two sorts of objections. On the one hand, they can object to the

lack of effort on the part of their fellow citizens to resist the pressures of consumer cul -

ture. But on the other hand, they can also object to the structure of their basic institu-

tions, insofar as these arrangements foster a consumer culture in the first place, a culture

that distracts citizens from emerging injustices and inflates the importance of material

lifestyle in ways that block corrective policies.

Finally, some might argue that it is simply an empirical question whether a dan-

gerous form of consumer culture will develop in a just market democracy. Social scien-

tists, rather than philosophers, are in the best position to judge whether we have an ade-

quate basis for thinking that a significant form of consumer culture will emerge in these

hypothetical circumstances.

28

The first thing to note here is that my argument is a response to the liberal egali-

tarian defense of market democracy. The liberal egalitarian claims that we can reason-

ably expect that a just market democracy will keep the destabilizing pressures of con-

sumer culture under control. My basic criticism is that conceptual clarity about both the

nature of consumer culture and the danger that it poses reveals a serious gap in the liberal

egalitarian argument. As articulated by Rawls, the argument connects consumer culture

too closely with amour-propre in its corrupt form, and so fails to address the output ex-

pansion bias. It does not, therefore, provide us with an adequate basis for thinking that a

just market democracy will achieve stability for the right reasons.

I would also stress that stability is not simply an issue for social scientists to ad-

dress. Empirical evidence is, of course, important in determining whether a social ar-

rangement could achieve a certain kind of stability. But it is a normative question for

philosophers to determine what kind of stability is morally relevant in the first place.

Philosophers must do the conceptual work necessary to clarify the nature of this form of

stability, describing the forces that are essential to it (e.g. a sense of justice), the proper

configuration of these forces, and how these forces relate to other human tendencies and

social processes. This clarification may then affect our assessment of the empirical evi-

dence. For example, the type of stability that Rawls takes to be morally relevant is partic-

ularly demanding because it requires congruence between the right and the good. Stabil-

ity requires that citizens support their basic institutions because they regard them to be

just; but it also requires that the rational aspirations that citizens form under these institu-

tions should lead them, on balance, to support the arrangement and the regulative position

29

that the corresponding sense of justice occupies in their motivations.40 It follows that the

presence of a structural pressure towards an intensifying consumer culture would in itself

represent a failure of stability, in Rawls’s sense, even if this pressure were kept in check,

as a matter of fact, by legal penalties, social sanctions, and a sense of justice. This is be-

cause rational citizens would find that one of their most fundamental aspirations in life—

the desire for self-respect—would be at odds with the principles of justice, and therefore

that the good was in conflict with the right.41

7. Implications

I have argued that there are structural features of market democracy that push society to-

wards a consumer culture, and that the standard liberal egalitarian arguments do not show

how a just regime would substantially reduce or eliminate this pressure. A central impli-

cation of my argument is that a just market democracy must be prepared to take more ac-

tive measures to manage the effects of the output expansion bias. Some possible mea-

sures include legal limits on marketing expenditures, mandatory civic holidays, and mea-

sures to deepen citizen involvement in political life. I want to discuss two further policy

measures here.

40 See Samuel Freeman’s illuminating essay “Congruence and the Good of Justice” in The Cambridge

Companion to Rawls, Samuel Freeman (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2002).

41 This would be a failing even on Rawls’s later account, which aims more explicitly to show how stability

for the right reasons is possible given reasonable pluralism. See Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Con-

sensus” in Political Liberalism; and Samuel Freeman, “Congruence and the Good of Justice,” 306-8.

30

One is mandatory national service. Many countries in the world—including

South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Norway and Finland—require some form of service from

their citizens, usually lasting one or two years after high school. Although service has

traditionally been performed in the military, many countries now allow for some alterna-

tive, such as cleaning parks, caring for the elderly or working in youth programs. There

are many reasons why a society might adopt a national service program, but the argument

of this paper suggests a distinctive rationale. The point of national service would be to

prepare the way for citizens to make the sorts of sacrifices that are inherent to maintain-

ing just relations with each other. By ensuring that all citizens spend at least part of their

lives vigorously pursuing the common good, national service would aim (1) to foster a

stronger commitment to the ideal of mutual concern that lies behind the principles of jus-

tice and (2) to weaken the system of social recognition built around material lifestyle.

Furthering these objectives may require, as Michael Walzer argues, that service should

not be too easy and that it should occur periodically throughout people’s lives.42 Society

may also incorporate uniforms or some other form of cultural leveling in order to weaken

the concern for material lifestyle. These and other features would help to create a better

social climate for maintaining just background conditions. Even the titans of Wall Street

may find it easier to relinquish some of the symbols of their prestige if they spend a

weekend every month cleaning parks or caring for the elderly.

Another policy would be to encourage more socially conscious forms of con-

sumerism. Consumers in our society tend to view the market as a sphere in which they

42 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 168-76. See also J. J. Rousseau,

“Considerations on the Government of Poland,” The Social Contract and other later political writings, Vic-

tor Gourevitch (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 226-231.

31

are free to pursue their personal interests. In recent years, however, a new pattern of

“ethical consumerism” has emerged, in which consumers see themselves as having a

more concrete obligation to show consideration for social justice in their buying deci-

sions. In order to lessen the degree to which consumer culture is at odds with the goal of

maintaining a just society, government policies can encourage the practice of ethical con-

sumerism. For example, regulators may encourage manufacturers and NGOs to work to-

gether to label products in ways that make it clear how they relate to various environmen-

tal, labor and trade concerns—“fair trade” is the most prominent labeling scheme along

these lines, but there are many others.43 These measures would help to create a consumer

culture that was not simply a distraction from public concerns, but also a way of orienting

people towards emerging injustices.

Many liberals may resist policies such as mandatory national service and public

support for ethical consumerism because these policies violate a liberal ideal for the pub-

lic sphere. This liberal ideal says that the public culture of a just society should be the

product of the free and informed choices that individuals make within the framework of

supportive institutions; the state should not be in the business of advancing any particular

religious or cultural outlook. I would argue, however, that the Rousseauian measures I

have described do not violate the liberal ideal, at least when the ideal is understood as re-

quiring state neutrality.44 When the state articulates and enforces the rules of the market,

it effectively creates certain social pressures by concentrating resources in the hands of

corporations and putting them in a position where they have a powerful incentive to pros-

elytize in favor of consumer concerns. Measures such as mandatory national service and

43 For an overview, see Michele Micheletti, Political Virtue and Shopping (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

44 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 190-200.

32

public support for ethical consumerism serve merely to counteract the effects of the out-

put expansion bias. It is best to think of the market and the Rousseauian measures I have

described as two parts of a single, stable framework of social cooperation. This frame-

work will encourage some conceptions of the good and discourage others, but it can

nonetheless be justified in terms of principles that are appropriately neutral about which

of these conceptions is correct.

It is worth keeping in mind that liberal societies are not required to adopt market

institutions. A liberal form of socialism can meet the requirements of social justice.45

Moreover, a liberal socialist regime may actually provide a more appropriate setting for

traditional liberal ideas about state involvement in cultural matters, since it could plausi-

bly eliminate the output expansion bias altogether. But if a liberal society does decide to

adopt market institutions, then it may have to accept certain countervailing departures

from these traditional liberal ideas in order to protect other central political values.

8. Conclusion

Consumer culture presents an important challenge to the liberal egalitarian defense of

market democracy. Market institutions play a significant role in propelling consumer

culture to the forefront of modern social life and the best liberal egalitarian account of

stability does not give us a basis for thinking that things will be different in a more egali-

tarian regime. The dangers of consumer culture lend qualified support to the views of

those who resist traditional liberalism on the grounds of a robust conception of demo-

cratic community. We must be prepared, at least in the context of a market society, to

45 Rawls, Theory, 247-8 and Justice as Fairness, 135-40.

33

adopt measures such as mandatory national service and public support for ethical con-

sumerism to reshape the cultural environment in ways that make it easier for citizens to

be gripped by the plight of their fellow citizens and to see the hardship of others as a call

for action.

34