Citizens, Consumers, and the Good Society

Michael Schudson
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Michael Schudson: University of California, San Diego, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2007, vol. 611, issue 1, 236-249

Abstract: Advocating a “postmoralist†position in the analysis of consumer culture, this article holds that it is a mistake to identify political action with public-spirited motives and consumer behavior with self-interested motives. Both political behavior and consumer behavior can be either public-spirited or self-interested. Consumer choices can be expressly political and public-spirited, and styles of consumer behavior can enlist and enshrine values that serve democracy, from going to coffee-houses in eighteenth-century London to eating at McDonald's in twenty-first-century Beijing. Political behavior, meanwhile, may be a particular kind of consumer behavior, and political practice often turns out not to be public-spirited but egocentric and grasping. The article concludes with some suggestions for making political activity more like the experience of consumer choice, that is, more like a situation in which people can take their own preferences seriously because there is a reasonable prospect that they will ultimately matter.

Keywords: citizens; civic virtue; consumers; elections; McDonald's; politics; postmoralism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:611:y:2007:i:1:p:236-249

DOI: 10.1177/0002716207299195

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