Benjamin Barber's "Shrunken Sovereign: Consumerism, Globalization, and American Emptiness"

In search of a writing sample for the Queen's Business Review, I stumbled upon a short review that I wrote for my first-year comparative politics class. Conceptually, "american emptiness" is something that might interest anybody studying politics, economics, or business. Here it is:

Outsourcing Sovereignty: a review of Benjamin Barber's "Shrunken Sovereign" by Sarah Fadel

Nobody could have predicted the transformative power that Ernest Dichter, the founder of modern day marketing and arguably the most important figure of twentieth-century advertising, would have on American culture after he published his book The Psychology of Everyday Living in 1947. According to Cabinet Magazine, “as America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas" (Cabinet Magazine, issue 44, p. 30). More than sixty years later, Dichter’s vision of an America that unabashedly perpetuates the pleasures that are inherent to human nature has become a reality; the profundity of American consumerism is unmatched by any other cultural force. But what are the consequences of such a powerful transformation? American political theorist Benjamin Barber argues in his paper, “Shrunken Sovereign: Consumerism, Globalization, and American Emptiness”, that with the rise of consumerism came the decline of sovereignty and democracy.

           

The central theme of Barber’s paper is the erosion of American sovereignty or national autonomy, democracy, and citizenship. Barber attributes what he calls “an accelerating process of internal disintegration” to “[the engine that drives it], consumerism.” The metamorphosis of the American psyche, he attempts to prove, has been from productivist capitalism to consumerist capitalism. The first, he writes, is “molded by a Protestant ethos conducive to work, investment, deferred gratification, and service,” whereas the second is “defined by an ethos of infantilization conducive to laxity, impetuousness, narcissism, and consumption”.       

The problem with consumer capitalism, Barber says, extends beyond the marketplace and into the American civic society. Politics have been reshaped by the revival of political libertarianism, which has popularized privatization, a process that Barber believes is “a crucial ally of the dominion of consumers.” To illustrate this, Barber constructs a stark dichotomy between the citizen and the consumer. He writes, “the tension between private choice and public participation is clearly embodied in the tension between the consumer as private chooser and the citizen as a public chooser. Barber’s logic behind his distinction is that “citizens cannot be understood as mere consumers because…public goods are something more than a collection of private wants.”

Barber further clarifies his disdain for consumer capitalism when he asserts that it encourages individuals to behave only in ways that suit consumerism and it also “compels us to withdraw from our public selves”. The result, Barber argues, is a nation no longer ruled by government, but by corporations, which represent the mass conglomerate of consumers. Barber states that power is now “dependent on culture, information, and networking and ever less grounded in national sovereignties.” He cites 9/11 as proof that sovereignty has completely lost its meaning; America, the world’s most powerful hegemon, lacked sovereignty powerful enough to withstand attacks from extremist groups.

Although Barber makes many attempts to prove that the rise of consumerism has led to the decline of national sovereignty, his paper fails to build a compelling argument in favor of such a causal relationship. He fails to address that there is a difference between consumer freedom –the freedom of desire, so to speak –and political freedom –the freedom of a citizen, which is to participate in the making of laws of self-government, which will restrain desire. This is a fundamental weakness in his argument. Perhaps it is true that citizens cannot be understood as consumers, but Barber fails to establish why this is the case. These kinds of unsubstantiated claims are ubiquitous in his paper. Moreover, Barber, perhaps willingly, neglects mentioning any of the widely felt benefits of consumerism. Consumerism and globalization and the prosperity it has produced, though imperfect, has indubitably made life better, on average, for everybody. To readers, it seems as though Barber fails to understand the very Protestant ethos conducive to work, which he is nostalgic for: increased productivity cannot be met without increased consumption, for what is produced must be consumed. If anything, the rise of consumerism merely reflects the rising productivity and development of America as a whole. America was founded upon the irrevocable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness –if consumerism is a result of the pursuit of happiness, then so be it.

See Barber's article in full here: http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/shrunken-sovereign-consumerism-globalization-and-american-emptiness