Capitalism Nature Socialism

ISSN: 1045-5752 (Print) 1548-3290 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcns20

Rethinking the good life: the consumer as citizen

Kate Soper Teacher in Philosophy

To cite this article: Kate Soper Teacher in Philosophy (2004) Rethinking the good
life: the consumer as citizen, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 15:3, 111-116, DOI:
10.1080/1045575042000247293

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1045575042000247293

Published online: 23 May 2006.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 623

View related articles

Citing articles: 21 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcns20

Download by: [Universiteit Leiden / LUMC] Date: 19 September 2016, At: 14:05
CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM VOLUME 15 NUMBER 3 (SEPTEMBER 2004)

NATURE PROSPECTS

Rethinking the Good Life: The Consumer as Citizen

Kate Soper

Peoples economic decisions are often regarded as taking place in a separate

domain from their values and commitments as citizens. As citizens they are conceived
as agents who care about public goods and collective welfare, as consumers they are
thought to be driven only by narrow forms of self-interest. Even when it is argued, as
in a recent article by Amartya Sen, that the role of citizenship in promoting sustainable
development should be more fully recognized, the participation of individuals in this
role is presented as something quite separate from what they more passively do as main-
tainers of living standards. In line with this dichotomy, Sen suggests that we might main-
tain high living standards and pass them on to future generations even though the
quality of life issues of value to us as citizens fresh air or the preservation of the
spotted owl, for example were no longer a part of that legacy to the future.1

This division between citizen and consumer is also reflected across a spectrum of
theoretical positions on consumption. At the neo-liberal, pro-market end of this spec-
trum, individual choice is viewed as free and sacrosanct, and presumed always to pri-
vilege private needs/desires over collective goods. The consumer is here presented as
a relatively free agent, whose autonomy must be respected, but it is an autonomy exer-
cised only with a view to maintaining individual living standards. The values associ-
ated with a community oriented exercise of citizenship are not to be located here. Nor
are they, however, on the antithetical account associated with the Frankfurt School
influenced critique of commodification. On this argument,2 consumer needs
(wants), whether for material commodities or cultural goods, have been viewed as
inculcated or manipulated through the provision and merchandising strategies of

1
Amartya Sen, Why We Should Preserve the Spotted Owl, The London Review of Books, February 5,
2004. The dichotomy follows from Sens acceptance of the standard definition of standards of living
in GDP terms. A living standard so defined, which in effect takes income to be the measure of how well in
terms of meeting needs any individual is faring, excludes the quality of life issues that Sen places on the
side of what is valued by the citizen.
2
See in particular, Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965); Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. James J. Shapiro
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979) (the essay Culture Industry); Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974).

ISSN 1045-5752 print/ISSN 1548-3290 online/04/030111-06

# 2004 The Center for Political Ecology
DOI: 10.1080/1045575042000247293
112 KATE SOPER

the market, and thereby as less than authentic. On this model, individuals are viewed
as victims of transcendent social and economic forces through which they are bought
off by forms of pleasure and gratification that occlude their real interests and recon-
cile them to the system that perpetuates the dissatisfaction and repression of their more
genuine needs. So far from being applauded as the ideal system to gratify private
needs, capitalist society is on this view to be deplored precisely on the grounds that
it systematically destroys the will to resist it, or to enjoy any system of pleasures
other than the one it provides. From both these opposing perspectives, however, con-
sumers pursue their private ends, the only difference being that in the one case these
are viewed as distorted by commodity society, in the other endorsed as freely chosen.
The effect in either case is to rule out consumption as a space for the exercise of citi-
zenship. And much the same is true of more recent postmodernist approaches: these
stress the importance of consumption in the creation of identity but conceive this as
a matter of relatively transient or superficial self-styling or performance rather
than as a vehicle for any concerted political action or exercise of citizenship. Postmo-
dernity allows for a plurality of life-styles, tastes and opinions to find an outlet. But the
paradox of this freedom of expression, as Zygmunt Bauman has claimed, is that it in
no way subjects the system, or its political organization, to control by those whose
lives it still determines, though at a distance. Consumer and expressive freedoms
are not interfered with politically so long as they remain politically ineffective.3

So whether consumers are viewed as free but essentially self-interested buyers of

goods and services, or as the unfree manipulated victims, or as freely self-styling
constructs of the system, in none of these cases are they theorized in their being or
aspect as consumers as reflecting and responsible agents assuming accountability to
the world beyond their immediate personal concerns. What is ruled out, it would
seem, from both the more rightwing neo-liberal and the more orthodox leftwing theor-
etical perspectives (and postmodernists can claim ideological affiliation with either side
to the divide)4 is any allowance for citizen-consumers; for individuals whose consumer
practices and conceptualizations of the good life are inextricably linked to their
citizen concerns for environmental preservation and sustainability.5 Such citizen-
consumers would not necessarily be environmental activists (campaigners against
GM food or for the preservation of the spotted owl, for example) but individuals
whose own pleasures were felt to have been compromised through the quest for ever

3
Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), p. 88.
4
Postmodernists veer towards neo-liberalism in their celebration of consumption as allowing for self-
styling, diversity, pluralism, etc., even though this stress on the freedom of the self is in tension with
the insistence on its social/discursive construction; they veer to the left when they (again inconsistently)
present existing regimes of power and discourse as a form of discipline upon selves who would otherwise
be freer of its cultural tyranny and more self-realized.
5
The idea of sustainable development is, of course, subject to a number of differing interpretations, and
has generated much controversy. For some sense of the spectrum of positions see Andrew Dobson, Justice
and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 2, and cf. his edited collection, Fair-
ness and Futurity: Essays on Sustainability and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). I share the
view of many commentators that the idea loses all critical force if it is not construed in relatively strong
terms as environmental sustainability and thus as including natural capital.
 RETHINKING THE GOOD LIFE 113

enhanced living standards defined in terms of disposable income, and whose very idea
of what it was to have a living standard worth sustaining had been revised in the light of
the wider social and environmental consequences of living/consuming in a less sustain-
able way. For these individuals certain forms of consumption would have become a site
of problematic pleasure, either by reason of distress at the exploitation entailed in their
provision or by reason of concern for their more immediately personal and environ-
mental impact, or (probably most usually) for both reasons conjointly. Here, then,
there is no longer so clear a distinction to be drawn between what the individual values
and what he or she self-interestedly pursues as a maintainer of living standards, and the
consumption choices such a person makes are likely to reflect this more integral
conception.

Individuals who think this way will acknowledge the role of everyday needs (for
transport and electrical goods, house paint, medicine, glues, batteries, chemical clea-
ners, dyes, insecticides, etc.) in creating the pollution and industrial wastelands
deplored in the environmental literature. They will be disinclined to invoke a
them versus us, producers versus consumers, allocation of responsibility for
environmental damage. They will accept that to place all the blame on the indomitable
forces of the modern industrial juggernaut, or to present its faceless agents and auth-
orities as locked into a conspiracy to keep us from the truth of the toxins daily
insinuated into air and water, is itself a piece of mystification. They will accept, too,
the importance of overcoming the huge disparities in resource use between rich and
poorer nations if any progress is to be made towards sustainable development.

It follows that as consumers, they will opt wherever possible for fair trade and more
environmentally friendly goods or services, to spend time cooking rather than use fast
food, to walk or cycle rather than to drive. And they will do so, because of the intrinsic
pleasures these afford, and their wider and longer term social and environmental benefits,
even though they may sometimes cost more than other options or prove less personally
convenient in certain respects. For these consumers, what is needed is not to sustain and
hand on to future generations a living standard as currently defined, but to consume
differently now in order to accommodate the goods (including that of dealing more fairly
with those who labor to provide them) that are currently being lost or marginalized by
high standards of living. Their need is to enjoy those goods in the present and to
preserve their possible enjoyment as a legacy for future generations. It is by reference
to this profile, which presents the consumer as a reflexive and relatively autonomous
agent whose self-interested needs can also come to encompass collective goods that
one can advance a case for viewing consumption as potentially acquiring a republican
dimension and emerging as a site of citizenship and political pressure for greening the
economy and social policy and directing them along more sustainable lines.

These consumers, of course, are very much in the minority in affluent societies at
the present time, and I am certainly not claiming that the shift in sensibility they
represent is that of the public at large. I claim only that it should be recognized as
a distinctive and politically relevant form of consumer response, and one that should
be welcomed and encouraged by all authorities with a genuine concern to look after
114 KATE SOPER

the environment and promote sustainable development. An avant garde consumer

ethic requires and deserves a response from those with the power to extend its reach.

It goes without saying that the current US administration has failed lamentably to
date to offer any such response. But the same is true, by and large, in Britain, too,
where the privatization of public services, economic de-regulation and social atomi-
zation carried through on the Thatcherite ideology of individualism and consumer
empowerment has all too quickly came to serve as the rationale for a new form
of statist condescension rooted in the reduction of the self to a merely consuming
self incapable of seeing above the parapet of individual needs. The supposed blind-
ness of consumers to anything but their private interests is thereupon invoked as
grounds for experts to profess their scepticism about the wisdom of any form of
consultation exercise. New Labour has wanted at times to present itself as burdened
with the new-right legacy, and it has made much of its readiness to engage in public
consultation. Yet it has preferred on the whole to cling to the ideology of consumer
power and has done very little to promote a more genuinely political form of public
participation and control over policy making. (Sen, in the article already cited, speaks
with some justice of the feebleness or total absence of positive initiatives to
involve citizens in environmental policies.) Even where the views of the public
have been consulted and opposition to government policy is widespread, highly
considered and consistent, as in the recent case of GM crops an appeal to the
superior expertise of science is used to over-rule it. As critics have pointed out,
the scientific evidence invoked is itself partial and controversial. But the more import-
ant point is that this type of dismissal side-lines the reservations about private prop-
erty in nature and other ethical concerns at the heart of public antipathy to GM.
Science is here being used to justify short-term commercial gains at the cost of the
longer term wisdom and sensibility represented by the GM opponents. When con-
fronted with this kind of case, it is difficult not to feel that there is something quite
specious in the scepticism of experts regarding the social responsibility of the public.

Policy makers have a duty to be honest and straightforward in their engagement

with the public on these issues. If there is a real commitment to environmental care
and sustainability, as the Blair government, for example, has argued there is, then
every encouragement should be given to the public to rethink the good life and to con-
sume in less damaging ways, even if that comes at the cost of continued rates of
growth in some areas of the economy. If there is no such commitment, then there
should no longer be a pretense that there is, nor any lament at the implications in
terms of resource attrition, global exploitation, and increased pollution and ill health.

I am not suggesting here that the public is entirely consistent in what it chooses to
resist or protect, or the means it employs in doing so. Nor am I suggesting that the skep-
tics cannot point to trends in current consumer practice as evidence of the democratic
legitimacy of giving preference to economic growth over environmental protection,
better health and the promotion of other quality of life values. The proliferation of the
shopping malls, the expansion of car use, the ever growing demand for air flight:
these developments, to name but some, can all be cited in confirmation of the futility
 RETHINKING THE GOOD LIFE 115

of persuading the public at large to consume differently. But alongside this evidence of
disregard for the social and environmental impacts of consumerism, there are also signs
of a newly emerging and more equivocal response to the affluent life-style. For example,
the general success of the policy on congestion charging in Greater London, has prob-
ably had to do with the way it coincided with the already ambivalent attitudes of many
car users for whom the pollution and gridlock caused by city driving have significantly
reduced its pleasure and use-value. Congestion charging could not have been imposed
(or not as democratically and therefore unproblematically) had it not been for the already
existing degree of disaffection among London car owners and users with the car cul-
ture and its impact on city life. Congestion charging has succeeded because it responded
to an already experienced equivocation in those it was going to police, even if the
consequences (quicker and more reliable buses, emptier and less noxious streets) have
significantly reinforced the support for the charging since it was introduced. Prior to
implementation, it was a policy that was able to appeal for its legitimacy to dissatisfac-
tions already experienced by consumers; through being implemented it has offered
provision and experience of a kind that has enhanced public appreciation of it. In this
respect, it manifests a dialectic of alternative hedonism that I would claim is very per-
tinent to any engagement with the issue of the consumer as citizen/citizen as consumer.

In speaking of alternative hedonism I refer to a distinctive rationale for the shift to

ethical and green consumption (although it is one that overlaps with other motives and
usually held together with them). This derives from the more negative aspects for consu-
mers themselves of their high-speed, work-dominated, materialistic life-style, and is fed
by a sense that important pleasures are being lost or unrealized as a consequence of it.
Alternative hedonism points to the way in which enjoyment of affluent consumption
has become compromised by its unpleasurable by-products (noise, pollution, danger,
stress, health risks, excessive waste, and aesthetic impact on the environment) and thus
prompted revisions in thinking about the good life. It also manifests a relatively new
way of thinking about the politics of consumption, since those who respond to its sum-
mons have opted to consume with a view to securing pleasures put at risk by other types of
satisfaction. If it makes sense, in this context, to associate alternative hedonism with the
emergence of a republican dimension to consumption, this is because the consumer
citizen who acts on its motive has rejected the argument that private acts are always futile
in the face of general trends, and made a decision to consume in such a way as to help
preempt the tragedy of the commons (the negative collective effect of aggregated indi-
vidual choices). To act in the spirit of alternative hedonism is to acknowledge how
minimal ones power is as an individual consumer and then to use it nonetheless.

It is true that alternative hedonism has no major hold on consumer behavior at

present. Nonetheless, the sense of compromised pleasure is arguably sufficiently felt
to justify expanding the framework of discussion on counter-consumerism and
sustainable development so that it registers not only the more usually cited, and essen-
tially altruistic, motives for the shift to green and ethical consumption (concern for the
global social and environmental impact of affluence), but also the more direct and per-
sonal interest of affluent consumers in improving the quality of their own lives
through consuming differently.
116 KATE SOPER

We might note, too, that personal dissatisfactions and anxieties of this kind could
have an over-determining influence on the shift to ethical and green consumption.
Indeed, conceptually it may be difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between
hedonistic and other motives for changing consumption, since the ethical and green
consumer wants to avoid the distraint on pleasure that follows from collusion in
exploitative consumption. Yet these more compassionate and other-oriented (if also
in a sense self-pleasuring) motives for resisting exploitative forms of consumption,
have not been widely shared and their effect on consumer behavior has hitherto
been minimal. Where a more material self-interest, however, acts as an additional
and complementary motive for changing consumer practice, the impact over time
is likely to be considerably greater. Hence the importance for the project of sustain-
able development of any reinforcement of altruistically motivated consumption may
receive from the more self-regarding forms of disenchantment. Hence, relatedly, the
relevance of fostering the dialectic of alternative hedonism: of making explicit
the desires implicit in current expressions of consumer anxiety, and of highlighting
the alternative structure of pleasures and satisfactions to which they gesture.
The encouragement of alternative hedonist conceptions of the good life is also
rational and realistic in more global terms if affluent nations are to be pressured into
assuming proper responsibility for promoting sustainable development and global stab-
ility. Since alleviation of poverty and fairer distribution of resources are preconditions of
progress in these directions, redressing some of the current imbalance in wealth and
access to resources is both a moral and a pragmatic imperative: not only a demand of
social justice, but a prerequisite of any long-term global ecological well-being and
security. Yet the international agencies and institutions committed to this agenda are
likely to remain relatively powerless, and very little pressure will be applied on national
governments to cooperate in promoting it, unless and until their electorates come to per-
ceive that as in their own interests.6 I have argued here that alternative hedonist frame-
works of thinking about the good life might alter conceptions of self-interest among
affluent consumers, and thus help to set off this relay of political pressures for a fairer
global distribution of resources. An alternative and ecologically sustainable conception
of the good life can not only win the support of consumers within the richer nations, but
also figure as an ideal through which less developed countries can consider critically the
conventions and goals of development itself and thereby better understand the worst
consequences of north-west over-development and how to avoid them.7 Such
outcomes would surely be of benefit to us all.

6
The blame here lies as much with electorates who are reluctant to be policed on their most ecological dama-
ging forms of consumption, as with their governments who view themselves as accountable to their voters
in the last analysis, and are equally loathe to jeopardize their re-election.
7
E.U. von Weizsacker has written, In order to bring the developing countries back to health, not only is it
necessary to correct unfair trade structures but also to wean them from their vision of the Norths throwaway
society, Earth Politics (London: Zed Books, 1994); cf. R. Goodland and H. Daly, Ten Reasons Why North-
ern Income Growth is Not the Solution to Southern Poverty (Washington: Environment Department, World
Bank, 1992).