Consumption

Abstract

In focusing on alienation in the sphere of consumption, Fromm addresses a distinctly modern concern. The dawn of the age of mass consumption can be symbolized by the Model T Ford, which made the motor car available to a mass market, so that by the end of the 1920s, 27 million Americans owned a car. That decade also saw the spread of cinema and radio to millions of people, opening a vast market for advertisers. The potential for social manipulation was apparent to the novelist Aldous Huxley after visiting the United States in the late 1920s, so much so that his dystopia, Brave New World (1932), depicts a world of total social control through programming, drugs, and instant gratification.¹ Fromm regarded the book as so prophetic that he devotes five pages to it in The Sane Society,² which appeared as the United States was experiencing its second phase of mass consumption, with the spread of television and the expansion of cars and consumer durables. It is now commonplace in sociology to consider the ideological impact of patterns of consumption stimulated through the techniques of mass advertising, but Fromm was one of the first to note the potential significance of consumption as a form of social control. In Escape From Freedom he bemoans the emergence of what he calls “hypnoid suggestion” through advertising techniques, but, ever the dialectician, he also identifies the nascent consumer movement as a means through which the consumer may restore a capacity for discernment and a sense of significance. The consumer movement, he argues, can play a role equivalent to that of the trade unions in the sphere of production.³