The Consumerism In Modern Life

Consumerism is an important cultural-ideology in modern society. It originated in America in the20th century. As a cultural-ideology, consumerism doesn’t mean the need for goods in the traditional sense, but the relationship between human and object and a life-style and which make pursuit of material pleasures. In theory, there are two main types of attitude towards consumerism:liberalism and criticism. The paper will discuss three great minds who adopt the critical attitude.Simmel Georg、Herbert Marcuse and Naomi Klein were three Sociologists who lived in the late19th century、20th century and the present age respectively. In this paper, the author proposes that the problems they discussed were related to the consumerism in modern society in varying degrees. Simmel draw up from social life and explained in psychological terms to reveal the essence of fashion. He argued the modernity destroyed the unity of objective and subjective. Fashion already penetrated each aspect of people’s daily life, people satisfied themselves with an endless consuming style in the modern society. Marcuse considered that the technology changed into ideology to manipulate people’s mind, which was the substantive characteristics of developed industrial society. The progress of science and technology had greatly improved the productivity. Capitalist society depended on efficient consumption to maintain the normal functioning of the society. So the spending pattern of contemporary humanity emerged, and that satisfied and strengthened people’s material demand. Klein deemed that brand was everywhere in the new wave of economic globalization. Capitalism forged the brand to be the pursuit of life quality, and it catabolized the psychology of contemporary consuming.On the basis of explaining the theory of the fashion imaginary demand and brand by Simmel、Marcuse and Klein one by one, the paper try to analyse their Criticism of consumerism. At the end of it, three thinker’s critical ideals were preliminarily unscrambled and the theoretical significance was also resumptively described.