A Study On The Theory Of Consumer Society Of Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was one of the most famous philosopher,sociologist and postmodern theorists.He has taught in the top ten universities in Paris and the ninth university in Paris successively.His thoughts mainly analyze contemporary social and cultural phenomena and criticize contemporary capitalism,which has a wide worldwide influence.One of Baudrillard's main idea was consumption rather than production that was the main driver of capitalist society,which leads to the consumption driven human social life and his critique of the consumer society.Starting from Marx's concept of 'use-value',Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticizing the sign value and symbolic value that exists in modern society.Began with analysis of 'consumption',he stressed the critique of the consumer society based on the evolution of consumption behavior in human society,and carried out fundamental studies over core concept of consumer society.Accordingly,Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20 th century "global" society had caused an effacement of reality.Later,he believed the current capitalist society has been transformed from production driven type toward consumption driven,that is,the consumer society.The primary interests in this thesis includes extensive studies of Baudrillard's consumerism,its core value and limitation.And base on that,the consumerism pattern in modern Chinese society are analyzed,with proposed solution to various types of problems exposed in current Chinese consumer society.There are four sections in this thesis.First session is introduction,which summarize the state-of-art research on this topics and the purpose of this thesis study.Second session focus on analysis of origin and formation of Baudrillard's concept of consumerism,based on the methods of uniting history and logic.The third part is the main content of baudrillard's theory of consumer society.Baudrillard consumer society on the how to clarify the functional of content into symbol value and establish the symbol system,under the action of symbol system,promote the consumption behavior,and further discusses how symbols accused of manipulation of the society,create a series of chain relationship embodied in the social consumption control,and through the symbol consumption,production,consumption,and ultimately production society to consumer society.The fourth session of this thesis is the discussion about Baudrillard's the core value and limitation of Baudrillard's consumerism,consumerism pattern in modern Chinese society,its existing problem and solutions,under late 20 th century "global" society.