Publisher's Synopsis
This casts its net wide to develop a new theory of consumerism and a new interpretation of the cultural history of modern society. Colin Campbell shows how fashion and the addiction to novelty, the crucial features of modern patterns of consumption, have their cultural origins in sentimentalism and the spirit of Romanticism, systems of belief which with their ethos of hedonism and pleasure-seeking reversed the Protestant ethic. Social theory, economic history, psychology, the history of religious thought and literary criticism are blended together in a work that offers a challenge to the conventional understanding of the origins of modernity and provides an alternative to Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism".
