“Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century F..

“Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France” This book traces consumer culture from the Seventeenth Century to the aforementioned late Nineteenth Century. It’s not that consumerism suddenly appeared in the 19th Century and was nonexistent in primitive societies; consumerism simply reveals itself differently in each community and epoch. For example, in the 17th century, consumption was strictly limited to the reserved few Aristocrats whose wealth was dependent on the exploitation of the working masses. France during this time was bound by a divinely ordered hierarchy in which it was utterly unthinkable to even question the aristocrat’s right to such amenities because wealth and status was divinely endowed. Although, after the Revolution of 1789, the Aristocracy fell along with the perspective of “divinely inherited status”. What did not change, however, was the Aristocracy’s position as a model of desire; the rising Bourgeoisie, too, inherited the tastes and trends of the Aristocrat and equated their abstract goal of enlightened “progress” with that of concrete social wealth. I will briefly reiterate the two opposing schools maneuvering the Enlightenment to its respective point of “Climax”, the storming of the Bastille. The enlightenment seeked to relegate what they viewed we antiquated views long held in the past such as religion in search of modernity and the human potential to discover that which refuses to be named (nature and the forces that seem to mysteriously exist independently of man). The two philosophical figures this is primarily attributed to is Voltaire and Rousseau; the binary opposition present in these two thinkers are that of the Aristocracy (former) and the peasant who refuses to be enslaved by the values adhered by the Aristocracy (latter). The 18th Century was very much consumed by what is called the “Civilizing Process” which is described in various ways largely contingent with class. Voltaire, originating from nobility, associated “civilization” with luxury and material gain for its ability to rouse man from his natural inclination toward idleness, which in turn, will stimulate the economy and deter him from regressing back to that state of primitivity. Rousseau, however, viewed “civilization” as a set of artificial chains binding man to abstract goals and principles in which not only alienate him from his natural environment but from himself.