Consumerism and Society: History, Psychology, and Contemporary Crises

This is a reference academic work dedicated to the critical analysis of consumerism as a historical, economic, and cultural phenomenon. With an interdisciplinary approach and theoretical rigor, the book investigates the deep roots and structural mechanisms that have transformed consumption into a central pillar of contemporary capitalist societies.

Starting from the Industrial Revolution and spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, the book articulates concepts such as consumer society, behavioral economics, material culture, financialization, advertising, commodity fetishism, symbolic distinction, and consumer identity. Over the course of nine chapters, listeners are guided through a dense and well-grounded analysis of historical transformations, the globalization of lifestyles, the rationality of desire, and the aestheticization of everyday life.

The book explores topics such as:

Mass production and the Fordist model

Consumer credit and the role of personal debt

Advertising strategies and visual culture in the manipulation of desire

Identity performance on social media and the logic of spectacle

Symbolic inequality and social exclusion through consumption.

With an extensive bibliographic foundation and engagement with thinkers such as Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, David Harvey, and Zygmunt Bauman, the book aims to denaturalize consumerism, revealing its role in the reproduction of power relations, class hierarchies, and subjective alienation under neoliberal and digital capitalism.