Sociocultural Aspects of Consumption, Consumerist Culture and Society

The author analyses in the paper the sociocultural aspects of consumption, consumerist culture and society. With regard to the fact that values in the field of consumption are pouring over into other areas of social activity, it can be concluded that modern society in totum is a consumerist culture, and not only in its specific consumerist activities. One of the main hypotheses of the paper is that the problem of interpreting the consumerist revolution, and thus the emergence of contemporary consumerist culture and society, is connected to the key question in sociology - the question of the fate of the Protestant ethic. What remains after abandoning the Protestant ethic is only hedonism, which has become the cultural excuse for capitalism. Consumerist society is related to modernity as a whole as well as the main values, practices and institutions that define Western modernity such as choice, individualism and first and foremost market relations. The market is the main determinant of consumerist culture. On the other hand, consumerism is manifested as the privileged place of the autonomy of meaning, subjectivity, privacy and freedom. For critics of consumerist culture it can be observed not as an individual liberation but an anomy, not as social progress but pathology. Further analysed are some contemporary approaches to consumption, consumerist culture and society, whereby the fact emphasised is that the world of commodities and its principles of structuration are crucial in understanding contemporary society.