The Commodification of Everything

Spring Colloquium 2003

One of the most striking transformations of our times has been the elevation of the market as the ideal paradigm of social organization. Indeed, many have understood the political revolutions of the last decade to offer a complete vindication of American-style free and self-regulating markets.

What is most remarkable, however, isn’t merely the way that the market has triumphed as the dominant form of economic organization, but rather the way that commodification—the process of transforming things into objects for sale—has also become a dominant and totalizing cultural force. We live not only in a market economy, but in a market society, where the market and its categories of thought have come to dominate ever more areas of our lives.

The cultural changes brought about by commodification are as sweeping and complex as they are controversial, leaving us with a whole range of pressing moral, political, and social questions. What forces, pressures, and cultural changes drive this tendency to commodify? Is anything resistant to commodification? What happens to democracy and political order, marriage and the family, religion and morality, identity and our understanding of the human person when they are conceptualized under market categories? What sorts of psychological and anthropological changes occur when we begin seeing our basic relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world as commodities? Are there any realistic alternatives to a consumer society dominated by commodification?

FEATURING:

Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology at Boston College

George Ritzer, Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland

David Lyon, Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario

Graham Ward, Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics and the director of the Centre for Religion, Culture and Gender at the University of Manchester

Kiku Adatto, Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University

Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University

Papers from this colloquium are published in the Summer 2003 issue of The Hedgehog Review.