Citizenship and Consumption provides a timely forum for current thinking on consumption and citizenship, exploring overlaps, interactions and tensions between them. Conventionally, citizenship and consumption have been treated as oppositional or exclusive spheres. Ideas of citizenship have developed in relative isolation from studies of consumption. Recent controversies about choice and sustainability as well as a new wave of consumer activism, by contrast, point to the complex civic dimensions of consumption. Bringing together experts from history, theory, media studies, law, and civil society, the volume retrieves alternative traditions of consumption and citizenship in West and East, past and present, and evaluates the civic prospects of consumption for the future.

A really innovative and challenging set of essays, which explore...the connections between being a citizen and a consumer. These two fundamental modern-day identities...are not necessarily in conflict with each other. Rather, commercial and caring relations, consumption and rights, often complement each other. This is a thesis which is argued with passion and intelligence in many chapters of the book.
Paul Ginsborg, University of Florence and author of The Politics of Everyday Life.


Citizenship and Consumption rightly bids farewell to the old prejudice that consumers are always politically mindless, possessive individuals. It is the best available scholarly introduction to some of the great enigmas surrounding the new citizen consumer: the publicly contested analytic and normative meanings of the words consumer and citizenship; the crumbling divide between state-centred politics and global market consumption; and the vexed question of whether our heavily consuming planet can effectively nurture obligations to future generations.
Professor John Keane, Professor of Politics, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB)

About the Author

KATE SOPER is a Professor of Philosophy in the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University, UK. She is well known for her work on the philosophy of nature and as a theorist of need and consumption, and has recently completed a research project on Alternative hedonism in the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption Programme. In addition to this volume, she is a co-editor (with Lyn Thomas and Martin Ryle) of Counter-Consumerism and its Pleasures (forthcoming).

FRANK TRENTMANN is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Recent publications include Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, edited with John Brewer (2006) and Civil Society: A Reader in History, Theory and Global Politics, edited with John A. Hall (2005).