COLIN CAMPBELL

by Jiayu Huang (2023)

Colin Campbell was born in Sutton Coldfield, UK in 1940. After graduating from London University in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in economics, he started teaching at the City of Birmingham College of Commerce, then moved to York University in 1964 as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Politics and Sociology. In 1968, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of London as an external student. Since 1964, Campbell has been at York University and has been Emeritus Professor since October 2006. He is an orthodox Weberian scholar and seeks to develop the Weberian vision of sociology, especially in the theory of social action. Campbell’s research fields include cultural changes, theory of action, and sociology of religion. His published books include The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism ([1987] 2018), The Easternization of The West (2007), and The Myth of Social Action (1996). The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism is his most influential work, which gets the highest citation in a citation database search in 2014 for the term ‘sociology of consumption’ (Warde 2017).

In the field of sociology of consumption, Campbell calls scholars to pay attention to the physical dimension of consumption and argues that modern hedonism might be the best way to understand modern consumer behaviors. Campbell’s theoretical approach emphasizes the role of pleasure-seeking in consumption, which is quite different from the paradigm of positional consumption that views consumption practices as structured by social class. This article introduces Campbell’s consumption theory and puts Campbell in conversation with Bourdieu to discuss the connection and differences between Campbell’s hedonistic consumption and Bourdieu’s positional consumption.

A THEORY OF MODERN CONSUMER BEHAVIORS

In eighteenth-century England, the consumer revolution occurred with the onset of industrialization, but Campbell finds that historians fail to acknowledge the significance of that revolution and leave the subject of consumption to economics, which he describes as “a notoriously ahistorical discipline” (Campbell 2018: 99). The issue of explaining the consumer revolution that coincided with the birth of industrialization is ignored. As a result, Campbell argues that there is a mystery surrounding the behavior of consumers in modern industrial societies: why modern consumption involves an apparently endless pursuit of wants and its most characteristic feature is the insatiability.

Campbell suggests that instinctivism, manipulationalism, and the Veblenesque perspectives fail to supply satisfactory explanations of that dynamic generation of new wants. The instinctivist view argues for an explosion of demand unleashed simply by increased income and leisure. Campbell challenges it because it doesn’t explain the variation and changeability of human wants over the lifetime. The manipulationism argues that market organizations compel consumers to want new products through the medium of advertising. Campbell is critical of the passive role of consumers and contends that the manipulationism ignores the process of how wants come to be formed in consumers. According to the Veblenesque perspective, new wants is a by-product of a principal concern with the maintenance and enhancement of social status. Campbell denies the emulative assumption because it does not explain why status competition should require consumers to pursue continuous novelty. 

Instead, Campbell proposes that modern hedonism provides the answer to the problem of the distinctive features of modern consumerism. He distinguishes tradition and modern hedonism, “The former was identified as a preoccupation with sensory experience, with ‘pleasures’ regarded as discrete and standardized events, and in the pursuit of which there is a natural tendency for the hedonist to seek despotic powers. Modern hedonism is marked, in contrast, by a preoccupation with ‘pleasure’, envisaged as a potential quality of all experience” (Campbell 2018: 302). The individual must substitute illusory stimuli for real ones and manipulate illusions to construct their own pleasurable environment in order to obtain pleasure.  “This modern, autonomous, and illusory form of hedonism commonly manifests itself as daydreaming and fantasizing” (Campbell 2018: 302).

Each new product is expected to offer the pleasure dreams that consumers have already enjoyed in imagination. However, each purchase leads to literal disillusionment because it no longer provides the pleasures imagined in daydreams after the product is used. Therefore, consumers dislike products as rapidly as they acquire them and come to develop a new desire very quickly. The cycle of desire-acquisition-use-disillusionment–renewed-desire is a general feature of modern hedonism. “What is not extinguished, however, is the fundamental longing which day-dreaming itself generates, and hence there is as much determination as ever to find new products to serve as replacement objects of desire” (Campbell 2018: 145).

According to Campbell, the dynamic of modern consumption is independent from the activity of other consumers, and neither imitation or emulation is required to maintain the endless desires. In addition, the practice of day-dreaming is itself inherent to modern societies and does not require the commercial institutions of advertising to sustain itself. Campbell argues that the key to the understanding of modern hedonism is the dynamic interaction between illusion and reality. “The tension between the two creates longing as a permanent mode, with the concomitant sense of dissatisfaction with ‘what is’ and a yearning for ‘something better.’ This is because wish-directed daydreaming turns the future into a perfectly illusioned present” (Campbell 2018: 145).

THE ROMANTIC ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF MODERN CONSUMERISM

After associating modern consumer behaviors with modern hedonism, Campbell moves on to explain the origins of modern hedonism that facilitates the new propensity to consume. He identifies the evidence that strongly suggests that the middle classes, along with artisans and segments of the yeomanry, with the strongest Puritan traditions, were the ones who predominantly drove the consumer revolution. Puritanism is recognized as a tradition of thought which denounces all idleness, luxury and indulgence and embraces an ethic of asceticism. Therefore, it is assumed that the middle class, the carriers of an ascetic and puritanical ‘Protestant ethic’, must protest the new propensity to consume. Campbell asks: how could this come about that those with a ‘Puritan’ outlook are responsible for a form of consumerism based on hedonism? Campbell refutes the assumption that the middle-class abandons asceticism through emulation of the aristocracy. Firstly, the cultural innovations, such as consuming the Gothic novel, originated with the middle classes rather than among the nobility. Secondly, the middle class confronted and overcame the existing ruling class to build a modern capitalist society, how could those people against the aristocracy emulate their consumption? Therefore, Campbell makes Protestantism and its connection with pleasure as the object of his investigation. 

Campbell notes that Weber’s analysis of Protestantism stopped at the end of the seventeenth century, and Calvin's accomplishment in achieving a great dogmatic synthesis in Christianity has received relatively little attention. Therefore, Campbell looked into the Arminian reaction and the arguments of the Cambridge Platonists and Leibniz’s alternative theodicy. He found that a new religious ethic of benevolence emerged among protestants, “This was the basis of an emotionalist deistic ethic in which the good man or woman revealed their virtue – in the form of a profound sensibility to the plight of others – through a display of frequent and profound emotions, especially those of pity and melancholy" (Campbell 2018: 303).

Due to the shift from the spiritual significance of emotions to their intrinsic pleasures, protestants obtained powerful legitimation for the pursuit of emotional pleasure, which influences profoundly the eighteenth-century movements of sensibility and Romanticism. The movement of Romanticism embraces aestheticism and bohemianism, the former specifying that “the giving of pleasure is the sole purpose of art, and then goes on to suggest that life itself should be approached, in the spirit of art,” (Campbell 2018: 287) the latter evaluating “pleasure above utility, and hence voluptuousness above opulence” (Campbell 2018: 283). He uses some examples to show the close association between romanticism and cultural consumerism. Paris, for instance, is the spiritual home of Bohemianism and the historic fashion capital of the world as well (Campbell 2018: 305). Therefore, Campbell comes to conclude that the romantic ethic has elective affinity with the spirit of modern consumerism, “romantic teachings concerning the good, the true and the beautiful, provide both the legitimation and the motivation necessary for modern consumer behavior to become prevalent throughout the contemporary industrial world” (Campbell 2018: 305).

Campbell does not challenge Weber’s original thesis about the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Instead, he posits that alongside Weber's production ethic, there existed a consumption ethic, which challenges the highlight of production in social science. In addition, Campbell shows that two major strands of Puritanism were Pietism and Calvinism in the seventeenth century. The former developed into Romanticism, and the latter developed into economic rationalism and utilitarianism. Therefore, he challenges the assumed ever-increasing rationality alongside the development of the modern economy.

CAMPBELL AND BOURDIEU

Modern Hedonism and Habitus

Bourdieu and Campbell are both critical of orthodox economics’ explanations of consumption behaviors and social practices/social actions in general, which assumes consumers pursue utility maximization and minimal cost.

“Does a human behavior really always have an end, that is, as a goal, the result which is the end, in the sense of conclusion, or term, of that behavior? I think not” (Bourdieu 1998: 80).

“A theory which does not even attempt to account for the nature or origin of wants and tastes, and offers only the most attenuated suggestion concerning why people buy goods, hardly deserves to be called a theory of consumer behaviour” (Campbell 2018: 82).

Although Bourdieu and Campbell both seek to bring culture to the consumption analysis, they take different approaches. Bourdieu argues that individuals’ capital composition (economic capital and cultural capital) and volumes in differentiated fields shape the formation of habitus, which is an embodied disposition. Therefore, without conscious calculation, individuals with specific habitus show a preference to specific consumption practices. Campbell agrees that the consumption choices are not dominated by conscious calculation, but he argues that individuals’ pursuit of pleasure that is derived from day-dreaming or fantasy leads to specific product selection. Therefore, for Campbell, it is the imaginative hedonism rather than habitus that shapes consumer behaviors, and the imagined pleasure varies from individual to individual.

However, Bourdieu may argue that individuals in different social positions may have different imaginations and pleasure pursuit, and it is the differences of habitus that lead to the different types of daydreaming or fantasy. In addition, the volume and the composition of economic capital and cultural capital may influence the dynamic interaction between illusion and reality. For instance, when an individual’s capital is limited, he or she may have to pursue satisfaction rather than pleasure. However, Campbell seems to view the imaginative hedonism as common among people across classes. We don’t know how consumers’ imaginations will change over time and just know they are subject to change and consumers always pursue pleasure and comfort. This leads to the following discussion of the motivation of consumption in Bourdieu’s and Campbell’s theory of consumption behaviors.

Taste Good and Good Taste

For Bourdieu, consumption practices are shaped by social class and in the meantime, help reproduce social class. Individuals compete for their positions in the social space. They employ distinct consumption practices to make social distinctions and draw class boundaries. Taste is about refusal. Consumers use their consumption choices to confirm social group identities and create their social relationship with other people. Therefore, from Bourdieu’s perspective, consumers’ actions are oriented to others, like the pursuit for novelty is to display openness in taste. On the contrary, Campbell argues that the dynamic of modern consumption is independent from the activity of other consumers. In other words, consumers’ actions are self-oriented, and the pursuit of novelty is to obtain individual emotional and psychological pleasure. The set of motives- pursuing personal pleasure and comfort, dominate consumption behaviors. Campbell stresses that the pleasure derives more from daydreaming/fantasy than from emulations and ostentations experienced in real world, “hedonism pleasure is not simply a quality of experience, but a self-illusioned quality of experience” (Campbell 2018: 145).

In addition, Bourdieu assumes that consumers use consumption practices to convey messages about good taste and signal social status. Although Bourdieu does not expect consumers across social classes have the same cultural capital to decode cultural meanings and aesthetics communicated by consumption practices, he assumes that the dichotomy between the taste of necessity and the taste of freedom will help consumers value the selected products. However, Campbell is critical of the communicative paradigm. He agrees that in some circumstances, communicative consumption works. As he put it, “the price of a commodity is a cultural symbol of some importance and in purchasing and conspicuously displaying it a consumer conveys a message to those around him; a message which may indeed amount to saying, ‘see how rich I am, I can afford this very expensive item’” (Campbell 2018: 92). However, he argues that in many cases, consumers fail to communicate messages to other due to the diverse choices available in the market, “this meaning consists of the 'message,' that which is conveyed from one actor to one or more other actors. Now it is obvious that such actions will only be performed in a social situation, that is to say, when other individuals are present to receive the message. What is more, if such actions are to fulfill their communicative functions then their specific meanings must be known and shared among those actors who are party to the act” (Campbell 1996: 116). Because of the failed communicative messages, Campbell argues that “the study of subjective meaningfulness replaces the study of conventionally agreed but observer-defined meaning” (Campbell 2018: 27).

Furthermore, Bourdieu and Campbell both emphasize the individual agency and are critical of the role of passive consumers in the market, but compared with Bourdieu, Campbell is strongly suspicious of market influence on consumers. Campbell argues that the practice of day-dreaming is itself inherent to modern societies and does not require the commercial institution of advertising to survive. Commercial institutions make use of the fact that people day-dream to feed consumers’ dreams, but they are not able to shape consumers’ imagined pleasure. However, for Bourdieu, the market institutions can collaborate with cultural intermediaries to construct specific consumption practices as good taste and influence consumers’ taste formation and judgement.

CONCLUSION

Campbell creates a new paradigm to consumption study, that highlights the physical dimension of consumption, pleasure pursuit of consumers, and self-oriented actions. The arguments of modern hedonism are helpful for explaining the fashion market. Compared with Bourdieu’s positional consumption, Campbell’s hedonistic consumption helps capture the emotional and psychological motivations of consumers and justifies the pleasure and comfort pursued by consumers.

However, Campbell seems to view the imaginative hedonism as common among people across classes and fails to provide the explanation about how social class may affect the dynamic interaction between illusion and reality. Does hedonistic consumption require consumers to have pre-given knowledge and expectations like the cultural capital for positional consumption? In addition, Campbell does not tell us how consumers’ imaginations change over time and across space. It is highly possible that young people and senior people have quite different daydreams and fantasies. Campbell centers his analysis on English society, so it is unclear whether the social, cultural, and political contexts shape individuals’ imaginative hedonism. Furthermore, Campbell mainly applies his theory to clothing, leisure, and fashion consumption, thus it is uncertain whether his theory is helpful for explaining mundane consumption. Especially for environmental consumption practices, how can consumers obtain pleasure and comfort from reducing their consumption?

As an orthodox Weberian scholar, Campbell uses his extensive knowledge of history, religion, and culture to argue the elective affinity between the romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. He shows us that “the movement of ideas can be a major cause of social change when constituted as the ‘living faith’ of a culture” (Campbell 2018: 39). He values the importance of the consumer revolution that accompanied the onset of industrialization in eighteenth-century England, and reveals the influence of consumption on the development of the modern economy. Even though Campbell does not challenge Weber’s original thesis about the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, he gives us a better understanding of the nature of consumption in modern societies. In addition, he argues that there was a consumption ethic operating alongside Weber’s production ethic, which challenges the highlight of production in social science, and connects the production revolution and consumer revolution. Furthermore, Campbell continues Weber’s analysis on the Protestant ethic after the seventeenth century, and identifies the coexistence of Romanticism and economic rationalism, which challenges the assumed ever-increasing rationality alongside the development of the modern economy.

Although Campbell’s historical perspective makes contributions to the study of consumer culture and culture changes, his analysis centering on English society leads to an obvious weakness. If we accept the idea that modern consumerism is rooted in the romantic ethic, how could we understand the modern consumption in those societies that did not cultivate the romantic ethic? In other words, will we find other types of ethics that drive modern consumption in non-English society?

For scholars and students interested in sociology of consumption and consumer culture, Campbell’s work provides a cultural approach to understand consumption practices. People can get new insights quietly different from that in Bourdieu’s theory of positional consumption. For people who are fans of Weber, Campbell’s work directs them to revisit the elective affinity between two value systems on the consumption side.

REFERENCES

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Campbell, Colin. 1996. The Myth of Social Action. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Campbell, Colin. 2018. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Warde, Alan. 2017. Consumption: A Sociological Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.