Consumerism as a Civilizing Process: Israel and Judaism in the Second Age of Modernity

Modern post-emancipatory Jews have long been associated with cosmopolitanism, mostly as a bad thing. They've been anathematized as rootless cosmopolitans so often that cosmopolitan, used as a noun, is in some circles an anti-Semitic code word. During the heroic moments of Zionism, as with other liberation movements, this cosmopolitan strand of Judaism was de-emphasized in favor of conceptions that emphasized separateness and self-consciousness. There exists a side of Jewish identity that Zionism consciously suppressed, namely its urban, pleasure-loving, shopping-oriented cosmopolitanism. This exists also in social theory: Consumerism and modernism are joined at the hip because consumption is an indispensable part of the civilizing process. The process of consumption, of expressing our identity through tastes and possessions, changes the entire field of interaction. It makes possible new kinds of social identity. And it makes possible new forms of social integration, based on individuation and sympathy.