"Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy"
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Neoclassical economics flatters itself with a comforting moral: markets are neutral mirrors of preference, and advertising is just information sprinkled on top. Lasch needles that self-image by pointing to what the model has to assume away in order to stay elegant. If ads cannot "force" you, then the consumer remains sovereign, guiltless, rational, and free. The market becomes a democracy of desire; persuasion is harmless; corporate power is conveniently offstage.
Lasch is writing from a historian's vantage, alert to how ideas protect institutions. The verb "insists" is doing heavy lifting: it suggests not a discovery but a doctrine, a defensive posture. The word "force" is also a trap. Of course a thirty-second spot doesn't hold a gun to your head. But Lasch's subtext is that coercion in modern life often arrives as seduction, normalization, status anxiety, and the slow colonization of what counts as a "want". Advertising doesn't have to manufacture a purchase; it has to manufacture the self that feels incomplete without it.
Context matters: in late-20th-century America, the rise of mass marketing, television, and lifestyle branding coincided with Lasch's broader critique of consumer culture and the "therapeutic" turn, where identity is maintained through consumption and validation. His point isn't that people are mindless. It's that the clean separation between desire and its shaping is ideological. Neoclassical theory preserves the fiction of autonomous wants precisely when the culture industry is getting very good at producing them.
Lasch is writing from a historian's vantage, alert to how ideas protect institutions. The verb "insists" is doing heavy lifting: it suggests not a discovery but a doctrine, a defensive posture. The word "force" is also a trap. Of course a thirty-second spot doesn't hold a gun to your head. But Lasch's subtext is that coercion in modern life often arrives as seduction, normalization, status anxiety, and the slow colonization of what counts as a "want". Advertising doesn't have to manufacture a purchase; it has to manufacture the self that feels incomplete without it.
Context matters: in late-20th-century America, the rise of mass marketing, television, and lifestyle branding coincided with Lasch's broader critique of consumer culture and the "therapeutic" turn, where identity is maintained through consumption and validation. His point isn't that people are mindless. It's that the clean separation between desire and its shaping is ideological. Neoclassical theory preserves the fiction of autonomous wants precisely when the culture industry is getting very good at producing them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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