The consumer has a split-personality:

• ‘cultural dupe’: an irrational slave to the trivial, material desires, who can be manipulated into mass conformity; a fool seduced by advertising and fashion
• rational and autonomous: in pursuit of self-interest, connections are made with material gain, technical progress and individual freedom; a hero of modernity

A dichotomy is constructed through which the consumer has been traditionally viewed:

Within liberalism, ‘consumer sovereignty’ means two things:

• consumers have sovereignty over their own needs, desires, wants, identities; desires and needs are private, free from external, social authorities, who might wish to impose overarching social aims and projects
• in a market society, competition ensures that producers must respond to the expressed preferences of consumers; the price mechanism means that firms only survive by accurately and efficiently satisfying their desires

By making social institutions (e.g. firms) accountable to individuals’ desires, the liberal society fosters initiative, enterprise, efficient use of resources, imagination and opportunism. Consumer sovereignty brings together freedom, reason and progress. The most trivial, mundane purchase is an act of individual self-determination, of rational calculation of ends and means, and of energetic social advancement of economic forces.

Consumer sovereignty was the most popular Cold War difference between the east (industrial communist economies) and the west (advanced capitalist societies).

In the Soviet system: in aspiring to plan production and distribution, the social system subordinated the needs of the population to bureaucratic planning, instituting a ‘dictatorship over needs’. Unable to be disciplined by a market system, the Soviet system became increasingly undemocratic. It produced unfreedom, irrationality and lack of progress and dynamism. Yet, elements of consumer culture survived in the informal, unofficial black economy, making up for the deficiencies of central planning.

In the west: the neo-liberalism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics radically promoted consumer sovereignty: the ‘model of consumer choice’ came as the most adequate model for all forms of modern citizenship and social action. This meant that the state had to reduce its scope of economic activities (e.g. privatisation). Freedom meant the individualistic freedoms of the market and being ‘free to choose’. A cultural revolution occurred that replaced the traits of dependency, indiscipline of western welfare socialism with the enterprise culture, associated with market behaviour and economic competition. Within neoliberalism, consumers must be enterprising, demonstrate initiative, risk-taking, self-reliance, independence and self-responsibility.

Liberalism derived its image of the consumer from the broader ideal of ‘Enlightenment man’. Enlightenment thinkers depict individuals as free and autonomous, who use reason as the inner resource to liberate themselves from the irrationality of traditional society.

For both Enlightenment and liberalism, the individual comes to be seen as essentially self-defining, as achieving identity through choice rather than following the traditional social order. Enlightenment made the individual the philosophical centre of the world, liberalism made the individual its moral and political centre.

For liberalism, freedom is understood in a ‘negative’ sense: freedom from interference, a right to privacy. By making personal liberty the central social value, liberalism argues that personal interests can be the only sources of social legitimacy. Liberalism places individual choice at the centre of social theory.

Markets are crucial for realising consumer sovereignty. The liberal market is a mechanism for translating individual preferences into a socially coordinated allocation of resources among different spheres of production and between individuals with different kinds and degrees f desire. The market is seen as an impersonal mechanism or means of coordination that allows social order to emerge from the ‘anarchy of diverse individual desires’. Moreover, the attempt to will particular outcomes is self-defeating: no authority can know and control the infinite individual self-ainterests.

Price is not a reflection of the value of the good, but a social compromise between the agendas of wants followed by each private individual. Price is an efficient mechanism for allocating social resources.

For Foucault, unlike for liberalism, becoming a choosing self is not a liberation but a strategy of modern governance. The choosing self is a strategy power used to construct the modern social order. For Foucault, the liberal government relies on the self-managing capacities of individuals, and compels and requires them to manage themselves to act freely, responsibly and with rational foresight.

The free market as an institution is not a sphere of freedom from the state but a mechanism encouraged by the state to allow it to manage ‘at a distance’ a complex social process it cannot directly govern.

Contrary to liberal thinking, the enterprising/ choosing self does not release an authentic humanity but rather produces a self that is self-surveilling and self-regulating.