According to liberalism, consumers are private individuals rationally pursuing their self-defined interests through the market. Liberalism theorises how consumers pursue what they want, not what it is that they want. It deals with formal rationality, calculating how best to maximise satisfaction. It fails to think of consumers substantively, as having concrete, actual, specific wants. Substantive rationality is very much a cultural thinking about needs and goods in terms of their meanings.

Although liberalism places individual choice at the centre of its moral and social world, it is something it can say very little about: we do not to see individuals coming to formulate their desires and interests, only the way in which they calculatedly pursue them. All commodities (heroin, nuclear weapons, bread, CDs) possess a single quality, utility. In liberal thinking, the nature of desire and preference is irrelevant, what matters is maximising utility.

By thinking through economic amoralism, the consumer has three dimensions:

• an ethical basis – personal liberty, privacy, autonomy, private freedom
• a cognitive basis – limits of reason when it comes to values
• a technical basis – substantive needs, values, culture come from outside the market

Ethical basis: By restricting itself to analysing formal, calculating rationality, liberal economics refrains from making any judgements about the substantive needs and desires of individuals. For if liberals defined about ‘what people want’ as opposed to ‘how they calculate’, they would constitute itself as a social authority over individual needs. It would therefore offend its own principle of privacy of individual interests. Liberalism cannot say much about actual consumption, but it also will not.

It does not matter whether individuals express a preference for heroin, vodka or ballet tickets, for hospitals or nuclear warheads: the analysis will have the same logical structure. The beauty of the market is that refrains from moral judgement: everything has its price if individuals express a demand for it.

Liberalism makes individuals the sole authorities over their desires and their ability to pay the sole mechanism determining whether these desires should be satisfied. It is this economic amoralism that gives contemporary neo-liberalism such a populist, anti-elitist character.

Cognitive basis: According to liberals, reason is incapable of moving from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, of moving from what it knows to be the case to stating what should be, of deriving values from factual knowledge. For instance, if an individual devote its energy to looking young, fit and handsome, it is simply a matter of choice, and ultimately irrational, however rationally it pursues it.

Reason cannot prescribe the ultimate ends or meaning of life. The desires of the individual are not be regulated by others not merely because they should not be (in the name of liberty, privacy, natural justice) but more because they cannot be. Reason can dethrone traditional values but it cannot replace them with alternative values.

Technical basis: Utility is not defined not in terms of needs but in terms of pleasure or satisfaction. Needs are often distinguished from wants, desires, whims, which are subjective and non-essential. The concept of needs presumes knowledge of essential, authentic and real needs and of moral judgement.

However, within liberalism, there is no moral or cognitive authority by which preferences, wants and desires can be judged. Consumers are sovereign over their desires, and, through market forces, over the institutions whose profits depend on satisfying those desires with commodities.

Yet, contemporary capitalism constantly attempts to create or determine needs through technologies of planning – advertising and marketing.

In liberal thinking, economic action is separated from cultural and social relations, and is carried out in a separate sphere. Liberals look at ‘the market’ rather than at market-places, and view the market as a highly abstract set of forces (demand and supply). Yet, the market-place is a socially organised event filled with a range of activities and relations (e.g. meeting friends, public speaking, busking, day-dreaming).

Liberals depict the consumer as an enlightenment man (sic) - autonomous and self-determined, as he is able to define his own needs, and to pursue them rationally. Yet the consumer is also represented as a fool because:

• he is a slave to desires rather than a rational calculator of them - governed by childish whims and desires
• his desires are determined by others, by the needs of family, by social pressure, by fashion and trends, by advertising, marketing – the subject becomes an object

Feminists criticise the liberals’ model of rationality as ‘male-defined’, claiming it assumes a self that is alien to women’s experience and devalues their work. The liberals’ model of the self relates to men as public actors and marginalises women’s reproductive work, their social skills, their emotional life, and so on. Furthermore, the model ignores the extent to which male autonomy depends on women subordinating their own interests so as to further the interests of their husbands and children (e.g. women curtail their own consumption of food to feed other members of the household). It is paradoxical that liberals’ notion of consumer rationality excludes women’s experience given that they undertake much consumption.

Another criticism of the liberals’ model is that consumer is not an image of enlightenment man but can be an object of calculation. They are targets for intervention by advertising, marketing and retailing agencies – producers’ sovereignty.

Within the liberal tradition, the consumer is sovereign and enterprising. Liberals cannot and will not discuss the nature of consumers’ desires, only their logical structure. Consumers can be seen as fools and be manipulated and be targets and objects of others’ rational calculations. Moreover, the liberal model of the consumer reflects its enlightenment man ideals of freedom, reason and self-interest, yet this marginalises women’s work and consumption.