= "the desiring, acquiring and enjoying of goods and services which one has purchased" (162).
= "the active seeking of personal gratification through material goods" (164).
"Why, in the floodtide of Enlightenment enthusiasms for freedom--free speech, free inquiry, free labour, free trade, free contract--was free consumption never articulated as a soical goal? Or put another way, why has the opportunity to consume been made dependent morally upon the opportunity to produce, but functionally upon the opportunity to purchase? . . . Why is it . . . that consumption, which is the linchpin of our modern social system, has never been the linchpin of our theories explaining modernity?" (162).
"What was profoundly unsettling, even shattering about cumulative gains in material culture which became manifest by the eighteenth century was that they made it evident that human beings were the makers of their world" (164).
"Louis Dumont's From Mandeville to Marx. After detailing the western conception of society as the interactions of rational, utility-maximizing, self-improving, materialistic individuals, Dumont commented that this was a radically aberrant world view shared by no other culture. Rather than ask why other people were taking so long to become like us, he stuggested, we should . . . ask how `this unique development that we call modern occurred at all' [6-7]'. There has been a punitive arrogance in the west's refusal to see its cultural differences as differences and to characterize them instead as the end-point in a universal process" (164).
"A peculiarly intense form of curiosity in western culture drew the countries of western Europe along the path of innovation which grew ever wider as the pathbreakers pushed against a comparatively weak attachment to customary practices. On this broad avenue of human inventiveness Europeans encountered themselves as the creators of their own social universe. . . . How was social order to be maintained when collective understandings were being undermined by the the new Promethean powers at large in the world?" (165).