Consuming Ambivalence Eighteenth-century Public Discourse on Consumption and Mandeville's Legacy

Contrasting diagnoses on commercial modernity have been typically organ ized by a normative dichotomy between consumption and production that can be traced back to the emergence of a public discourse on commodity circulation in 18th-century Britain. Within this framework, I re-interpret Bernard Mandeville as a proto-sociologist. Mandeville may be considered as the forerunner of a position that neither refuses nor celebrates com mercial modernity. He maintains that both hedonistic consumers and avari cious producers are slaves to their passions and yet conceives these passions as the sole ground on which individuals can construct themselves as subjects. The suggestion that commercial modernity fosters different forms of identity permits to consider modern consumer practices as ambivalent phenomena whereby subjects are forced to construct their own selves.