Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture |  | Authors: Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 124918
Media: Paperback
Pages: 368
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Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 006074586X
Dewey Decimal Number: 306
EAN: 9780060745868
ASIN: 006074586X
Publication Date: January 1, 2005
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Product Description
In this wide-ranging and perceptive work of cultural criticism, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter shatter the most important myth that dominates much of radical political, economic, and cultural thinking. The idea of a counterculture -- a world outside of the consumer-dominated world that encompasses us -- pervades everything from the antiglobalization movement to feminism and environmentalism. And the idea that mocking or simply hoping the "system" will collapse, the authors argue, is not only counterproductive but has helped to create the very consumer society radicals oppose. In a lively blend of pop culture, history, and philosophical analysis, Heath and Potter offer a startlingly clear picture of what a concern for social justice might look like without the confusion of the counterculture obsession with being different.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
 Brilliant, Witty January 21, 2005
California reader (California)
29 out of 31 found this review helpful
A brilliant, witty critique of the counterculture and how it has diverted our energies from pursuing effective political solutions to our social problems and redirected them into silly, self-indulgent, self-defeating gestures of pseudo-rebellion. Very similar to what Thomas Frank and his crew of wits at The Baffler are saying, only more incisive and analytical. Heath and Potter are masters of lucid exposition (for example, I've never read a more elegant description of the Prisoner's Dilemma than theirs) who use Thorstein Veblen's economic theories to pull the whole lid off the notion of commodified "dissent".
My only quarrel with the book is that 1) it is light on prescription (the authors content themselves with brief, general calls for more regulation to control the worst excesses of corporate behavior); and 2) it doesn't always address the strongest arguments against corporate hegemony (the authors are content to argue that Walmart isn't so bad, because it offers low prices and friendly service, but they don't mention anything about its underhanded business practices or its devastating effect on local economies).
Nevertheless, this is the most persuasive and thoroughgoing critique I've yet read on the sad fraud that is the counterculture.
brilliant book, but within limits January 9, 2005
Gigi
95 out of 116 found this review helpful
A good book to consider in tandem with this one is James Masterson's "The Search for the Real Self." Masterson's thesis is that those with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders have never really had support for the development of real, authentic, core selves. It's but a small leap from there to Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism." The idea is that many, and perhaps most, Americans today have that pervasive sense of emptiness, a lack of self.
One of the authors of "Nation of Rebels" admits to having been a punk rocker rebel in a prior phase of life. He then goes on to say that that phase was, he realized upon reflection, an example of the false rebellion that the book talks about. But then, disturbingly, it becomes apparent as one reads the book, that Heath and Potter assume the same lack of self in all members of todays "nation of rebels." In other words, all consumption is based upon false, status, pseudo-rebellious tendencies.
The problem here is that the authors assume that no one buys a BMW in order to have an exciting driving experience, but only to impress the neighbors. They assume that no one buys a home theater in order to simply enjoy movies, but only to have the latest "thing." They would assume that no 20 year old would quit college simply because it wasn't right for him or her, and that the only conceivable reason would be a false sense of rebellion against parents, society, or whatnot.
In other words, they truly seem to believe what they posit early in the book: that real, authentic selves do not exist. In anyone. Talk about psychological projection outward from their own inner circumstances on a doozy of a scale! To that extent, as brilliant as this book is, I suspect that the authors are playing at being deeper, more serious social activists, and are playing at being Canadian philosophy professors, in the same exact way that one of them once played at being a rebel.
The second limitation of the book is the assumption that the authors make that "progressive" politics are a given. If you disagree with that premise, as conservatives, moderates, and many of the countercultural-type liberals that Heath and Potter are attacking in this book would surely do, then the authors have nothing for you. The book collapses into a battle between the authors as Ralph Nader-like diligent old-style liberals, and the standard liberal of the Clinton or Kerry variety. As such, the true audience for this book becomes, in all likelihood, the conservative reader-as-voyeur, as such standard liberal icons as Marcuse, Ellul, Mumford, Laing, Baudrillard, Foucault, and on and on are cleaned and gutted with profound gusto.
I sense this is an important book, and is a bomb thrown into a crowded room. I'm not sure what the results are, or what they will be further down the road. I look forward to how other readers respond.
good on the left and right December 29, 2004
Mike E. Wright (Wyoming, MI United States)
26 out of 31 found this review helpful
Brilliant critique of counterculture ideology and how it actually feeds, strengthens, and most importantly, lies at the heart of capitalism rather than subverts it. The two philosophy professors use theories from Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and Peirre Bordeau's notion of aesthetic value and taste as well as citing a variety of contemporary media examples such as Fight Club, American Beauty, and Naomi Klein's NO Logo. Their main argument is that the values of counterculture that were and still are seen as subversive to the evils of capitalism and that see capitalism as evil in itself are really the cause of so many of the evils in the market system. By automatically seeing anything mainstream as coercive, conformist, and just for the "masses," anti-consumerism is nothing more than a reworking of anti-mass society. Thus counter culture is nothing more than anti-mass society, where sub-cultures continually emerge and get taken into the mainstream, only to be "thrown away" by those who cannot stand to like anything many other people like. New genre's and "groundbreaking" work is continually occuring as this counterculture ideology drives this prisoner's dilemma in a race to the bottom. Wealthy capitalist nations reach a stage where basic, necessary goods are provided and what becomes important is positional goods that provide status. The problem with positional goods, of which status is one (based upon different criteria, e.g. the city you live in, sartorial tastes, restaruants, employment, etc) is that they are a zero sum game. Food can be produced to feed everyone, but what gives one thing status, or cool, proportionally makes something else, not cool. The fact that one restaurant is hot makes another one not, precisely because people are seeking diferentiation. And for a moment they have it, whether it be new music or cars, its confers a status of cool upon the consumer because they have "gotten it" whereas others are just conforming with the masses. They use music as a perfect example of non-mainstream conferring status upon the listener. Hal Niedzviecki searches for the ultimate "unco-optable" music, which he finds in Braino, with "staccato blasts that unnerve the scattered chattering poseurs and scare the unprepared," and later he admits it to be just "awkward, painful noise."
This critique seems so far left it is right. It attacked many of the ideas I have become to unknowingly embrace just because they were leftist and a bit rebellious. The counterculture values make it easy to seem rebellious to the wrongs of the system while at the same time having fun. But this book takes a very practical approach, and while I disagree with some of their arguments about the ills of advertising, I agree with their take on countercultre theory. While they do address the pharmaceautical industry and some of its problems, I don't think they consider the impact advertising has had on the drugs they sell. I think the enormous rise in the sale of pharma's drugs coinciding with their ability to advertise and their gigantic increase in advertising is somewhat detrimental to their disregard of the affects of advertising. I have not read Naomi Klein's No Logo, but this book seems to do a very balanced job of discrediting it. They make Klein out to be a pretentious liberal concerned with status and a much more fervent driver of competitive consumption than most of the people she may blame for being "branded."
The book also offers some more practical solutions to problems they argue are market failures that can be corrected. They offer many reforms that many reject because they just do not seem rebellious enough and are only reforms, whereas counterculture is concerned with subversiveness, and many times, dissent for the sake of dissent,which Heath and Potter call deviance. Some of the reforms include eliminating advertising as a deductable tax expense (or cut the deduction back), reducing the deductions for entertainment, and pollution credits and penalties. The broader idea is to internalize many of the costs that are now externalized. For example, many negative externalities such as pollution, for which everyone pays, are not incurred by the consumer of a product. This is a market failure and can thus be corrected by government regulation.
This book is by far the best of 2004 (and a latecomer it is) and should be read by those on the left seeking a critique of many of their views and on the right because the traditional dichotomy on these types of issues is just not relevant anymore. There is more room for agreement than people admit.
Essential reading for all progressives March 24, 2005
J. Norris (Boston)
45 out of 57 found this review helpful
As is all-too-frequently the case on the Amazon site, i find the "Spotlight Review" of this book to be fairly misleading. To critique the seeming lack of success that the two authors have shown in their respective personal soul-searching endeavors is to make an entirely moot point with regards to the success of the book's central thesis (indeed - only a reader who was preoccupied with such irrelevancies would find the free use of the 'I' pronoun to be an annoyance). This is because the arguments in this book are built in large part upon the notion that this "seeker" mentality and its corralary preocupation with "self-actualization" are among the primary reasons why the counter-culture has been, and continues to be, so unmistakeably innefectual in its attempts to bring about change. In fact, the reviewer simply drives this point home all the better; (s)he is distracted by the ingrained radical obsession with the individual and the individual's attempts to come to terms with the realities of her world, thereby overlooking (among other things) the fact that the authors are none-too-subtly attempting to frame their argument in a way that avoids such obvious pitfalls. I think, furthermore, that they are remarkably successfull at doing so. The point here is NOT that people only buy non-necessities in order to gain status, but rather that the constant attempt to spend money in ways that enhance or preserve the supposed "authenticity" of one's "core self" is NOT (need i repeat it? - NOT) an effective means of bringing about social change. You might buy a nice TV because you love whatching movies on a flat screen and still be able to say with all honesty that you aren't trying to keep up with Jonses - and that might even help you to feel that you are staying true to your counter-cultural principles because your not INTENTIONALLY playing the consumerist game - but NONE of this bears the slightest significance when it comes to altering the political landscape or seeking greater justice in the marketplace. It is THIS rather obvious fact that the authors are attempting to broadcast to us; a fact which counter-culture advocates and activists (and apparently the spotlight reviewer) have been doing their damndest to ignore since the 60's. Might this book be used as fodder for the bogus arguments of conservative pundits? Yeah, i suppose, but even IF the cover alone isn't enough to scare them off, then those fears should be easily assuaged simply by pointing out that every critique they make of these various leftist ideologies has already been made countless times, and in far less favorable ways, by vitriolic right wingers and free-market zealots. FAR more importantly, this book engages in a systematic debunking of all the myths, lies, illusions, and conceits injected into the counter-culture/progressive-politics movement by precisely those canonical leftist acedemics whose sustained attacks by the authors the reviewer laments - namely Foucoult, Marcuse, Klein, et al. Of course, the tempation of any self-respecting progressive with ideological roots in some form or other of sub-cultural rebellion is to describe this book as a good but flawed, and even potentially dangerous, reaction to some of the left's more conspicuous recent failures, but i think honesty demands that we don't succumb to such willfull delusion. Progressive politics NEEDS books like this, and we need to learn how to accept criticism without invoking paranoid fantasies of the imminent extinction of our values at the hands of the right-wing behemoths who run the world and dominate the airwaves. We need to stop trying to diminish and distibrute the blame for our failures, and stop attempting to sweep our vulnerabilies under the carpet, otherwise we fall into all the same narcissistic traps that the authors so poignantly describe and warn against. If you give a damn about the REST of the world, read this book.
Useful Debunking of Misguided Thinking: The Sad Legacy of "Counter"Culture. March 4, 2008
2 cents (B.F.N. United Snakes)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is one of the most interesting books I've read recently. Do NOT be discouraged by a couple of the negative reviews!
After having read the book I think it is clear enough that (as is often the case) the negative reviews are for the most part unfair and written by people that obviously did not like the what the authors had to say. What they have to say is clear enough to anybody with an open mind that reads the book.
I'm overwhelmingly confident that *by far* most people that take a look at this page and have an interest in this book will find it to be a fascinating, illuminating read. Without going into it too much, "Nation of Rebels" directly attacks the idea of "counterculture" itself and in doing so it's critical of the "New Left" that emerged out of the 60s. This book will help you understand so much of the confusion of these last decades and why the Conservative movement and the Right has had so much political success. You can see how this book would really tick some folks off, and I think particularly cultural lefties... It champions more traditional left leaning or old school liberal, class-based politics.
Actually, if you like Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and "The Conquest of Cool", (etc.), --you'll love this book. The authors of "Nation of Rebels" use a central thesis of Frank's work as a starting point for this book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
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