BOOK REVIEWS
Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole Benjamin R. Barber New York: W.W. Norton, 2007, 406 pp. Benjamin Barber’s Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole argues that ever-expanding capitalist commercial culture taints everything, marginalizing family life, religious life, and civic life, and reducing citizens to mere consumers whose private market choices give them what they want, but fail to give them what they want to want: a Benjamin Barber-style “strong” democracy in which we may need to be “forced to be free.” The argument of Consumed rests the false assumption that capitalism, in its contemporary incarnation, is in some sense overproductive. “Too many unprofitable products chase too few consumers, too many of whom must be prodded, pushed, and cajoled into consumption,” Barber writes, citing journalist William Greider’s One World, Ready or Not (p. 45). Barber accuses boosters of dynamic, free-market economies as having 293