Book Review: Beyond consumer capitalism: media and the limits to imagination

Justin Lewis's Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination addresses a paradox that the author observes is deeply puzzling: Consumer capitalism is a system that potentially can cause environmental catastrophe. It is a system that no longer is delivering its original promise, namely quality of life. And yet ‘we remain so deeply committed’ to this system 'whose benefits are increasingly limited, whose promises are exhausted and whose environmental consequences look increasingly dire' (p. 48). Why is this? What could explain the developed world’s failure to grasp the capitalist system’s limit? And why cannot we imagine alternative models of human progress? Lewis sets out to address these questions in an ambitious book that draws on an impressively wide range of literatures and disciplines, and usefully reminds its readers the merits of political economy for understanding and assessing contemporary consumer culture and media.