Customer Reviews

Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

The authors are right on in their fundamental critique of counterculture "politics." They describe how much counterculture activity does not the subvert the "system" at all and actually interferes with authentic efforts toward social justice.

For example, the counterculture emphasis on individuality and uniqueness prevents many leftists activists from making a coherent case for increasing state regulations in an effort to achieve progressive aims such as less inequality and a cleaner environment.

Unfortunately, the authors too frequently engage in overgeneralizations. Their overgeneralizations are so numerous that they often appear guilty of the very all-or-nothing thinking that they accuse counterculture rebels of. Furthermore, the authors make too many blanket assertions about subjects that are outside their field of expertise. These unsubstantiated assertions seriously undermine their credibility.

This book is a great first draft, but it should have been better researched, should have included better footnotes, and should have been far less polemical.

The main problem I see with the counterculture "rebels" is that they too often engage in black or white thinking. For example, rejecting all of the capitalism because of certain problems. However, this book will not go far in changing that because the authors commit the exact same error in thought.

In short, this book's main idea desparately needs to gain currency among leftists, but it must be presented by an author who is more nuanced, scholarly, and less judgemental than these two.

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.

The critical reader should note, of course, after recovering from the unbalancing effects of having all of her liberal sacred cows slaughtered and turned to jerky, that the authors of this insightful book are -- call to arms for the progressive movement to roll up its sleeves and focus on legislative and policy solutions rather than vague and self-defeating cultural dissent aside -- professors of philosophy, who have written an effective work of cultural criticism, but they fail (nor does it seem to really be their intention) to offer much in the way of specific practical solutions themselves.

this is, perhaps, largely because they understand that if they wrote a policy-heavy manual about how to make the practical (and, as they acknowledge, largely undramatic) reforms to the market to better reflect principles of social justice and sustainability, their major intended audience -- all those who are self-identified as members of the 'counterculture' -- would almost surely never bother to pick up the book.

the intention is noble and important. and i believe the authors understand the paradox -- they must speak to all of those ex-punks and vaguely political hipsters, all the artists and musicians and hippies and bicyclists, all the zinesters and skaters and anarchists and transformationists, and acknowledge the feeling that has made all of those people commit so much energy towards staking their "individualist" ground against the homogonizing forces of stooge governments and the marketing machine -- and, before offering legislation in earnest, convince them to come back to the fold and find it in themselves to see the social contract not as a restraint on their individual spirits, but as the mechanism by which the practical progress we are all wishing for might actually be achieved.

Nation of Rebels is one of those books that left me thinking 'wow, everything I know is wrong'. If you can excuse the hyperbole, what I mean is that this book, which is clearly written and pleasurable to read despite tackling complex economic and philosophical issues (from Marx and Bourdieu to Freud and Hobbes), severely challlenged the foundation upon which I had built my understanding of the intersection of politics, culture, globalization, and capitalism. One must have an open mind coming into this book, and it helps to know the arguments made by the present countercultural elite (such as Naomi Klein in No Logo), although the authors do an excellent job of setting up their position by explaining the opposition.

The authors make excellent use of popular culture, from American Beauty and Fight Club to Star Trek, to explain the implications of their argument. What is the authors' argument? In simplest terms, the authors argue that what we consider 'counterculture' is little more than a harmful illusion that has detracted from worthwhile political activism in the name of individualistic, utopian-fueled ballyhoo. Since the sixties, especially in the UNited States, rebels, activists, and leftists have opted out of direct political activism because, according to the countercultural critique, the entire 'system' is corrupt and therefore activism cannot take place within it, but must take place without it. The authors explain beautifully why this thought process of so damaging to making actual societal change, and that the efforts of the left to make the world a better place (which is what we claim as our mission, right?) has ultimately been misdirected.

This is a highly entertaining and thought provoking book written by two philosophy professors, and for anyone interested in current events surrounding political activism, radicalism, and anticonsumerism, this book is mandatory reading. If you have read Klein's No Logo, you MUST read this book if you want to consider yourself the least bit informed on what is ultimately an issue much more complicated than most anticonsumerists and 'culture jammers' would like us to believe.

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.

This is a book about the counterculture movement by two Canadian culture critics. It actually helped me do a lot of growing up.

That's a bit embarrassing for me to admit, since I'm writing this in middle age, by which time life is supposed to have smacked one's various immaturities and ideological obtusenesses out of you one way or another.

But no. We all have various idiocies lingering under the surface, left over from our younger years, many times having gotten lodged deep inside our craniums during our college years, or as a result of having spent our lives immersed in pop culture.

I have a lot fewer illusions after reading this book.

What illusions am I talking about? Oh, you know, the standard liberal package of ideas, such as that commerce is fundamentally evil; that ideally, we should all be living off the land; global corporations are the summit of iniquity, American values are imperialistic; those who bum around Europe with a Frisbee and a guitar are more in touch with their true natures; underground music is by definition more authentic; anything for the masses is to be eschewed, "despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible," (F. Dyson). That kind of stuff.

I would say that what this book is, broadly, is an attack on the Sixties and on radical leftists generally. But that's by implication: what the authors would probably claim is that this book is an exposure of the origins and fundamental silliness of such ideas as the anti-globalization movement, and how claims to countercultural legitimacy are really just the same game all over again.

An excellent job. Probably the best book I've read in the last two years.

There are, by the way, a couple of other books floating around out there on much the same theme. There's Diana West's recently minted "The Death of the Grown-Up," which is a good read but not revelatory, like this one was. Another one I admired tremendously was Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed," written in the 90s.

Yes, it's not often that a book helps you become more (there's no other word for it) mature. Immediately more serious and realistic, I mean. Heath and Potter's book did this by means of systematically taking some of my most cherished but unexamined ideas out for a ride, and either exposing their contradictions or seeing where they would logically take one.

This book did what it set out to do: it brings such ideas out into the open for a good whacking.

As Judge Louis Brandeis is supposed to have said, "Sometimes sunlight is the best disinfectant."

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 is 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. Particularly cultural lefties. The message of the book is not conservative unless you mainly think being "left-wing" means ear plugs and listening to punk and attending the college protests rallies and internet activism. The book champions more traditional left leaning or old school liberal, class-based politics that is focused less on "theory" and sex and more on "spreading the wealth" bread and butter issues...

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.

Reading this took me about 2 days. It starts out with a brilliant satire about Adbuster's branded sneaker plans and just keeps on going.

The authors write from a leftist perspective and regret that so many people think that pointless "rebellion", rather than activism, or even _voting_, is going to make a difference.

The gist is that the counterculture flatters itself in thinking that it will achieve anything by "sticking it to the man". The counterculture buys from companies and drives up their profits. Or they themselves turn into "the man", just like Orwell's animals end up as humans.

Another thread is criticism of the search for individuality and not "being part of the herd". As they point out, you wouldn't want to be a tourist in any country that will have tourists.

The idea is simple, brilliant, utterly funny and full of common sense. Living in Vancouver, it strikes very close to home in its criticism of self-important neo-hippies. Many of us will recognize some aspects of our behavior. I was a bit short on all the political and philosophical theory thrown about though.

Where the books falls somewhat short, as other reviewers have noted, is that the authors are just a wee bit prejudiced. For example "American Beauty" is derided as a narcissistic piece of thrash, celebrating immorality. Harsh, and typical of the sometime cheap and unjustified criticisms which they throw around. Thirty years from now, readers will be missing most ot their references to current artists and trends.

They are also judgmental against consumer tastes. If you have lots of disposable income, and are really into cars (I ain't), a BMW may not be a totally unwarranted choice. Disliking Celine Dion does not necessarily mean you are a snob either. She does have a beautiful voice, but I could care less about her music or themes.

What I don't criticize the book for is its lack of prescriptions. Everybody and his dog, on the left or right, has rolled out his solutions to all of society's ills. That was never their intention with this book.