At the turn of the century, a battery of new intellectual and cultural currents came together to reorient society - Progressivism, Pragmatism, feminism, labour activism, and consumer culture. In this work, Livingston reads philosophers like John Dewey alongside activists like Jane Addams and finds in their ideas a similar and novel sense of the individual's place in the world. By drawing new connections between these developments, Livingston re-channels discussion on the coming of modernity.

At the turn of the century, a battery of new intellectual and cultural currents came together to reorient society - Progressivism, Pragmatism, feminism, labour activism, and consumer culture. In this work, Livingston reads philosophers like John Dewey alongside activists like Jane Addams and finds in their ideas a similar and novel sense of the individual's place in the world. By drawing new connections between these developments, Livingston re-channels discussion on the coming of modernity.

The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of...