Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises a puzzle: 　how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional?　

The Emotional Market offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of...