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Purpose – This chapter focuses on the status of Emile Durkheim's work in the United States, and on the prospects of its rehabilitation in light of the crisis of theory engendered by the critique of the theory of the sign and the paradox presented by the application of terms that invoke an inertial view of culture to everyday discourse.

Design/methodology/approach – How is it possible to reconcile the most general aspect of the internal life of the sociality that Durkheim places under the name of “solidarity,” with the theoretically expansive idea of social movements and with an idea of a generative culture radically different from the inertial institutional concept attributed to Durkheim? Our argument depends on conceiving of society as a course of activity, therefore, according to internal relations among subjectivities and objectivities. The main ontological assumptions of the human sciences are that humans and human affairs are essentially social and that sociality is irreducible and irrepressible. That difference lies at the heart of every attempt to identify something as unitary, complete, and stable.

Findings – Culture is tied to social movements, where the latter are thought of as expressions of the “becoming” of society. An understanding of the dynamics of culture requires revisiting dialectics and “internal relations.” The challenge to the idea of meaning based on the exchange of signs requires a reformulation of basic categories of human science. When the social is thought of as historical, it is necessary to think of history as immanent rather than as a condition or temporal course. Therefore, one is driven back to Marx by way of Hegel, where “history” refers to the contradictory character of whatever can be said about the social. It follows that every instance of unity is merely ostensible and cannot be relied on as a primary referent of a social science.

Research limitations/implications – “Culture” can no longer stand for something inert; rather, it appears as radically generative and reflexive. Further, it is not independent of economic reality, though it has the sort of weight that makes economism impossible.

Originality value – This chapter will stimulate more insightful appreciations of the work of Emile Durkheim, relative to his typical reception in U.S. social science. For instance, to reappropriate Durkheim for theoretical purposes, it is necessary to work through the problems raised by poststructuralism and the literature of ethnomethodology and its adjacent areas of research, with attention to the ontological presuppositions of theories of human affairs and the epistemological requirement of all the human sciences, that theory find itself in its object and its object in itself.

While David Hume and Adam Smith have tended to steal the Scottish Enlightenment limelight, Hamowy treats Ferguson as an equal player on this stage. One simple indicator that this attention to Ferguson is appropriate is the extraordinary popularity Ferguson enjoyed in Great Britain, on the continent, and, somewhat surprisingly, in North America during his own lifetime. Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) went through seven English editions in his own lifetime, as well as being translated into French, German, Italian and Russian. In the United States between 1777 and 1813, the Essay could be found in over one-fifth of catalogues and booklists. Ferguson's popularity in North America is surprising in that he opposed the American Revolution. In fact, he was paid by the British government to write in opposition to it. The Americans, he argued, did not have a good cause. They wished to escape paying for services, notably defense, that the British government was rendering to them. This is not to suggest that he was anything but sincere in his opposition. His position towards the colonists flowed naturally from his political principles. Ferguson rejected, for reasons similar to those of Smith and Hume, the standard theoretical doctrines of the radical Whigs from Locke onwards. There never was any such thing as an original “state of nature” as posited by Locke and many Americans. Mankind had always lived in groups. Nor did society and much less government arise out of a social contract based on consent. Government evolved over time in response to changing circumstances, chiefly economic circumstances. Laws evolved to curtail abuses of already existing social hierarchies. Ferguson did suggest that providing the Americans with better representation might be a good idea, but in his thinking there was no justification for an appeal to the “laws of nature” from the laws of Great Britain. The Americans mistook their mere interests for their rights. The French revolutionaries made even graver errors under the influence of an abstract doctrine of rights. Hamowy quotes Ferguson as describing the French Revolutionary forces as “the Antichrist himself in the form of Democracy & Atheism” (p. 176).

The most generally accessible and entertaining history of Britain remains Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and all that which, notwithstanding the title, begins in 55 B.C. with the landing of Julius Caesar in Britain, and not with the assumption of the English throne in 1066 by William, the Conqueror (Sellar & Yeatman, 1930, ch. 1). But even though there are only two dates in the book, it is the later date which is, as they rightly say, “memorable.” This used to be part of a shorthand history of Britain which every schoolboy knew: the seaborne invasion of England, the death of Harold with an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings, the addition of French to the mixture of Saxon, Norse and Latin that already made up the local language. When last summer I visited the French town of Bayeux so that I might at last view the tapestry about which I had read as a small boy, but in which the graphic evidence of Harold's demise is now the subject of some dispute, I discovered something my teachers had never told me. There in the record of the Tapestry is Harold swearing allegiance to William; so that when, two years later, Edward the Confessor died childless, William set sail to claim his inheritance. Or at any rate, that is what the French story is, based on existing Norman sources, of which the Bayeux Tapestry is an important component.

Duchamp caused a revolution in the art of the twentieth century with the readymade concept, and simultaneously he opened Pandora's Box, which converted art into a simulation and made it dependent on discursive practices. This degenerated into a deconstructive vulgate when, from the 1960s onwards, an ‘aesthetic of banality’ was accentuated and the media institutionalized the ‘guerrilla’ between the practices and the discourses. Art ‘wrecked’ in a regime of hyper-reality of the image, and the art paradigms and criteria shifted from aesthetics to the law of the financial markets. At the same time, the proliferation of coexisting cultural ideas and a revolving cultural miscegenation ended up splitting the kingdom of the art. In the art world today, there is a cleavage between artists: on one side, the adepts to the heteronomy (a line that was born with ready-made products), those who, following dominant rules, work for the market and the organizations; on the other side, those, more passionate, for whom art is a hermeneutics for self-knowledge. Meanwhile, Picasso's aura returns to the art scene, in a panorama that until now was adverse to him.

Based on the work of leading French and emerging French social scientists, this paper attempts to reactivate the field of Consumer Culture Theory throughout the proposal of alternative notional tools.

This paper takes a conceptual orientation that is based on the selection and organization of concepts, methodologies, and insights borrowed from French philosophers and social scientists.

The paper first points out the various French thought styles. Next, it highlights key intellectual ideas in French intellectual tradition that have arisen over the last 30 years and promote their implications for possible future researches on consumption and for a better political activism which would give more voice to consumption studies.

The paper attempts to categorize with a semiotic methodology, the panorama of French thought styles and proposes new concepts and angles to refound the analysis of consumption. Based on the questioning on common categories of CCT, it proposes original ideas, methods, and concepts borrowed from the French tradition to break up conventional and ethnocentric approaches by considering consumption beyond the sheer notion of culture.

It was with a certain amount of surprise mixed in roughly equal proportions with curiosity that I recently accepted the task of writing a review of a work, published in 2001, on the encounter between the Enlightenment (meaning the French Enlightenment) and postmodernism. Reading in the Scottish Enlightenment suggests a need to know something about the wider European context though the exclusivity of France as the Enlightenment or as the home of Enlightenment is no longer a sustainable proposition. The Scots, in their energetic Universities, were as much involved with applying Newton and developing Locke or extending Shaftesbury or countermanding Mandeville as they were with the continental philosophies. The proposition put to me, to persuade me to the task, was the work was likely to contain ideas that intellectual historians of economics might profit from. A reflection on the significance of two potentially conflicting sets of ideas ought to have significance for the study of 18th-century economics developed within the cultural context of wider Enlightenment thought.

David Hume's image, as produced by his fellow Scot, Allan Ramsey, is printed large on the hardback cover of David Hume's political economy. This handsome portrait captures Hume's confidence and intelligence and displays, in its scarlet cloth, fine lace and elaborately worked, golden trim, Hume as a successful philosophe, a man of knowledge and also of commercial success (a success of considerable psychological importance for Hume, and a source of pride) founded upon the literary works on which his left arm rests. Indeed, without the significant reference to the books, this could as well be the portrait of a Scottish merchant or affluent banker, both types ranked among his Edinburgh friends. Hume with no University post and no inherited income worth speaking of made the most of the commercial possibilities open to authorship. This is a refined, even luxurious painting, and brings together in one enduring image, at least for those in the know, Hume's notion of “luxury” or of “Refinement in the Arts” and the idea of virtue in commercial society. This is a fitting cover for a work that places Hume's political economy firmly in the contexts of his notion of a science of human nature and of the role of virtue in commercial society.