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Capitalismo, consumo y autenticidad. Las emociones como mercancía
Este libro espera arrojar nueva luz sobre los modos en que la economía moral de las relaciones sociales organiza intercambios económicos a través de emociones. También nos ayuda a comprender cómo la economía moldea el tejido de nuestros mundos emocionales de una manera que muestra cómo las dicotomías entre racionalidad y emoción, y entre autenticidad y comodificación, se traducen efectivamente con fluidez y sin esfuerzo en prácticas de consumo. El commodity emocional ha volado por debajo del radar de las teorías del consumo, pero, como se intenta demostrar aquí, es uno de los hilos más fuertes para explicar el desarrollo del capitalismo a partir de mediados del siglo XX.
296 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
32 people are currently reading
630 people want to read
About the author
Eva Illouz
50 books644 followersEva Illouz (Hebrew: אווה אילוז) is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since October 2012 she has been President of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She is Bezalel's first woman president. Since 2015, Illouz has been a professor at Paris's School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales).
The research developed by Illouz from her dissertation onward focuses on a number of themes at the junction of the study of emotions, culture and communication:
The ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns
One dominant theme concerns the ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns, in the realms of both consumption and production.
Consuming the Romantic Utopia
Illouz's first book addresses a dual process: the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities. Looking at a wide sample of movies and advertising images in women’s magazines of the 1930s, Illouz finds that advertising and cinematic culture presented commodities as the vector for emotional experiences and particularly the experience of romance. Commodities of many kinds – soaps, refrigerators, vacation packages, watches, diamonds, cereals, cosmetics, and many others – were presented as enabling the experience of love and romance. The second process was that of the commodification of romance, the process by which the 19th-century practice of calling on a woman, that is going to her home, was replaced by dating: going out and consuming the increasingly powerful industries of leisure. Romantic encounters moved from the home to the sphere of consumer leisure with the result that the search for romantic love was made into a vector for the consumption of leisure goods produced by expanding industries of leisure.
Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul
In Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul Illouz examines how emotions figure in the realm of economic production: in the American corporation, from the 1920s onward emotions became a conscious object of knowledge and construction and became closely connected to the language and techniques of economic efficiency. Psychologists were hired by American corporations to help increase productivity and better manage the workforce and bridged the emotional and the economic realms, intertwining emotions with the realm of economic action in the form of a radically new way of conceiving of the production process. So whether in the realm of production or that of consumption, emotions have been actively mobilized, solicited and shaped by economic forces, thus making modern people simultaneously emotional and economic actors.
The role of popular clinical psychology in shaping modern identity
Illouz argues that psychology is absolutely central to the constitution of modern identity and to modern emotional life: from the 1920s to the 1960s clinical psychologists became an extraordinarily dominant social group as they entered the army, the corporation, the school, the state, social services, the media, child rearing, sexuality, marriage, church pastoral care. In all of these realms, psychology established itself as the ultimate authority in matters of human distress by offering techniques to transform and overcome that distress. Psychologists of all persuasions have provided the main narrative of self-development for the 20th century. The psychological persuasion has transformed what was classified as a moral problem into a disease and may thus be understood as part and parcel of the broader phenomenon of the medicalization of social life. What is common to theme 1 and theme 2 is that both love and psychological health constitute utopias of happiness for the modern self, that both are mediated through consumption and that both constitute horizons to which the modern self aspires. In that sense, one overarching theme of her work can be called
The research developed by Illouz from her dissertation onward focuses on a number of themes at the junction of the study of emotions, culture and communication:
The ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns
One dominant theme concerns the ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns, in the realms of both consumption and production.
Consuming the Romantic Utopia
Illouz's first book addresses a dual process: the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities. Looking at a wide sample of movies and advertising images in women’s magazines of the 1930s, Illouz finds that advertising and cinematic culture presented commodities as the vector for emotional experiences and particularly the experience of romance. Commodities of many kinds – soaps, refrigerators, vacation packages, watches, diamonds, cereals, cosmetics, and many others – were presented as enabling the experience of love and romance. The second process was that of the commodification of romance, the process by which the 19th-century practice of calling on a woman, that is going to her home, was replaced by dating: going out and consuming the increasingly powerful industries of leisure. Romantic encounters moved from the home to the sphere of consumer leisure with the result that the search for romantic love was made into a vector for the consumption of leisure goods produced by expanding industries of leisure.
Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul
In Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul Illouz examines how emotions figure in the realm of economic production: in the American corporation, from the 1920s onward emotions became a conscious object of knowledge and construction and became closely connected to the language and techniques of economic efficiency. Psychologists were hired by American corporations to help increase productivity and better manage the workforce and bridged the emotional and the economic realms, intertwining emotions with the realm of economic action in the form of a radically new way of conceiving of the production process. So whether in the realm of production or that of consumption, emotions have been actively mobilized, solicited and shaped by economic forces, thus making modern people simultaneously emotional and economic actors.
The role of popular clinical psychology in shaping modern identity
Illouz argues that psychology is absolutely central to the constitution of modern identity and to modern emotional life: from the 1920s to the 1960s clinical psychologists became an extraordinarily dominant social group as they entered the army, the corporation, the school, the state, social services, the media, child rearing, sexuality, marriage, church pastoral care. In all of these realms, psychology established itself as the ultimate authority in matters of human distress by offering techniques to transform and overcome that distress. Psychologists of all persuasions have provided the main narrative of self-development for the 20th century. The psychological persuasion has transformed what was classified as a moral problem into a disease and may thus be understood as part and parcel of the broader phenomenon of the medicalization of social life. What is common to theme 1 and theme 2 is that both love and psychological health constitute utopias of happiness for the modern self, that both are mediated through consumption and that both constitute horizons to which the modern self aspires. In that sense, one overarching theme of her work can be called
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 23, 2020
Ooookay. It never took me this long to finish a book. I do remember the beginning of the book best, as it was the best and most intruiging part, but adter that it went downhill. I was looking forward to reading the author's own studies and interesting thoughts on the influence of goods in our society. But the book was only a collection of studies by other authors, so you go through different kinds of writing and most of them were dry. My biggest issue was the language, so this might be my own fault, but the words they use slmetimes make it hard to understand the meaning, and I think those complicated words are not important if you want people to understand and enjoy a book. It wad too hard and too dry, sometimes I had do reread pages 3 times and sentences even more often. After a while I gave up and didn't touch the book for a month. I wantes to be done with it, because ai like to finish what I start and I rarely DNF books. This book was really bad. The topic is great, but unfortunately I still don't know what the book was about, and what its key message was.
December 17, 2025
Die Authentizitäts-Falle: Wenn das Gefühl zur Ware wird
Eva Illouz' „Wa(h)re Gefühle: Authentizität im Konsumkapitalismus“ ist eine zwingend notwendige soziologische Sezierarbeit über die vielleicht größte Illusion der Moderne: die Suche nach dem „wahren Gefühl“ in einer Welt, in der Waren Gefühle produzieren und Gefühle zu Waren werden. Die versammelten Beiträge enthüllen messerscharf, wie Slogans wie „Schrei vor Glück“ oder „Aus Freude am Fahren“ den zentralen Mechanismus des zeitgenössischen Kapitalismus illustrieren – die radikale Verschränkung von Emotionen und Konsumpraktiken. Illouz bietet eine umfassende Ethnographie dieser emotionalen Jagd – quer durch Tourismus, Musik und Sexualität –, um zu zeigen, dass die vermeintlich authentische Erfahrung, die wir suchen, gerade erst durch die Koproduktion von Gefühlen und Konsum erzeugt wird. So liefert das Buch einen entscheidenden Schlüssel zum Verständnis der modernen Identität und zur Kritik jener Warengefühle, die unser Subjekt permanent in eine Falle locken.
Eva Illouz' „Wa(h)re Gefühle: Authentizität im Konsumkapitalismus“ ist eine zwingend notwendige soziologische Sezierarbeit über die vielleicht größte Illusion der Moderne: die Suche nach dem „wahren Gefühl“ in einer Welt, in der Waren Gefühle produzieren und Gefühle zu Waren werden. Die versammelten Beiträge enthüllen messerscharf, wie Slogans wie „Schrei vor Glück“ oder „Aus Freude am Fahren“ den zentralen Mechanismus des zeitgenössischen Kapitalismus illustrieren – die radikale Verschränkung von Emotionen und Konsumpraktiken. Illouz bietet eine umfassende Ethnographie dieser emotionalen Jagd – quer durch Tourismus, Musik und Sexualität –, um zu zeigen, dass die vermeintlich authentische Erfahrung, die wir suchen, gerade erst durch die Koproduktion von Gefühlen und Konsum erzeugt wird. So liefert das Buch einen entscheidenden Schlüssel zum Verständnis der modernen Identität und zur Kritik jener Warengefühle, die unser Subjekt permanent in eine Falle locken.
April 18, 2023
I found this pretty empty. I agree that capitalism and neoliberalism commodify everything, including our emotions, and I wanted to see a more in-depth deconstruction of it and of the issues it creates than what most of this book does. The only section I found remotely does this is the last section on mental health, and it still doesn't do a great job.
August 28, 2023
Pretty dry and depressing and the critique was more descriptive than explanatory which I didn’t like :-( also feel like maybe we are all just thinking too hard and intellectualizing things unnecessarily cuz maybe people just want to live a simple happy life with sun and nice people and the world can’t be perfect and we do not have to critique it endlessly
April 15, 2023
Sehr gutes Buch.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews