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"Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship" edited by David A. Crocker and Toby Linden is reviewed.

Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, edited by David A. Crocker and Toby Linden. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. 585 pp. $84.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-8476-8494-6. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8476-8495-4.

This volume collects papers presented at conference of the same name at the University of Maryland in 1994. It also includes several articles that were previously published, as well as a couple of new pieces that were not presented at the conference. According to the editors, the conference was held under the auspices of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Despite the emphasis on ethics, which was traditionally the exclusive domain of philosophers and theologians, the collection includes essays written by sociologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, marketers, and policy makers, in addition to the philosophers and theologians. While this book provides an astonishing array of perspectives on the topic, most of the essays do a fine job of connecting the practices of consumers to individual consumers themselves, other people, social institutions, and the environment.

This collection sets out to accomplish three broad intellectual tasks. First, the editors and contributors endeavor to define and distinguish different ways to think about consumption. Indeed, the essays in this volume span a vast intellectual terrain, from Mark Sagoff's piece on ecological economics to Colin Campbell's idealist sociology to Rabbi Eliezer Diamond's halakic approach to the ethical dimensions of consumption. While sociologists probably might not find anything new or groundbreaking here, this volume certainly opens up the discussion of consumption to a variety of interesting perspectives.

Second, the contributions to this book assess the causes and consequences of patterns of consumption in order to help people to distinguish "good consumption from bad" (p. 5). Again, the essays approach the problem of "reasonable consumption standards" (p. 3) from a variety of perspectives and at several levels of analysis. The papers in Part 6 address consumption as a problem of global inequality and worldwide environmental degradation, while other essays focus on consumption as a problem within the economic and social policies of nation-states. David Luban's "The Political Economy of Consumption" is noteworthy in this respect. Luban argues for the promise of "safe-growth" policies against the political and economic impossibilities of "no-growth" policies, and he does so within an international perspective, taking into account both the internal politics of nation-states and the ramifications of national-- state policies for relations between nation-states. Other essays, such as Colin Campbell's "Consumer Goods and the Goods of Consuming," focus more on why "modern individuals consume as they do," and therefore examine the ethics of consumers rather than propounding an "ethic of consumption." In fact, Campbell states bluntly that "I don't know whether consumption is good for us" (p. 151 ).

Finally, many of the essays provide recommendations for policy and evaluations of existing policies. The most concrete suggestions come from the more ecologically minded contributors-for example Robert Goodland's "The Case Against the Consumption of Grain-Fed Meat" and Luban's "Political Economy of Consumption." Nathan Keyfitz's "Consumption and Population" is also noteworthy in this respect. Keyfitz uses U.S. census data and statistics from the United Nations to provide a snapshot of the global condition of humanity and its environment, and he makes a few broad suggestions for improvement on the global scene without succumbing to missionary optimism, as some practitioners and scholars of development are apt to do.

Sociologists of consumption should read various essays in this volume. Michael Schudson, for example, in "Delectable Materialism: Second Thoughts on Consumer Culture," points out the strengths and shortcomings of several traditions of the criticism of consumerism. Schudson identifies what he labels as Puritan, Quaker, republican, and antibourgeois critiques of consumer culture and places them in their respective historical and rhetorical contexts. He presents a useful schema for classifying social and ethical thought on consumption, while eschewing the twin stupidities of moral absolutism and relativism devoid of intellectual purpose. Sociologists of consumption should also read the selections that deal with the global environmental ramifications of consumption, since much of the sociology of consumption either obsesses over the consumer cultures of national societies such as the United States and Great Britain or remains at a high level of theoretical abstraction. The environmentally minded essays in this volume provide a less parochial perspective and a few sources of descriptive data that might be useful in bringing the sociology of consumption to an empirical (or at least statistical) level. In addition, sociologists could learn from the political-economic pieces in this book that the regulation or promotion of consumption is a problem for, and between, states.