Consumerism is a central phenomenon of modern society. It can be explained by a hedonistic theory of social action, which is fundamentally different from utilitarian-based perspectives found in contemporary economic theory. Consumerism was a feature of late eighteenth-century English society, and has persisted until the present day. As the central study on this subject, by McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, has argued: ‘It will be one of the major burdens of this book to show that consumer behaviour was so rampant and the acceptance of commercial attitudes so pervasive that no one in the future should doubt that the first of the world's consumer societies had unmistakably emerged by 1800.’ Consumerism is a product of a romantic ethic, and thus can be traced back through the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Colin Campbell has provided a fascinating study of this period which traces the emergence of consumerism from the reaction to Calvinist orthodoxy in the late sixteenth century. The intellectual movements of the Cambridge Platonists, Latitudinarian theology, sentimentalism, Romanticism and the final emergence of aestheticism in the late nineteenth century all show that the relation between moral idealism and hedonism is not straightforward. Yet out of this tension there emerges the moral and social justification for consumerism. It is true that consumerism can simply be equated with a ‘soulless’ utilitarianism, but this ignores the subtle interplay of intellectual thought and popular taste in the preceding two centuries.