Addiction as a feature of the free-market society
From dislocation to consumerism,
how does capitalism shape the human psyche?
Isaona Kherrour
Master’s degree of Political Science, Track Political Theory
Class Alternatives to Capitalism: Models of Future Society
Word count: 24 236
Supervisor: Annette Freyberg-Inan
Second reader: Chip Huisman
2 ABSTRACT
This thesis offers a perspective on addiction as being a symptom of the lack of social connection in our free-market society. This capitalist societal structure was shaped by the neoliberal rationality of the market, thus framing a social order inspired by individualism. By identifying social connection as required for self-fulfillment and contrasting it with the neoliberal mindset, a founding part of this thesis is dedicated to going through the process of dislocation that results from the lack of sociality in contemporary society. By linking this analysis to understanding consumerism as a tool for neoliberal governmentality, this thesis also aims at showing the compensation dynamic that links dislocation, addiction and consumerism. Indeed, consumerism is shown to shape and perpetuate addictive-like behaviour by being narrowly related to socialization and identity construction. This thesis draws on cognitive sciences to argue for a re-conception of addiction as finding its roots and solution in societal context.
3 CONTENTS
Abstract………..……2
Introduction………5
CHAPTER I – Theoretical Foundations……….…….8
I. Humans as social animals and the need of togetherness……….…….8
A. Power of speech and the creation of political space……….…….8
B. Primitive societies: from cooperation for survival to social belonging……….9
II. The neoliberal individualistic narrative confronting human sociality………...………..11
A. Founding principles of freedom and the economic rationality of liberalism………...……11
B. Shaping a social order from the heritage of liberal economic rationality………...……….12
C. The market rationality winning over human incertitude………...……14
Chapter conclusion………...…………...……15
CHAPTER II – Dislocation and Addiction………16
I. A dialogue between social identity and the self………..16
A. The neoliberal social order framing identities……….…………16
B. Contrasting self-identity and social identity: the dislocation phenomenon……….…18
II. Social bonding and drug addiction: a cognitive approach………...…….…19
A. The rat experiment: drug consumption vs. social interactions………19
B. A complementary experiment: the role of oxytocin release………20
Chapter conclusion………..………22
CHAPTER III - Consumerism and the Patterns of Addictive Behaviours……….………...24
I. Habit: Smoking areas in France……….……….25
A. The resources of habit in the addiction process……….………..25
B. Dedicating space for smoking, perpetuating addiction?………..……26
C. Public health vs. lobby interests………27
II. Panem et circenses: Food addiction and the physiologically addictive effects of sugar………28
A. The consequences of industrialized food consumption……….………29
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III. The profit chain: Retail therapy and neuromarketing………32
A. The emotional value of purchasing and the quest for personal identity………32
B. Targeting brains to create a desire of consumption………..………34
Chapter conclusion………..……….……35
CHAPTER IV – Curing Dislocation to Cure Addiction: Medicalization vs. alternatives……….………38
I. Pathologizing addiction: Missing the dislocation issue………..…………38
A. A medical business of treating symptoms………38
B. Drugs as self-medication: a hypothesis………39
II. Portuguese drug decriminalization policy and what we can learn from it………41
A. Rethinking the punitive society………42
B. The limits of demarginalization………...………43
III. Drugs to treat addiction: the alternative of psychedelics? ………...………...………44
A. The altered consciousness experience……….…………44
B. Exploring the self, reconnecting the self………..………46
Chapter conclusion………..………47
Conclusion………49
References……….52
5 INTRODUCTION
Addiction is a globalized issue that has been studied from a multiplicity of angles throughout history, but neither medicine nor sociology or psychology have reached an understanding of the addiction process that would be good enough to claim the discovery of an effective cure (Alexander, 2010). Nowadays, the issue of addictive behaviours is still not consensually explained by researchers, and the only healing approach we have found to this mass phenomenon is, paradoxically, applying case-to-case treatments and care (Fattorea, Dianab, 2016). Even the consideration of addiction itself does not reach consensus: The first time addiction was recognized as such was in 1956, when the American Medical Association declared that alcoholism was a disease, then leading the way to broaden this idea of illness to addiction itself.
This medicalized conception of addiction left a heritage of the issue as being physiological before being psychological, thus reducing the phenomenon of addiction to drug use only. However, we have witnessed during the past decades that the addiction process especially had psychological implications, as gambling, sexual behaviour, food, love relationships, internet use, video games, and even shopping are touched by the issue. Meanwhile, self-destructive practices such as cigarette consumption or alcohol abuse seem to be normalized, regarding the societal culture we have built around such addictive substances (Abbott, 2008). Even when public health is being endangered, this is looked at as individuals with addictive-like behaviours1 lacking self-control, thus presenting a failure of the will, or akrasia
(Roberts, 2017), despite negative implications for both mental and physical health.
By crossing medical, psychological, sociological and philosophical perceptions on addiction, I finally understand addiction as being defined as: the perpetuation of a dependence relationship to a practice, a substance or a person, that includes a craving for consuming the object of desire despite negative consequences for the individual and/or their environment. This compulsive maintenance of such a behaviour means that individuals sacrifice a part of their negative liberty (Berlin, 1958),2 because they are dependent to their own desire of perpetuating its consumption. The
self-destructive part of addiction appears when the addiction process, which also can be understood as a ritual or a habit of consuming, is desired strongly enough to become excessive.
The first question that rises from these observations and which shapes the conceptualization of the topic is: Why would individuals lose part of their liberty, endanger themselves and/or their environment, and still fail to quit addiction? From my own experience and observation of people around me suffering from some types of addiction, my first hunch
1 I am using the term addictive-like to refer to both drug and non-drug addiction.
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about this issue was that addiction at its roots must have a societal explanation. Therefore, the first aim of this theoretical thesis is to offer a perspective on addiction as being a feature of the free-market society it emerged from. I define the free-market society as being the type of society that results from the capitalist system following the neoliberal economic principles of free trade and private property obeying the dynamic of production and consumption for growth. They imply the political principles of individual freedom and self-responsibility, leading the way for individualism to be a preponderant societal value (Laval, 2018). Regarding these founding principles, this thesis studies how and why they would have led so many individuals to develop addictive-like behaviour.
To establish the link between neoliberalism and the process of shaping addiction, I argue that the founding principles of the free-market society created a social order that does not fit the human needs of social bonding and belonging, which appear to be necessary conditions for self-fulfilment. In this way, the multiplicity of mechanisms that a lack of social belonging implies -such as the construction of personal identity or the nature of social interactions- lead me to focus a founding part of my study on the phenomenon of dislocation (Polanyi, 1944). This phenomenon occurs when individuals’ lack of social integration prevents them from building a personal identity coherent with their social identity.
Hence, a theoretical bridge is created in this thesis between dislocation and addiction. Indeed, the heart of this research lies in understanding to what extent the issue of dislocation alters individuals’ addictive-like behaviours: Being dislocated is a clue for a lack of social belonging, unstable personal identity construction, hence leaving empty an important part of the individual’s self-fulfilment in their societal environment. By using Bruce Alexander’s (2010) experiments and theories, I argue that addiction fills the emptiness dislocation leaves.
To do so, the methodological approach I will be basing this thesis on is theoretical-argumentative and based on secondary literature. Moreover, I have the ambition to study the topic beyond the field of political science by following a cognitive science reasoning. I will be linking psychology, biology and neuroscience to social sciences, for a fuller understanding of the meaning of addictive-like behaviour regarding the dislocation phenomenon. Such a topic, in my opinion, needs a multi-disciplinary approach, as it aims at offering a perspective on addiction as being a physiological and psychological set of symptoms of a social dislocation phenomenon created by the individualistic neoliberal social order.
To better understand in which ways dislocation is being expressed via addiction, I need to link its emergence and existence with the free-market society. Regarding the economic neoliberal principles of growth that rule the dynamic of social interactions (Foucault, 1978), one element appears to be at the heart of the understanding of addiction as the symptom of dislocation: consumerism. Indeed, the neoliberal system relies for its perpetuation on individuals to perpetuate the rational dynamic of production/consumption. Consequently, as we are constructed and socialized within
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the neoliberal structure of society (Bourdieu, 1980), consuming is what we do best and most: cigarettes, food, and shopping will be illustrations of this theory. I will argue that, because the free-market society needs consumerism to perpetuate itself, it is towards consumption that our need for compensating the lack created by dislocation is being directed. Meanwhile, the pattern of the creation of addictive behaviour lies in the way and the quantity we consume. Hence the research questions this thesis aims at answering: How does the neoliberal mindset create a need of consumption? How does it lead to addictive behaviours?
To answer these questions, I will first establish the theoretical foundations necessary to the study of this topic, by focusing on understanding human sociality as being in contrast with the neoliberal individualistic narrative. This first part will open the way towards a further analysis of the link between dislocation and addiction, keeping the need for sociality as the cornerstone of the creation of such issues. I will continue the analysis by identifying consumerism as the main resource of power of neoliberal governmentality. The issues that will rise from this analysis will allow me to critique the consumerist mindset, by understanding that consumerism itself becomes addictive. Then, in light of considering consumption as a tool for perpetuating the free-market society at the cost of addictive-like behaviour, I will take a step back from the cumulated analysis to get back to the dislocation/addiction dialogue. I finally criticize a misconception on addiction while offering two alternatives to potentially solve the issue: one having public policy implications, the other exploring the psychological part of the addiction phenomenon.
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CHAPTER I
Theoretical foundations
This first chapter contains three parts: two theoretical building blocks and one where they will be in dialogue. They are necessary for setting the theoretical foundations I will be basing my thoughts on during the whole reflection of this thesis. Indeed, my ambition is to build conceptual bridges between neoliberalism and the phenomenon of addiction to be able to answer the questions: How does the neoliberal social order create a need of consumption? How does it lead to addictive behaviours? These bridges are made from the idea that humans, when socially detached from each other, develop psychological externalities.4 Thus, to properly build them, I need to show how and why humans need to evolve
in a social space for their own well-being. To do so, I will observe the emergence and complexification of human sociality in society. Parallel to that, I also need to analyse what neoliberal principles are made of, and how and why they are incompatible with the social conditions for human well-being. The third part of this first chapter will lead the way to the heart of my research to better understand where the phenomenon of addiction is located within this field of tension between humans’ sociality and neoliberal’s individualism.
I. Humans as social animals and the need of togetherness
From ancient political philosophy to contemporary studies on human sociality, this chapter aims at showing that the evolution of humans’ social interactions leads us to the understanding that we are social animals whose self-fulfilment considerably relies on social integration and belonging. The first part of this section offers a first step in shaping the idea that the interactive skills of human beings lead to the creation of societies.
A. Power of speech and the creation of political space
It seems so natural that the mode of communicating between humans is through the use of words that we are likely not to question the meaning of this practice. Our species, among others, uses shared forms of language that characterise social interactions. For a lot of these species, the usefulness of communicating especially emerges when it is a necessity: to defend their territory, to warn against a danger or for courtship rituals.5 Some other species have more
4 Externalities are the unwanted consequences of an action. They can be positive or negative. As mentioned in the introduction, externalities
are in this research rather understood as negative unintended consequences.
5 This is a claim that I justify by the significant number of documentaries on animal communication that I have watched. I would
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complex modes of communicating that allow them to exchange a broader range of information, and not only necessary information related to physiological and safety needs (Maslow, 1954).6 As for us, the humans, we acquire the skill of
words as we are taught to understand and to speak; and most of us are also taught to write and to read.
This cultural acquisition is the foundation stone of the creation of our sociality. This idea was already studied in ancient political thought. Aristotle7 wrote that our differentiation as humans rested on the fact that our use of words allowed
the emergence of complex political spaces. Indeed, the birth of the political interactions between humans relied on the fact that our mode of communicating allows for a multiplicity of domination dynamics (Bourdieu, 1982). We were predators to each other as much as we were prey. Words are a main resource of power between humans. Speech creates a possibility of interacting beyond the dominating/dominated dynamic of natural selection. Regarding this, Aristotle was led by his reflections to the idea that the birth of human language was inherent to our political nature. Indeed, there would be no need for interacting if humans were meant to be lonely creatures. This very first and simple argument inspires the idea that humans are “social animals”, thus needing a social space to draw the meaning of their existence from. This concept enables the study of the purpose of living in societies.
“By aggregating, penetrating into each other, merging, individual souls give birth to a being, psychic if you like, but which constitutes a psychic individuality of a new kind, within the whole”8
Durkheim, E. (2014). The rules of sociological method: and selected texts on sociology and its method. Simon and Schuster.
B. Primitive societies: from cooperation for survival to social belonging
This idea of society as resulting from the addition of individual consciousnesses enables a holistic vision of human togetherness as well as it emphasises the spiritual dimension of the emergence of societies (Durkheim, 1895).9 The
essence of human nature has been studied from a multiplicity of angles that include the idea that humans need the collective. Indeed, humans need the other10 to locate and identify themselves within this collectiveness. What is called
the process of socialisation shows that each individual is a product of their environment (Bourdieu, 1980). As we are
6 Reference: Maslow pyamid. Maslow, A. (1954), Motivation and Personality
7 Modrak, Deborah K. W. 2001. Aristotle’s Theory of Language and Meaning. Cambridge University Press. 8 Durkheim, E. (1895), The rules of sociological methods
9 I am using the word spiritual as Durkheim mentions the human soul. I especially like this definition of society, as most of the sociological
definitions of what is a society rather use facts without ever referring to the role of the human psyche in the creation of togetherness.
10 I would rather have used the word autrui in French, whose meaning rather considers that the other exists independently from your existence,
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taught to behave according to the rules of the society we live in, the purpose of such a process is to enable individuals to integrate in the given environment, to form part of it and thus evolve in harmony with it. This is what forms the dynamic of a human life, as it structures it within an already existing community.
Indeed, the construction of the individual identity relies on the ability of humans to construct themselves through either mimetics or by contrast (Malewska-Peyre, 1991) from other individuals of the same community, thus the purpose of your existence is given by your role in the community. In hunter-gatherer societies, women would rather gather, men would rather hunt,11 and the general structure of sociality is driven by the necessity of surviving together by producing
(Clastres, 1972). In tribal societies, you would identify by contrast from the chief: it is social status that would drive you to integrate into the range of the dominated or the one of the dominating.
As we go deeper and deeper into the complexification of the nature of the role people have in society, it is noticeable that the dynamic of survival slowly turns into a dynamic of living independently from natural selection. As humans start settling in a favourable environment for long-term living, agriculture societies emerge, thus leaving the possibility for each individual to locate themselves within the community through more nuanced roles. You would now have the possibility to integrate yourself into the whole by gathering, hunting, but also by cooking and building. In Western contemporary societies, human existence starts with the political structure of education: being a child in need to be socially educated (De Beauvoir, 1949).12 In this way, you would mime the most common behaviours of the social
environment you evolve in, and later identify yourself by contrasting yourself from what is not part of this familiar environment (Sartre, 1944).13 As such, integrating yourself within a community relies on more and more parameters.
It used to be driven by necessary vital needs. The emergence of our contemporary type of society has emancipated us from natural selection, thus leaving the space for personal -identity to be constructed by more complex elements of socialisation (Bourdieu, 1980),
Indeed, when survival determines the dynamic of human life, humans would integrate into the community, as their social status is based on their usefulness in the production process (hunting, gathering; leading, following; cooking, building). Thus, these forms of social structure rely on the nature of their economies (Durkehim, 1922; Weber, 1922).When production equals consumption, the economy follows the pattern of subsistence economy. This form of economy relies on the exploitation of natural resources and on commoning them. A few hours of work each day from each individual of the collective allows the production of enough physiological and safety resources to live in
11 As a concern for feminism, I need to mention the fact that this historicity of gender roles left some heritage on our contemporary gender
inequalities (De Beauvoir, S. (1949), The Second Sex).
12 That drives us back to the matter of being taught to speak.
13 The main inspiration for this argument is Sartre, J-P. (1944), Existentialism is humanism. He theorises that human nature relies on a
multiplicity of roles you would adopt by contrasting yourself to who you are and who you are not. For instance, working as a waiter defines who you are at the moment you endorse this role.
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autonomy. This form of economy ensures that the consumption equals the subsistence need of each and every one: no
surplus is produced,14 and the concept of trading does not emerge (Clastres, 1972).15 This pattern leaves the space for
people to take more time for the community and facilitates social integration. Each social action of each individual is determined by some rationality in favour of the whole, because everyone’s individual interest is determined by the need for cooperation. The sociality dimension of humans reinforces and allows prosperity, as the wellness at the individual scale leads to the well-functioning of the society they belong to. The individual and the common merge and give sense to one another.
What emerges from the previous analysis is that human sociality is inherent to the evolution of humans in their environment. Social interactions were based on the need of producing to survive, allowing each individual of the community to find their role and stick to it to shape the dynamic of social cooperation. Social integration results from this, a common sense of belonging emerges. In non-monetary systems (such as the subsistence type of economy), the need for cooperation to produce in order to survive ensures the integration of individuals. As their own interests merge into the common interest, the meaning of human sociality takes a togetherness turn. But as the economy becomes an economy of profit,16 the political space that determines the social interactions evolves alongside it.
II. The neoliberal individualistic narrative confronting human sociality
Regarding the previous analysis, I shall now further study how and to what extent the founding values of the neoliberal type of society are in contrast with human processes of construction and socialisation. To do so, I will first introduce the liberal heritage that shaped neoliberal principles of the free market. Furthermore, I will analyse how these principles rely on transforming the social order to maintain the functioning of the free-market economy, and why this is confronting human sociality.
A. Founding principles of freedom and the economic rationality of liberalism
As the political thought of liberalism emerges during the Age of Enlightenment, Locke raises the problematic of human freedom and considers that the only way for humans to reach it would be through the idea of property-owning. Natural
14 Marx considered subsistence economy as a primitive Marxism (Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy, trans. B. Fowkes
(New York, 1977),
15 Clastres studied what he called primitive societies, explaining that feudality emerged when people started producing surplus and then wished
to trade it. Because of the need of moving the production from one place to another for the trade to be conducted, social interactions need more and more structure. This is what partly explains the emergence of institutional structures, hence the creation of the State (Clastres, P., Hurley, R., & Stein, A. (1977). Society against the State (p. 131). Oxford: Blackwell.)
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resources belonging to the earth, the only way to appropriate them in a fair way is, according to him, through a mechanism of labour-reward. Following this logic would mean that the work you are giving in order to produce a natural product should lead you to consume it yourself, as your personal reward.
This would enable you to treat yourself independently, thanks to the property you earned, leading the way to your individual freedom. This idea, when applied to a globalised economic system, gives birth to classical economic liberalism that follows the same ambition of human individual freedom through labour and property-owning. Becoming the cornerstone of the capitalist system, this economic system slowly turned into a new way of conceiving trade, obeying the principles of the free market. The invisible hand and the laisser-faire doctrine (Smith, 1759) follow the idea that the addition of individual interests would lead to common prosperity thanks to the independence of the market. But there is a failure of togetherness in this way of thinking, as this perception of individual interest is driven by the idea of the homo economicus, whose only dynamic lies in the pursuit of their own interest without consideration for a sense of collectiveness (Pareto, 1906). In economics, this is translated through the rejection of any form of political intervention, here considered as an obstacle to this freedom seeking. In other words, the "liberal rationality" insists on the need for "less government” (Foucault, 1978). It is a matter of obstructing what obstructs freedom.
B. Shaping a social order from the heritage of liberal economic rationality
In Western societies, as governmentality implies the power of the State, this need for less government leads to lessening the power of the State. However, the governing power at the top of the hierarchical power structure of the State would not give up on their power of influence on society (Lukes, 1974). This is where classic liberalism encounters its limits, allowing the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Understood as a historical moment of society rather than purely an economic structure,17 neoliberalism does not simply advocate the independence of the market. It rather promotes
the extension of the economic model to all spheres of social interactions (Laval, 2018). It no longer refers only to an economic dynamic based on the freedom of individuals, counting on the fact that the pursuit of individual interest would lead to a common economic welfare. It rather is an "art of governing to the rationality of the governed
themselves” (Foucault, 1978). In this way, neoliberalism needs individual rationality to be at the heart of society. It
needs this rationality logic to expand itself because it is through the use of the individual’s rationality that the neoliberal system is legitimated and then perpetuated by the individuals themselves.
17 The idea being that if neoliberalism was purely an economic structure, it would be likely to fall apart during economic crisis. The strength
of neoliberalism being that its narrative shaped people’s mindset in a way of understanding their interactions as being profit-driven. Therefore, it is humans themselves that become the guarantors of neoliberalism.
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Bourdieu (1980) explained that neoliberalism changed the social order in Western societies by changing the values of human sociality. Indeed, social capital18 becomes a means for the neoliberal profit-driven state of mind. This erases
the sense of togetherness without people realising it, as it is part of the narrative they were taught to assimilate to shape their rationality (Foucault, 1978). By depicting neoliberalism as a conservative revolution,19 Bourdieu denounces that
the rules of efficiency regulating the market entered the social sphere, turning individuals themselves into a multiplicity of capital competing with each other. This is where Foucault identifies a “great transformation” of society thanks to a neoliberal “discursive formation”. In other words, this “set of ideas and practices with particular conditions of existence, which are more or less institutionalised, but which may be only partially understood by those that they encompass” (Gill, 1995) turned the dynamic of human interactions based on cooperation into a dynamic of
competitivity. Indeed, by placing individual rationality and the quest for personal interest at the heart of the society
dynamic, the principles of the free market are socially applied.20
Given that it is human interactions that create any economic dynamic, neoliberalism, to survive, needs to lead the construction of individuals’ identities to follow a pattern favourable to its maintenance. In a utilitarian way of thinking, this allocation of roles, indeed, is a pragmatic way of shaping a social order. Creating norms amounts to creating points of reference that help shape a collective imagination of society and ensure its prosperity without people questioning it, as it is part of their identity (Fraser, 2011). In other words, the establishment of common social rules supports the creation of organised patterns where roles are displayed in a way that allows societal interactions to be rationally in favour of economic growth. The fact that the roles are distributed ensures the functioning of the capitalist principles, because in the neoliberal regulation of society, it allows a global economic division of work. Indeed, capitalism, in its primary definition, refers to economic and social mechanisms in which the source of income generally does not come directly from labour (Marx, 1867). Thus, perpetuating capital creation is a matter of maintaining wealth between generations. That is exactly where the construction of allocated social roles appears to be a necessary condition for prosperity. This pattern follows the primitive functioning of survival of the species: for instance, men work, women care (Kabeer, 1996). They cooperate and they reproduce themselves, ensuring the reproduction of capital. Generalising this way of functioning to a whole society finally creates a global norm, a social order based on the predefined roles of each and every one. In other words, this delegation of work follows a binary reasoning where social integration is
18 Bourdieu defines social capital as the use of social connexions as resources for profit.
19 What he means by invoking this concept is that the reform of classic liberalism in favour of neoliberalism marked a dissimulated political
shift to the right. Neoliberalism was presented as being the ideology at the intersection of liberalism and socialism, because the quest of freedom did not necessarily include the rejection of political power anymore. He said that neoliberals were presenting themselves as progressives when, in fact, they were recycling old rightist theories. Moreover, at his time, during the 80s, he also claimed that the fact that neoliberals proclaimed themselves as progressives protected neoliberalism from a lot of critics.
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reduced to the goal of production, not for people themselves, but for a general capitalist system obeying the rules of the neoliberal rationality principles.
C. The market rationality winning over human incertitude
Thus, any action is rational if it responds to a quest for the ultimate end of satisfaction: rationality masters social actions. Alongside this idea, the promotion of individual responsibility is emphasised. Although the individual is not master of the results of his actions, he is still responsible for his rational reasoning (Gill, 1995). The behaviour of a person with a mental disorder, drug or alcohol addiction is more easily incriminated, since the neo-liberal mentality based on individualism and rationality ignores psychological externalities, as they are intrinsically irrational. Neoliberalism only sees through its own perspective, and humans evolving in the neoliberal society are surrounded by the invisible: they know neither the consequences nor the conditions of their actions.
Foucault thought that, in this perspective, it is only the rational interests that are the "phenomena of the political space", in other words, the phenomena that drive social interactions. If we are unaware of the secret of our actions,21 we can
still affirm that the individual always seeks to maximize profit and to diminish pain. It would therefore be senseless to assign a common goal to individual actions, and thus to subject liberties to an end that would go beyond the generalized pursuit of interest. This idea justifies the promotion of economic behaviour as a model for social interactions.
"In the order of the market, each person is led, by the gain, which is visible to him, to serve needs which are invisible to him"
Foucault M. (1978), Naissance de la biopolitique. Gallimard:Paris.
The market is the only place of rational articulation between the pole of certainty of the action (its origin in the search for interest) and our ignorance about the consequences of this action. These unexpected consequences that it is not possible to anticipate are called externalities. This is why it is not enough to disqualify humans in the neoliberal narrative by sending them back to their selfishness, but rather we must consider them as the product of a system that erases the meaning of the collective in favour of a quest for individual interests that one could not clearly identify but still pursues blindly. Adding this idea to the fact that this economically-driven way of reasoning, by erasing the sense
21 In other words, “Men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined” Spinoza, B. (1992). Ethics:
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of togetherness, erases social integration and sense of belonging, this implies reducing the field of action of social power and transferring it to the individuals themselves. Thus, the individuals carry the burden of directing themselves without social structure to guide the meaning of their existences among the existence of a collective they can no longer integrate into.
Chapter conclusion
What emerges from the previous analysis is that humans are social animals whose life dynamic makes sense and is fulfilling in a social space. Following this reasoning, self-fulfilment inherently results from the need for social cooperation in order to survive collectively. Indeed, the social response to this need for collectiveness created the value of togetherness between individuals, allowing each and everyone to integrate into the whole by taking on social roles useful to the maintenance of the collective. Individual rationality, in the sense, was motivated by a collective interest that echoes individual interest.
This social dynamic used to be driven by the model of subsistence economy,22 which was slowly replaced by the
classical liberal type of political economy as the desire for property-owning and profit came to reign. As classical liberalism rejected most political intervention, state power would have to be considerably reduced: neoliberalism emerged, aiming at adding flexibility to this economic pattern while emphasizing the principle of competition to ensure economic growth. What used to be subsistence economy turned into a quest for more and more profit, shaping the values of the capitalist system. Since then, neoliberal individualism has emerged with a goal inherited from classic liberalism: freeing people from a way of life focused on survival and shaping a system of laisser-faire founded on the use of rationality. However, rationality, in the neoliberal mindset, is used as a tool of governmentality, ensuring prosperity and economic growth by instrumentalizing social interactions.
The starting point of society used to be the need for sociality to create economic welfare. It is now the quest for economic growth that masters social interactions: Neoliberalism shapes individual rationality to drive people to be the gears of its functioning. Sociality is economically oriented, and the value of togetherness slowly erased in favour of a competitive mindset. Individuals do not integrate in harmony into the whole, but rather became an assembly of pieces forming the capitalist system that relies on the neoliberal principles. The next chapter is dedicated to the understanding of how the phenomenon of dislocation arises from this analysis, and how addiction appears to compensate dislocation.
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CHAPTER II
Dislocation and addiction
In this chapter, I will further explain the social disintegration that results from this free-market economy-oriented mindset. I will introduce the concept of dislocation to better understand how it gave birth to this form of social alienation, and then explain why and how this dislocation leads the way to addictive behaviours.
I. A dialogue between social identity and the self
In this section, I will elaborate the idea that the construction of one’s identity relies on one’s societal environment. Thus, by evolving within the free-market society, individuals’ identity construction follows the pattern of what such a type of society needs to be perpetuated. Keeping in mind the neoliberal individualistic narrative, as studied in chapter 1, I shall now argue that the neoliberal social order dislocated the construction of individuals’ identity, which results in the phenomenon of dislocation. Then, I will show that addiction is a compensation process to this dislocation.
A. The neoliberal social order framing identities
“[Neoliberal economy is] a set of interconnected and self-regulating markets in which buyers and sellers freely interact without the need for substantial government regulation [… and] markets ensure mutually advantageous exchanges and the efficient allocation of economic resources.” Stilwell, F. (2006), Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Idea
The terms buyers and sellers as used by Stilwell provide insight in the allocated roles of individuals within and for the neoliberal economic system. This binary way of conceiving sociality between individuals gives birth to a free-market society founded on the idea of efficiency in favour of obtaining profit from economic resources (Stilwell, 2006). Yet social interactions being shaped by a profit-driven state of mind is not sufficient yet to explain the impact of this dynamic on social integration. This is where Polanyi’s theory of the “great transformation” (1944) of the nature of social interactions intervenes. The issue being that this “sellers and buyers” pattern is not limited to money-earning activities: it became a way of living, shaping individuals’ identities (Sartre, 1944; Reith, 2004). Indeed, the
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autoregulation mechanism of the free market, combined with globalisation and mass consumption (Gill, 1995),
replaced the business dynamic of people interacting for their own offering of goods and services with a business dynamic of goods and services needing people to interact as agents serving those goods and services. In other words, autoregulation led social exchanges to be depersonalised: Corner shops where the cashier was known by the local inhabitants are not so common anymore in areas enclosed within the neoliberal economic scheme.25 The rise of
anonymity in this buyers-sellers dynamic restrains the possibility of social bonding. It finds its origins in the idea that
individuals are replaceable because the nature of their economic role is limited to interaction in a given logic of give and take, supermarkets being a good illustration: people are identified and approached by their function,26 what you
do becomes who you are.
This phenomenon of neoliberal globalisation finally leads to a social pattern wherein an individual’s social identity is often reduced to their function in economic society (Fraser, 2011). Consequently, identities lose their singularity and are uniformized: they are defined as the intersection of a plurality of ‘social boxes’. Indeed, what identifies us in the globalised social reality depends on which status we have, and this is related to sex, nationality, marital status, socio-professional category and other ‘boxes’ determining who we are among “a variety of marketed options” (Rose, 1999). Social identity, thus, can be understood as created by ticking boxes and identifying the resulting combination as the “types of person” it is possible to be in the eyes of society. This allows every person to be more or less easily categorised, thus making intelligible and conceivable the creation of individuals’ identities.
In this way, personal identity lies in a money-earning functional status in which individuals recognise each other by denomination, but at the same time lies in the addition of ‘box’ information that, when added together, forms one societal identity among a range of possible other combinations. Profiles on social media, dating applications, or job applications would be examples of this concept: you are defining who you are by introducing yourself as being, for instance, a 37-year-old single Belgian woman engineer. In the words of Foucault (1973), individuals being at the intersection of social boxes should be understood as individuals being subject to a form of governmentality of identities. The “construction of subjects” allows a control of the patterns of identities that drives the individuals away from their freedom to choose outside of Rose’s so-called marketed options.
25 The exception being the model of countryside villages where social connexion still occurs and corner shops are still culturally present. 26 For instance, it is common to denominate a person by the job they have, i.e. their function in the system: “the cashier”, “the security guard”,
“the pharmacist”. These are examples that illustrate the narrative we use to denominate people by their function, hence reducing their identity to their economic role.
18 B. Contrasting self-identity and social identity: the dislocation phenomenon
This ticking boxes is a way to give an idea to others of what type of person you are. Thus, it is possible to create a social self, i.e. creating who you are allowed to be, according with what is conceivable in social reality’s collective
imagination. “Everyone can be anyone” would illustrate this idea of being able to create a narrative of the self
(Giddens, 1991). The issue being that this narration is likely to unconsciously create and maintain an illusion about who we think we are depending on who we introduce ourselves as being-like.27 This pattern of cognitive dissonance
follows the pattern of alienation (Marx, 1867). Thus, this form of alienation rather is a social alienation that disconnects our social self from our self: this is what Alexander (2010) depicts as dislocation.
“Dislocation is the condition of great numbers of human beings who have been shorn of their cultures and individual identities by the globalization of a free-market society in which the needs of people are subordinated to the imperatives of markets and the economy.
Dislocation afflicts both people who have been physically displaced, such as economic immigrants and refugees, and people who have remained in place while their cultures disintegrated around them.
Dislocation occurs during boom times as well as recessions, among the rich as well as the poor, among capitalists as well as workers.
Today, dislocation threatens to become universal, as global free-market society undermines ever more aspects of social and cultural life everywhere.” Alexander B. K. (2009), A Change of Venue for Addiction: From Medicine to Social Science
To recapitulate, the neoliberal narrative offers to society a predetermined vision of who it is possible to be. Humans create their selves according to social boxes that help each and everyone to typify their existence among the existence of the others in this societal structure (Rose, 1999). As Alexander (2010) argues, it is neoliberal globalisation that leads to this pattern, shaping individuals’ identities and thus disconnecting them from the possibility of discovering their own selves. This form of alienation, in contrast to the Marxist concept of alienation, does not only apply to workers, as Alexander mentions: this social alienation is as much globalised as globalisation itself. Its explicit dimension lies
27 Singularising self-identity, by contrast, needs close social relations, because intimacy and trust are a way to express personality in a deeper
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in its behavioural expression.29 In other words, the phenomenon of dislocation is expressed through certain kinds of
behaviours. Those behaviours psychologically aim at compensating (Backman, Dixon, 1992) the lack that is created by this social disintegration. Addictive behaviours are one such set of behaviours.
To better understand how dislocation results from a gap between personal identity and social identity and how addictive behaviours are a compensation mechanism, Alexander (2001) conducted an experiment on rats he called the Rat Park.30
I will describe it in the following section.
II. Social bonding and drug addiction: a cognitive approach
This section aims at further arguing the connection between lack of social bonding and the dislocation phenomenon, by using cognitive science arguments to strengthen the theory that addiction is a symptom of social disconnection. By using the experiment of the founding father of the concept of dislocation, Bruce Alexander, I will analyse to what extent social interactions are being preferred over drug consumption. Then, to further interpret the results of Alexander’s experiment, I will be using biological analyses that show how social bonding releases a stress regulating hormone that individuals suffering from addictive troubles seem to be missing.
A. The rat experiment: Drug consumption vs. social interactions
During the late 1970s, as the use of drugs increased considerably,31 scholars became interested in understanding the
mechanisms that turned regular drug consumption into excess, habituation, thus slowly creating an addiction pattern. The physiological explanation that drugs used on a regular basis would imply physical addiction more than psychic addiction encountered more and more doubt, as regular drug users did not necessarily become drug addicts. Thus, to exclude the physiological factor from the understanding of the birth of drug addiction, Alexander and his team of researchers designed an experiment on rats that followed this process:32
29 In other words, I understand dislocation as a phenomenon, and addiction as being a social fact that allows dislocation to be concretely
expressed in social reality. This means that dislocation is the issue, and addiction is the symptom of this issue.
30 Artist Stuart McMillen illustrated the rat park experiment in a cartoon. Highly recommended to better understand the ins and outs of the
experiment http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/.
31 This period of history, often referred to as “club drug”, was marked by the emergence of electronic dance music and the synthetizing of new
party drugs such as MDMA and LSD.
32 This explanation is a recap of the experiment, based on the data I found in Nature neuroscience articles: Alexander (2010) and Ross Perlman
(2019). They related that many of the anti-drug policies that were conducted during the 60s were “scare tactics”, i.e. policies aiming at scaring people about drugs, for example by saying consuming weed would lead to sterility. In the late 1970s, more and more people started to question these policies after Chill and Duff (1981) released their book The Truth About Drugs – The Body, Mind, and You. By then, polls showed an increase of 12% of people trying, at least, marijuana.
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Rats of group A are individually locked in a tiny cage. They are isolated from other rats and cannot even see each other. There are two bottles of water in each of their cages. One is filled with mineral water, the other one is filled with opioids in the water.
Rats of group B are locked together in a large cage that rather looks like a colourful park full of games. They can freely interact with each other. There are two bottles of water in their cage. One is filled with mineral water, the other one is filled with morphine in the water.
Most of the rats of group A end up drinking the drugged water, pushing themselves farther and farther until they die by self-poisoning.
Most of the rats of group B don’t pay attention to the drugged water and chose social interaction over drug consumption.
This experiment was meant to show that social interactions are preferred over drug consumption (see Annex, Figure 1), and that social disintegration is a main factor that leads to drug consumption, as a compensation. However, this rat experiment is hardly sufficient to show the connection between drug consumption and the complexity of sociality. Indeed, it shows that addictive behaviours are encouraged by social disintegration, but the social mechanism of rats, in this experiment, relies on having simple interactions within a social settings controlled by the researchers. By contrast, social mechanisms of humans do not only rely on gathering and spending good times together. Humans’ social mechanisms, under the prism of the neoliberal society, also imply existing and evolving in accordance with the values of labour and social status. These are complicating societal parameters that make the rat experiment suggestive but insufficient to exhaustively explain human drug consumption.
B. A complementary experiment: The role of oxytocin release
Cognitive science research on the hormone-regulating roles of social bonding vis-a-vis addiction may offer further explanation. Positive social interactions result in the release of oxytocin into the brain, acting as an endocrinal33 natural
way to reduce addictive behaviours – among other mental health issues, as close relationships help people recover from addiction. Indeed, the positive effects of social support groups such as 12-step programs34 have been shown to
contribute to addiction treatment outcomes (Proudfoot, 2017). The desire to belong to a group comes from the brain's
33 From the biology term endocrine, which refers to “any of the organs of the body that make hormones (= chemicals that make the body
grow and develop) and put them into the blood, or to the hormones that they make” (Cambridge dictionary). In other words, endocrinal means that it is done within the body, for the body, and by means of hormones.
34 A 12-step program is a process that was first written up in Bill’s Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men
Have Recovered from Alcoholism (1939), which has inspired most of the rehab cures to follow the same 12 steps. To sum up the mindset of this group program, it begins by self-acceptance and ends with helping others.
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reward system: Oxytocin, often referred to as the "trust hormone", strengthens the brain's reward system in response to love and social connections. Oxytocin has a calming effect on the brain, which appears to facilitate the formation of positive social bonds. Therefore, it also has a protective power against addiction, as the presence of strong social bonds seems to decrease vulnerability to drug abuse (Ross Perlman, 2019). It decreases the pleasure from drugs, because these strong social bonds already act chemically as a drug that is as pleasurable to the brain. However, for people with a weakened oxytocin system, drugs produce a more intense sense of pleasure.
The social environment is a key factor in the development of the oxytocin system: Traumas of adversity in early childhood are a key factor to the underdevelopment of the oxytocin system, but also a social environment that is not favourable to trusted social connexion (Lee, Rohn, Tanda, Leggio, 2016). This, indeed, is likely to lead individuals to use drugs as a kind of masturbation process that Proudfoot (2017) depicts as “a solitary pleasure that involves a turning away from the pleasure of being with others towards the pleasure of the drug”.
A complementary analysis by researcher Lee Robins (1974) on Vietnam war soldiers allows us to further understand those psychological and physiological mechanisms when it comes to humans and their personal identity. In the 1970s, as drug consumption exploded in the USA,35 former president Nixon launched a “War on Drugs” aiming at establishing
and strengthening anti-drug policies. As soldiers during the Vietnam war were often using heroin,36 the US population
was worried about having drug-addicted soldiers coming back to society once the war was over. Yet, when they came back to their families, Robins’ research showed that only 5% of the soldiers continued using drugs, and only 12% had relapsed after 3 years. To better understand the ins and outs of these statistics, Robins conducted interviews, letting the veterans explain their drug consumption and what made them stop or continue. Among those who got back to the US and quit drugs, 84% mentioned the same parameters: fear, family and work. The environment in which they were in Vietnam was scary and lonely: drugs were used as a psychological compensation more than as a physical need. This means that when they were in emotional distress due to their conditions of being soldiers at war, away from their loved ones they could not connect with, there was no compensation to face the stress of being exposed to a life-threatening war. Socially dislocated because socially disconnected, soldiers also dislocate because they assume the identity of a fighting warrior and have no other oxytocin compensation than doing drugs to soften their psychological distress. By contrast, coming back to their family was such an oxytocin release that drugs appeared to be useless for most of them. As for those who continued using, they justified it mentioning trauma and loneliness, quoting that “drugs have a
gathering power”.
35 Based on the data of the World Drug Report 1970s by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
36 The example of US soldiers during the Vietnam War is also relevant to the point that using drugs depends on the environment one is in.
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Thus, it appears that the addiction pattern has a reciprocity dynamic: it is social disintegration (more precisely dislocation)37 that leads to addictive behaviours, and it is social integration that helps quit addictive behaviours.
Biologically speaking, when oxytocin is not produced thanks to trusted social bonding, addiction is the band-aid for
dislocation.
However, the example of the Vietnam War soldiers mentioning that drugs supposedly have a “gathering power” raises the question of social bonding through the use of drugs. Indeed, whoever grows up in a Western type of culture knows that alcohol and tobacco are often used as social catalysers.38 Even if the consumption of addictive substances does not
necessarily lead to addictive behaviour, this gives a clue that drugs also have a power of framing the social environment (Strickland, Smith, 2013). Indeed, the example of the Vietnam soldiers who kept using after getting back to the US gives insight on the phenomenon of drugs being used for social connection: when consuming drugs one turns into
being a drug-consumer, the problem of re-establishing the dialogue between the social self and the self seems to have
found a solution through the use of drugs. When dislocated individuals have this one common point of using drugs, recognising each other through this consumption gives birth to the possibility of creating a new social self whose foundations lie on the use of drugs (Proudfoot, 2017). Thus, the issue becomes: who are we when we are not addicted? Even when it seems like controlling the drug use39 should be possible by balancing it with sociality, the issue is made
more complex when sociality relies on this drug consumption, thus becoming the tool for an alternative way of experiencing the social self.
Chapter conclusion
Dislocation arises from a multiplicity of human conditions evolving within the neoliberal system. As the free-market principle created a pattern of individuals being buyers or sellers, perpetuating the spiral of capitalism, the nature of the interactions between individuals changed. Closeness in space used to be the mirror for further closeness in individuals’ relationships: knowing each other beyond the socio-economic status of being either a buyer or a seller used to be a value that patterned the dynamic of a society where people connected and bonded. The neoliberal “great transformation” (Polanyi, 1944) notably leads to people’s interactions being depersonalized: When we spend time in marketplaces where capitalism is effectively ruling, we denominate each other using economic functional attributes.
37 The term dislocation is more meaningful than the classic expression “social disintegration”. Dislocation, indeed, better suggests the pattern
of disconnecting your social self from yourself.
38 I am referring to the drinking and smoking culture that often gathers people: people drink alcohol to party, and the drug effect makes them
better bond with each other physiologically, but also mentally, as it is a matter of being into the “popular culture”.
39 Addiction-like behaviour relies on the quantity and the frequency of consumption. Having drug experiences from time to time and gathering
with people outside of the prism of drugs creates a balance between the drug use and the social interactions. When individuals lose this controlled balance, excess of quantity and frequency become more likely, slowly driving towards addictive behaviours.
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For instance, one is the cashier person, another is the security person. In this sense, what you do becomes who you are in the eyes of others. Within this societal pattern, the self and its social identity are defined. The way we denominate one another can be understood as the expression of social ‘boxes’ in which we recognize each other, as well as in which we can recognize ourselves. Thus, self-identity is created at the intersection of those social boxes, a “variety of marketed options” creating a form of governmentality of identity which we obey despite ourselves. Put together, these parameters create dislocation.
Creating a narrative of the self, depending on the person it is possible to be among the marketed options (Rose, 1999), is likely to result in confusing the social role we play in order to fit into those boxes, with the authentic self that has no virtual place to even conceive itself. By literally dislocating their social self from their authentic self, individuals lose the ability to integrate and connect to each other. The main visible expression of this dislocation is the compensating process of developing addictive behaviors. Indeed, as experiments have shown, it is often social disintegration that acts as the starting point of addiction (Alexander, 2010).
But the reciprocal is also true: social integration acts as a preventive shield against the development of addictive behaviors. Indeed, biology offers a further explanation for this phenomenon: when social bonding, the body secretes an endocranial response by producing oxytocin, also known as the trust hormone. The lack of social connection that induces dislocation, therefore, especially creates a craving for oxytocin compensation, doing drugs being one of them. The following chapter will explain how and why, instead of doing drugs, consumerism is an alternative expression of a desire to compensate social dislocation. More precisely, I will argue how and why, in fact, it is the neoliberal structure that drives us to consider consumerism as a potential compensating cure, and why it finally just postpones the issue by creating an addiction to consumerism itself.
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CHAPTER III
Consumerism and the pattern of addictive behaviours
The previous chapter has focused on drug use, as analysing addictive behaviours through actual drugs allows the use of empirical data to analyse and further understand the links between addictive behaviours, personal identity and social connection. There, identity appears as a key concept in establishing the link between dislocation and compensation by addiction, as the issue complexifies when using drugs turns one into being a drug user. Indeed, the suggestion is that the individual is not acting but rather is being possessed, subjected, identified by the action of and addiction to the drug. I shall now broaden the concept of addiction by depicting the addiction-like behaviours of consumerism in the free-market society. Keeping in mind that sociality has been modified by the neoliberal era in which Western societies now live, these arguments are now applied to analysing the consumerist essence of this free-market society: from smoking cigarettes and consuming industrialized food to doing shopping. To do so, I will be using a French author from the XVIth century : La Boetie (1577). In his classic political scientific thesis, La Boetie presents three resources that help the governing power to rule over society. These are the three resources of domination: habit, panem et circenses, and the profit chain.40 I will bring them into the perspective of the free-market society to form the three
composing parts of this chapter.
I will first argue that we are witnessing the construction of physical space in favour of excessive consumption, turning consumption into a tool favouring the development of addictive behaviours (habit). This argument will open the way to the question of public health in contrast to private economic lobby interests. In the following section, I will use the case study of food addiction to show the correlation between consumerism and compensation (panem et circenses) and how the industrialization of food production facilitates addiction as an expression of this compensation without individuals being aware of their exposure to addictive substances. Finally, I will question the therapeutic effect consuming can have by associating it with a quest for personal identity and belonging, then potentially becoming addictive itself (the profit chain). The very last part of the last section will be dedicated to an analysis of the new marketing strategies that create a desire for consuming, which allow us to understand why consuming seems to be such a cornerstone of the free-market society.
40 Translated from the French la chaine des gains, which means that what you win, gain, or take advantage from is made ouf of a successive
25 I. Habit: Smoking areas in France
This first part of the analysis aim at showing that the planning of public space have an important role in shaping habits of individuals that use it on a daily basis, as space is a preponderant resource of power (Foucault, 1978). When this possibility to create habit through space is used for getting individuals used to consuming via consumption areas, habit becomes the foundation stone of developing addiction. I will analyse this by using the example of smoking areas in France.
A. The resources of habit in the addiction process
As depicted in the introduction, the creation of addictive behaviours follows a pattern of habit that relies on two main parameters: On the one hand, addiction begins by the ritual of consuming. On the other hand, addictive behaviour settles in one’s mind by turning the ritual of consuming into an excessive ritual of consumption that also includes a feeling of needing to perpetuate the ritual. When the amount of consumption keeps growing and the anxiety about not having the possibility to fulfil this desire of consuming shows itself, I shall talk about addictive behaviour. This is to be kept in mind for the following analysis.
Adaptation to a repeated stimulus, drug stimuli or any other type, creates a habit that will slowly turn on the plasticity function of the brain: the neuroplasticity.44 Physical dependence is a manifestation of this very same phenomenon; it is
the adaptation to a stimulus that creates a pattern of habit (Kalant, 1982). When it comes to addiction, the role of creating a habit is a necessary parameter. Staton Peels, in his work The Meaning of Addiction (1985), argues that the creation of addiction is a phenomenon resulting from social and cognitive influences from which individuals receive habituated information.
“Addictive behavior is no different from all other human feeling and action in being subject to social and cognitive influences. In this reformulation, addiction is seen not to depend on the effects of specific drugs. Moreover, it is not limited to drug use at all. Rather, addiction is best understood as an individual's adjustment, albeit a self-defeating one, to his or her environment. It represents an habitual style of coping, albeit one that the individual is capable of modifying with changing psychological and life circumstances.” Peele, S. (1985), The Meaning of
Addiction Lexington Books/DC. Heath and Com.
44 Neuroplasticity is defined in the Oxford English Dictionnary as the capacity of the nervous system to develop new neuronal connections.
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In this sense, habit shapes our psyche by slowly creating and reinforcing the same pathways between neurons, preventing us from realizing that some of them have lost their original sense, but rather form a self-learned autopilot behaviour (Brown, McCutcheon, Cone, Ragozzino, Roitman, 2011). Habits related to consumption create a multiplicity of consumption desires that we associate with pleasure, as we have been taught, by repeated stimuli, to associate them with pleasure: eating an ice cream in front of a movie, drinking tea during a break at work, or smoking a cigarette. In the same article quoted above, Peel gives the illustration of cigarette consumption, focusing on the urban smoking areas. What he calls “environmental clues” are, in fact, a multiplicity of visual indications aiming at reminding the
consumer of their possibility to expose themselves to their desire of consuming and satisfy it, thus facilitating their consumption. In other words, having a dedicated area especially for smoking is a spatial contribution for the consumer
to create a landmark that will facilitate their habit of smoking because they are visually stimulated.
This spatial settling may help the creation and perpetuation of the habit of smoking, but one could also argue that its existence is a way to regulate the presence of tobacco smoke in public areas by dedicating spaces for smokers, to preserve non-smokers. If this is the main motivation for public powers to create smoking areas, then the stimulating effect they have on smokers is an externality. However, it remains true that the idea of those smoking areas also represents a public legitimization of the smoking addiction (Weber, 1922). Because there is a public space for it, regulated by the public powers, smoking is, by extension, perceived collectively as legitimized by the same public powers, and the externality it creates is an externality that was expected when the public space was designed and dedicated.
That is why I argue that the creation of the habit of tobacco consumption is representative of the free-market neoliberal mindset aiming at creating a desire for consuming. But more importantly, the example of smoking areas refers to the public health smoking addiction issue that public powers wanted to address: I will show how the reach for economic profit won over a public health political decision by using the example of successful lobbyism strategies in France.
B. Dedicating space for smoking, perpetuating addiction?
First of all, the example of smoking areas is an illustration of the creation of habit in public space planning. Smoking tobacco has had its place in public space since the 1960s.45 In this sense, tobacco addiction benefits from a form of
habit legitimation. Indeed, this is an exact illustration of the traditional form of legitimacy that Weber described in
Economy and Society (1922). The importance of rituals that Weber drew attention to actually refers to the importance
