DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Luxury Philosophy

John Armitage author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:20th Feb '25

£65.00

This title is due to be published on 20th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Luxury Philosophy cover

The first philosophical exploration of luxury and the luxurious, tracing the ideas throughout history to contemporary iterations.

Luxury has been associated with superficiality, consumerism and meaninglessness throughout the history of serious philosophical thought. How could something so obviously about the external possibly be existentially significant or even a profound concept? Luxury Philosophy carves out alternative modes of understanding the luxurious arguing that the negative characterization by 18th- and 19th-century philosophers of luxury as dissatisfaction or as an evil enjoyed by the idle rich gave way in the 20th century and beyond to more positive, even potentially revolutionary, theories of luxury as voluptuousity, squander, uselessness, and abundance.

John Armitage charts the history of continental theories of luxury which embody a wide variety of disciplines and methods, including philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, revealing the depth of contemporary critical luxury studies. Luxury Philosophy provides profound insights for all those interested in the nature, causes, and principles of sumptuous living and surroundings, knowledge of pleasure, or the values of comfort and desire.

John Armitage employing the perspective of continental philosophy across a careful, always enlightening, discussion of key thinkers dismantles the taken-for-granted ideas about luxury within contemporary Western societies. This is a powerful counterpoint to theorists in the analytic tradition and to those who uncritically accept the place of luxury today. * Christopher J. Berry, Author of Idea of Luxury (2011) *

ISBN: 9781350414839

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

216 pages