Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? In this classic work, Albert O. Hirschman offers a stimulating social, political, and economic analysis dealing with how and why frustrations of private concerns lead to public involvement and public participation that eventually lead back to those private concerns. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage.

FOREWORD ix
PREFACE xv
INTRODUCTION: A Private-Public Cycle? 3
Chapter 1. On Disappointment 9
The Role of Disappointment in Preference Change 9
Taking Disappointment Seriously 14
Chapter 2. Varieties of Consumer Disappointment 25
The Privileged Position of Truly Nondurable Goods 27
Consumer Durables 32
Services 39
Chapter 3. The General Hostility Toward New Wealth 46
Historical Evidence from the Eighteenth Century in England and France 46
The Manifold Case against New Goods 53
Chapter 4. From Private Concerns into the Public Arena-I 62
Exit and Voice Reactions to Consumer Disappointment 62
Explaining Changes in Life-Styles: Ideology and Second-Order Volitions 66
Chapter 5. From Private Concerns into the Public Arena-II 77
Collective Action and the Rebound Effect 77
Why Free Rides Are Spurned 82
Chapter 6. The Frustrations of Participation in Public Life-1 92
The Poverty of Our Imagination 93
Overcommitment and Addiction 96
Chapter 7. The Frustrations of Participation in Public Life-II 103
The Underinvolvement of Voting 103
A Historical Digression on the Origins of Universal Suffrage 112
Chapter 8. Privatization 121
Corruption 123
Public Virtue Debunked 125
Attractions of the Private Sphere 128
CONCLUSION 131
INDEX 135