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Kirkpatrick, Jerry, In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1994, 168 pp., $45.00.
This excellent, thought-provoking book thoroughly debunks popular, hostile misconceptions about consumer advertising, all of which boils down to the notion that advertising is a coercive, offensive, monopolistic force which must be heavily regulated by the government. Jerry Kirkpatrick, Professor of Marketing at California State University, Pomona, demonstrates that, in fact, advertising is a rational, morally good, productive, and even benevolent instrument of laissez-faire capitalistic production and the division of labor. This he accomplishes by describing and refuting the false philosophic and economic world view underlying the "social" and economic criticisms of advertising, using unique theoretical applications of philosophy, economics, and psychology. He shows the fallacies underlying this "antireason, anti-man, antilife, authoritarian world view that permeates our culture" (154). His aim is to get practitioners, academics, and thoughtful lay persons alike to check their assumptions and consider instead novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's pro-reason philosophy of objectivism as well as Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises' pro-individualist laissez-faire economics as the foundations of advertising's defense. This alternative world view, he logically demonstrates, leads to a positive moral evaluation of advertising's role in our affairs: capitalism is the social system resulting in greatest economic progress, and advertising is the "beacon" (154) of a free society guiding individuals to the fruits of that progress, rather than the evil serpent that tempts consumers with original sin to pursue selfish gain and disrupts the Garden of Eden of pure and perfect competition in which advertising is nonexistent.
The author wishes to provide readers "intellectual ammunition" (xii) with which they can confidently defend the theory and practice of advertising against three major criticisms: it is (1) coercive, (2) offensive, and (3) monopolistic. The first two constitute the so-called social criticisms and view advertising as being superfluous, inherently dishonest, immoral, and fraudulent. The third objection, the economic criticism, alleges that advertising increases prices and wastes society's scarce resources. All three criticisms assert that advertising adds no value to products.
A major premise underlying the author's analysis is that these objections assault consumers' reason--their ability to form concepts and think in principles--because advertising is conceptual communication to self-interested consumers about the self-interested, conceptual achievements...