This essay aims to give a critical exposition of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of consumptive society and give some adequate comments on this theory by analyzing its achievements and failures. Jean Baudrillard makes clear the consumptive principle’s dominance in the contemporary society, and explains especially the consumptive objects as the relations themselves reflected by a system of symbols and their meanings. Further, he investigates broadly the technique means and the cultural order system of contemporary symbol consumption, and puts forward an incisive criticism of the alienation effects of the consumptive society. However, because he exaggerates the differences between the productive society and the consumptive society unlimitedly, and denies the production based on capital principle as the basis of contemporary economic life further radically, this theory cannot enter the social reality deeply, and so his social criticism ends in a level of abstraction and superficiality. In comparison with the romantic orientation and the weakness in the historical theme of this theory, the historical materialism has its theoretical superiority, because of its developing a correct road to the social reality.
