The System of Objects

The System of Objects is a 1968 book by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, based on his doctoral thesis, prepared under a committee that included Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu.

It belongs to Baudrillard's early work, alongside For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and The Consumer Society. In these books the central focus is consumerism and the different ways in which various objects are consumed. At that time, in the late 1960s, Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism and situationism, yet he parted from Karl Marx in one significant respect: for Baudrillard, as for the situationists, consumption rather than production was the main driving force of capitalist society.