The discussion presented in the chapters which follow runs a considerable risk of error and omission not least because of the breadth of the subject matter it grapples with. A more concise discussion of work or of consumption or of culture would have saved some of the author’s embarrassment, but this would have meant sacrificing one of the main objectives of the study, which is to look at the relationships between work, consumption and culture. We have made arguments about these relationships and the importance of affluence as a driving force in their constitution. We have drawn support from the substantial corpus of theoretical work already available