A Critical Social Analysis of Economic Personalism

Economic Personalism (EP) of Acton Institute (USA) has emerged as a school of thought that claims to offer solution to the predicament of human reduction in capitalist economics. This book has raised critical reservations regarding EP’s claims when seen against the background of market contradictions, like alienation, commodification, and reification of human beings. In other words, even if EP sees itself as offering a “right approach,” its embeddedness in a liberal-capitalist world makes EP a part of capitalism’s contradictions. In order to verify EP’s claims, this book makes use of social scientific lenses. Assumed to possess interests masked behind its canonical statements, this book subjects the EP document through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Historical-Critical Analysis to uncover both the implicit intentions of its claims as well as its implicit interests and ideologies. In this way, a critical social analysis of EP would verify suspicions through the rigor of a scientific analysis.