Economism

The reduction of social and political goals to their economic dimension, characteristic of Western ideologies.

Economism is an offshoot of the classical liberal doctrines of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries and was later extended to socialist doctrines of Marxist inspiration. Its central objective is a policy of ‘economic development’, quantitative production, pursued without regard to cultural, ecological, ethnic, etc., imperatives. It reduces human happiness to a matter of living standards; it pursues economic ‘growth’ for the sake of short-term interests; and it neglects, among many other things, the conditions necessary for demographic renewal. It believes a country’s health is measured solely by its economic performance. From a long-term perspective, economism actually weakens economic power, because it ignores the external forces affecting it: such as political independence, resource availability, birth rate, etc. From the viewpoint of economism, history is explainable solely in terms of economic factors, which are seen as facets of a civilisation’s infrastructure, while cultural, demographic, and other factors are ignored or treated as secondary.

(see society, market)