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‘It’s Not the Money but the Love of Money That Is the Root of All Evil’: Social Subjection, Machinic Enslavement and the Limits of Anglican Social Theology

Rose, Marika

‘It’s Not the Money but the Love of Money That Is the Root of All Evil’: Social Subjection, Machinic Enslavement and the Limits of Anglican Social Theology Thumbnail


Authors

Marika Rose



Abstract

Maurizio Lazzarato argues that contemporary capitalism functions through two central apparatuses: Social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection equips individuals with a subjectivity, assigning them identities, sexes, bodies, professions, and other markers of identity, along with a sense of their own individual agency within society. Machinic enslavement arises out of the growing reliance of capitalism on what Lazzarato calls “asignifying semiotics”—processes of production that function increasingly independently of human awareness or intention. Drawing on this analysis of the contemporary functioning of capitalism, this paper will explore the concepts of individuals and society at work in recent Anglican social theology. Focusing on two recent texts which attempt to give an overview of Anglican social thinking—Eve Poole’s The Church on Capitalism: Theology and the Market and Malcolm Brown’s Anglican Social Theology—it will suggest that, within the contemporary Church of England, mainstream attempts to reckon with political questions tend to understand the role of individual agency and ethical behaviour in ways which prop up existing social, political and economic structures rather than disrupting them.

Citation

Rose, M. (2016). ‘It’s Not the Money but the Love of Money That Is the Root of All Evil’: Social Subjection, Machinic Enslavement and the Limits of Anglican Social Theology. Religions, 7(8), Article 103. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7080103

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 5, 2016
Online Publication Date Aug 9, 2016
Publication Date Aug 1, 2016
Deposit Date Apr 1, 2019
Publicly Available Date Apr 2, 2019
Journal Religions
Electronic ISSN 2077-1444
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 7
Issue 8
Article Number 103
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7080103
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1305001

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).





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