Cultural theory collapses agency into a drive for self-empowerment and less pain

Evidence

“Empowerment,” a legal term referring both to the act of giving power to someone and to someone’s power to act, becomes a metaphysical quality defining secular human agency, its objective as well as precondition. Although the various usages of agency have very different implications that do not all hang together, cultural theory tends to reduce them to the metaphysical idea of a conscious agent-subject having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular historical direction: that of increasing self-empowerment and decreasing pain. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘empowerment’ began as a narrow legal term but became a defining metaphysical quality of secular agency.
• XREF: Grafts onto the rational-choice agency literature the reader has curated (Milgrom, Coleman social capital). — connects to: Affirmative culture redirects longing for change into inner affirmation — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 2153; Horney’s cultural determinism slid into ignoring social distortion of instinctive structure