Modern society, by 'inventing' economics – i.e. by creating an autonomous 'sphere' for the production, distribution and consumtion of material wealth, a sphere in which it is legitimate and necessary to allocate means as efficiently as possible – has reduced culture to the narrower preoccupations of the 'Ministries of Culture' possessed by many civilized nations. This reduction originates in Western metaphysics, which, since Plato, have been accustomed to splitting the unity of being into matter and spirit. This presumably means that culture becomes no more than the awareness (perhaps a false awareness) which a society has of its 'material' practices through religion, art and all its means of expression.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 39