ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will elaborate upon a central observation made in chapter 3, and then apply it to the concept of agency: in most treatises, secondary sources, and textbooks, including those written by Anthony Giddens, sociologists seem to posit something like a straight line from the optimistic, rationalist philosophies that informed the works of Comte and other Enlightenment philosophers to current sociology. No acknowledgment is usually made of the long intellectual detour from that optimistic era to ours through what Henri Ellenberger (1970) calls the fin de siècle spirit exemplified by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, by the Romantic and pre-Romantic forces that led up to it, and by his many disciples, especially Nietzsche. Following Parsons (1937) as well as Giddens (1993), most social theorists seem to have assumed (not proved) that rationalist philosophies informed the orientations of turn of the century social theorists. To borrow Schopenhauer’s distinction between the “heart” and the “mind,” one might say that contemporary sociology has placed the accent on the “mind” and
has repressed turn of the century sociology’s emphasis on the “heart” and its derivatives: the unconscious, feelings, culture, and irrational metaphysics. Giddens is no exception to this generalization. With regard to the concept of agency-which is central to Giddens’s entire system of thought-the consequences of this one-sidedness in theoretical scaffolding are far-reaching. Despite his apparent sense of triumph over Parsons and others whom he accuses of not appreciating the skill and knowledge of the human agent, Giddens ends up offering a caricature of the human agent. Giddens’s agent is all mind and no heart. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his discussion of agency vis-à-vis Sigmund Freud’s theories: Giddens simply amputates Freud’s notions of the id and the unconscious and then substitutes his own rationalist equivalents. The result is a portrait of the agent based on oversimplified wishful thinking, a caricature based on modernist ideology in which the agent is reflexive, able to monitor his/her actions, skilled, and knowledgeable at all times. And of course, in line with his modernist revisionism of nearly all the classical social theorists, Giddens makes Freud out to be a thinker who is concerned exclusively with the modern:
Radicalizing Freud means showing that what he took to be characteristics of civilization in general are really specific to the modern order. That order is presented as much more monolithic, and resistant to change, than it really is.
