ABSTRACT
The problem of human agency has been considered one of the central problems, if not the most central, of social analysis. How does one account for human action or activity without recourse to a primordial “subject” or “individual,” and within the logic of a thoroughly social idea of the human being as both creator of its world and created by it. Marx explicitly addressed this dual feature of human agency, claiming that human beings “make history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past” (Marx [1869] 1963, p. 15). Others have attempted to integrate into a single theory this idea that mental life-experience, together with the forms of knowing and feeling-is not only socially constituted, but is itself ingredient to action, serving as the source of the continuous change human societies undergo. In Karl Mannheim’s words: the historical subject is “that kernel of the human personality whose being and dynamism is [sic] consubstantial with the dominant active forces of history” (Mannheim [1924] 1952, p. 102). Accordingly, while the proper object of social analysis is society, society is understood in a dialectical way, as something continuously made and inhabited by human beings and, in turn, making them (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 456).
