ABSTRACT
What role does the unconscious play in an individual’s political action and political thinking? How might a notion of the unconscious help us to better understand the influence of the past on agents’ political behaviour? This chapter addresses an omission in the literature on agency, namely the neglect of a notion of the unconscious within conceptions of agency in social and political theory and, more specifically, within dialectical approaches to structure and agency. I develop my understanding of the unconscious from Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. My argument involves a two-step manoeuvre: first I must explain what habitus is and how it provides a compelling account of how to understand the relationship between structure and agency. Second, I outline the unconscious aspects of habitus. I draw out the significance of the unconscious for understanding political behaviour in the second part of the chapter. Here, I consider its significance for substantive areas of research showing how it relates to memory formation, debates about unconscious bias and approaches to political socialisation.
