ABSTRACT
A concept of agency as making is needed to express the presenting concerns facing contemporary society. The appropriateness of this idea of making seems particularly fashionable with a number of authors who adopt it to capture the central theme of their text, though what it means for them is often left implicit. Arendt called for care of the public world, that man-made artifice standing between man and nature, because it provided the crucible for the only form of action - politics - which can accommodate the unique human condition of plurality. Hannah Arendt understands that worlds are man-made. What she inveighs against are models of action that erase political action, the bios politikos. A fashionable theory of the late 1990s declared that the march of globalisation was hollowing out the state, its powers and functions privatised and outsourced or redistributed across increasingly autonomous quangos, agencies and authorities.
