ABSTRACT
As realism gains ground in social theory, it seems fair to admit that it has made a greater contribution to the reconceptualisation of structure than it has to that of agency. However, if the ‘problem of structure and agency’ is to be resolved then equivalent attention has to be given to both terms. Moreover, realism’s stratified ontology, which has proved so useful in delineating the properties and powers that emerge at different levels of social structure, is just as pertinent to agency. This is what will be examined here. Specifically, it is those strata that pertain to every mature social agent, namely ‘selfhood’, ‘personal identity’ and ‘social identity’, that will be the focus of attention.2 The implications of distinguishing these different personal emergent properties (PEPs) will be discussed throughout in relation to other theories that fail to make these distinctions. What difference a realist approach to agency makes to social investigation will be indicated in the conclusion. There are two aspects to the ‘problem of agency’, and both are fundamental.
Technically, the central problem of agency is to conceptualise the human agent as someone who is both partly formed by their sociality, but who also has the capacity partly to transform their society.Morally, the problem is to put forward a model that is recognisably human; one that retains Arendt’s notion of the ‘Human Condition’ as entailing a reflexive ‘Life of the Mind’. As agents, we are what Charles Taylor (1985, 65) calls ‘strong evaluators’, and thismust be recognised: for we do not take a detached, third-person, scientific stance to our own lives or to our societies. Basically, I argue that two ‘models of man’ have dominated social theorising for
the past 200 years, and that neither can cope with the technical or moral problems raised by the ‘problem of agency’.3 These models can be called ‘Modernity’s Man’ and ‘Society’s Being’. In cameo, the Enlightenment allowed the ‘Death of God’ to issue in titanic man.
With the secularisation of modernity went a progressive endorsement of human self-determination, of people’s powers to come to know the world, to master their environment and thus to control their own destiny as the ‘measure of all things’. As the heritage of the Enlightenment tradition, Modernity’s Man was a model that had stripped down the human being until he had one property alone, that of instrumental rationality, namely the capacity to maximise his preferences through means-ends relationships and so to optimise his utility. In this model, Homo economicus stood
forth as the lone, atomistic and opportunistic bargain-hunter – a completely impoverished model of man. Technically, what this model of man could not deal with were phenomena such as
voluntary collective behaviour, leading to the creation of public goods; normative behaviour, when Homo economicus recognises his dependence upon others for his own welfare; and, finally, expressive solidarity, a willingness to share, or altruism. Crucially, this model could not cope with the human moral capacity to transcend instrumental rationality and to have ‘ultimate concerns’. These are concerns that are not a means to anything beyond them, but are commitments, which are constitutive of who we are and an expression of our identities.Who we are is a matter of what we care about most. This is what makes us moral beings. None of this caring can be impoverished by reducing it to an instrumental means-ends relationship, which is presumed to leave us ‘better off’ relative to some indeterminate notion of future ‘utility’. Nevertheless, this was the model of man that was eagerly seized upon by social
contract theorists in politics, utilitarians in ethics and social policy and liberals in political economy. Homo economicus is a survivor. He lives on not only as the anchorman of microeconomics and the hero of neoliberalism but also as a colonial adventurer and, in the hands of rational choice theorists, he bids to conquer social science in general. As Gary Becker outlines this mission, ‘[t]he economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behaviour’ (1976, 8). The rise of postmodernism during the last two decades represented a virulent
rejection of Modernity’s Man, but it spilt over into the dissolution of the human subject and a corresponding inflation of the importance of society. The ‘Death of Man’ joined the ‘Death of God’. Now, in Lyotard’s words, ‘a self does not amount tomuch’ (1984, 15), and, inRorty’s follow-up, ‘[s]ocialisation [: : :] goes all theway down’ (1989, 185). To give humankind this epiphenomenal status necessarily deflects all real interest onto the forces of socialisation, as in every version of social constructionism. People are indeed perfectly uninteresting if they possess no personal powers that can make a difference to shaping their own lives or their own society. Consequently, to Foucault, ‘[m]an would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1970, 387). Society’s Being is social constructionism’s contribution to the debate, which
presents our entire human properties and powers, beyond our biological constitution, as the gift of society. Our selfhood is a grammatical fiction, a product of learning to master the first-person pronoun system, and thus quite simply a theory of the self that is appropriated from society. As Harre puts it, ‘[a] person is not a natural object, but a cultural artefact’ (1983, 20). We are nothing beyond what society makes us, and it makes us what we are through our joining ‘society’s conversation’. Society’s Being thus impoverishes humanity, by subtracting from our human powers and accrediting all of them – selfhood, reflexivity, thought, memory, emotionality and belief – to society’s discourse. What makes actors act has now become an urgent question within construc-
tionism, because the answer cannot ever be given in terms of people themselves, who have neither the human resources to pursue their own aims nor the capacity to
find reasons good if they are not in social currency. Effectively, this means that the constructionists’ agent can only be moved by reasons appropriated from society, and thus is basically a conventionalist. The human dilemma has been eliminated from the human condition.
