ABSTRACT
The central problem of theorising agency is how to conceptualise the human agent as someone who is partly formed by their sociality but also has the capacity partly to transform their society. The difficulty is that social theorising has oscillated between these two extremes. On the one hand, Enlightenment thought promoted an ‘undersocialised’ view of man50 – Modernity’s Man – whose human constitution owed nothing to society and thus was a self-sufficient ‘outsider’, who simply operated in a social environment. On the other hand, there is a later but pervasive ‘oversocialised’ view of man, whose every feature, beyond his biology, is shaped and moulded by his social context. He, as Society’s Being,51 thus becomes such a dependent ‘insider’ that he has no capacity to transform his social environment. From the realist point of view, the central deficiency of these two models is their
basic denial that the nature of reality as a whole makes any difference to the people we become, or even to our becoming people.Modernity’sMan is preformed, and his formation – that is, the emergence of his properties and powers – is not dependent upon his experiences of the world.52 Indeed, the world can only come to him filtered through an instrumental rationality shackled to his interests whose genesis is left mysterious. Preference formation has remained obscure, from the origins of the Humean ‘passions’ to the goals optimised by the contemporary rational chooser. The model is anthropocentric, because man works on the world, but the world does not work uponman, except by attaching risks and costs to the accomplishment of his preformed designs. In short, he is closed against any experience of reality that could make him fundamentally different from what he already is. Similarly, Society’s Being is also a model which forecloses direct interplay with
reality. Here the whole of the world comes to people sieved through one part of it, ‘society’s conversation’. Their very notion of being selves is merely a theory appropriated from society, and what they make of the world is a matter of permutations upon their appropriations. Once again, this model cuts man off from any experience of reality itself, which could make him fundamentally different from what social discoursemakes of him. Society is the gatekeeper of reality and therefore all we become is society’s gift because it is mediated through it. What is lost, in both versions, is the crucial notion of experience of reality,
namely that the way the world is can affect how we are. This is because both anthropocentrism and sociocentrism are two versions of the ‘espistemic fallacy’, where what reality is taken to be, courtesy of our instrumental rationality or social discourse, is substituted for what the world really is. Realism cannot endorse the ‘epistemic fallacy’ and, in this connection, it must necessarily insist that how the world is has a regulatory effect upon what we make of it and, in turn, what it makes of us. These effects are independent of our full discursive penetration, just as gravity influenced us, and the projects we could entertain, long before we conceptualised it. The emergence of our ‘social selves’ is something that occurs at the interface
between ‘structure and agency’. It is therefore necessarily relational and, for it to be properly so, then independent powers have to be granted to both ‘structures’ and
‘agents’. This is what is distinctive about the social realist approach. It grants the existence of people’s emergent properties (PEPs) and also the reality of structural and cultural emergent properties (SEPs andCEPs), and sees the emergence of agents and actors as relational developments occurring between them. Conversely, Society’s Being presents ‘agency’ as an epiphenomenon of ‘structure’, whereas Modernity’s Man regards ‘structure’ as an epiphenomenon of ‘agency’.53
