ABSTRACT
This chapter comments on the values that have generally animated the political Left and those who espouse the title “Critical Theory” in our (Western) culture. These traditions tend to find their moral sources principally in agency. This is true not only of the sources of socialism, for instance Rousseau and Marx, but also of those of liberalism, such as Locke and Mill. Political action should take people from a phase where they are dominated by others, or where their agency has been pre-empted, and takes us to a freedom which is effective self-action (Selbsttätigkeit). Before that crucial stage, as Marx has defined it, agency is alienated. But the word “alienation” also suggests something very different to many people: namely, a condition in which one cannot but feel alien in the world we live in, or this world cannot but feel alien to us. It doesn’t “speak to” us, or doesn’t “answer” our attempts to find meaning. I want to raise this other type of alienation in order to explore the possibility that what is wrong with our world may not exclusively consist in the frustration or capture of agency. What we need is not only a condition of agency but also one we might call “patiency”.
