ABSTRACT
This new theory of collective action provides a formal consecration for fundamental mutations in Marxism and in left social science that have taken place over the past half decade or so; mutations in which an emphasis on forms of agency have increasingly come to take the place of purely structural determinations. These shifts can be seen in a variety of areas of analysis. The study of the labour process, for example, has been transformed from Braverman’s (1974) focus on the structural accumulation of capital accompanied by the necessary de-skilling of labour to the analysis of various strategies of class agents. The examination of politics has shifted from Poulantzas’s structurally determined relative autonomy (1973) to neocorporatist analyses (see for example Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982), which have focused upon how trade union confederations trade their willingness to act as agencies of social control over their members, in exchange for certain forms of policy-making power. In the study of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Brenner (1976), among others, has rejected the previous ‘structural’ emphases of Dobb (1976) and Sweezy (1976) in order to
underline the importance of class capacities and class struggles. In the field of social stratification, Przeworski (1977) has most clearly developed the argument for the centrality of class struggles which render indeterminate the outcomes of supposedly determinate social structures. More generally, there has been the development of ‘structurationism’ as a relatively distinctive theoretical tendency in which structures are viewed as both the medium and the outcome of the skilful and knowledgeable actions of social agents (see Giddens 1979). Even the study of ideology has shifted away from the Althusserian analysis of the structural determination of the ‘ideological instance’ to the post-structuralism of Foucault, whose intentional and manyfaceted ‘body’ can potentially resist discourse-constituted structural constraints, and to the analysis of Derrida, whose ‘writing’ and ‘text’, through constitutive structuring of subjects, objects and ideas, display qualities of activity and creativity which-in contradistinction to Barthes’ prison of language-are as characteristic of agency as they are of structure (1972). The renaissance of interest in Heidegger (see Rorty 1982, for example) and Nietzsche further bespeak this shift to a new theoretical Weltanschauung.
