I. Introduction: The Agency Deficit
By the late twentieth century, the interpretive turn had fundamentally transformed the human sciences. Foucault's genealogies, Derrida's deconstructions, Gadamer's hermeneutics, and Taylor's historicist moral philosophy converged on a shared insight: the autonomous, self-transparent subject of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy was an ideological fiction. The "sovereign subject"—disembedded, rational, authorial—gave way to the situated interpreter: historically formed, linguistically constituted, structurally mediated. This was an intellectual achievement that liberated inquiry from naive voluntarism and ahistorical individualism.
But in correcting the excesses of Enlightenment humanism, interpretive theory often over-corrected. Once dethroned, the individual agent risked disappearing entirely. Causal and moral efficacy migrated upward to abstractions: discourses, epistemes, effective histories, horizons of meaning. Post-structuralism succeeded in demolishing the sovereign subject but struggled to install a workable successor. The result is a pervasive agency deficit—a reluctance, even an inability, to speak coherently of historically situated persons bearing virtues, making consequential choices, and affecting outcomes in ways that matter for explanation and evaluation.
This creates a genuine problem for anyone engaged in interpretive history, comparative ethics, or normative political theory. How can we attribute virtues like epistemic humility, tolerance, or practical wisdom to historical figures—Cyrus the Great, Akbar, Mahatma Gandhi—if individuals are merely "sites where discursive forces converge"? How can we make meaningful counterfactual claims about what might have happened under different leadership if persons are just epiphenomenal effects of structural determinations? How can we assess responsibility if agency itself has been redistributed to impersonal systems?
The task here is to recover a concept of weak agency—weak not in causal power but in metaphysical commitment. This account makes no appeal to sovereign subjectivity, transcendental egos, or disembedded rationality. Agency is "weak" in the sense that it requires minimal philosophical apparatus while nonetheless remaining efficacious yet situated, socially constituted yet capable of meaningful intervention, mediated but not reduced to structural effects. Drawing on pragmatist resources—particularly Dewey and Mead, with some modifications—I propose a rehabilitation of individual agency that preserves the insights of the interpretive turn while restoring the possibility of attributing choices, virtues, and influence to historically embedded persons. This does not involve a return to sovereign subjectivity or Great Man theory of history. It does, however, insist on symmetrical mediation: if structures are mediated and yet causally efficacious, so too are individuals. The question is always at what scale and under what conditions we attribute influence—a question to be answered by examining specific cases, not by theoretical fiat.
II. How the Interpretive Turn Dissolved the Agent
The dismantling of the sovereign subject proceeded along multiple trajectories, each contributing to the current impasse. Foucault's genealogies revealed how subjects are produced by disciplinary regimes and discursive formations rather than standing outside them as autonomous legislators. The modern "soul," far from being a pre-social essence, is an effect of power-knowledge configurations. In "What is an Author?" Foucault argued that even the concept of authorship—seemingly the paradigm of individual creative agency—is a historically contingent "author-function" serving specific ideological purposes within discourse.
Derrida's deconstructive strategies radicalized this dissolution. His analyses of writing, trace, and différance suggested that meaning and identity are always already deferred, constituted through an endless play of differences rather than grounded in self-present consciousness. The subject becomes a temporary effect of textual dynamics, not their origin. Where humanist thought located agency in the intending consciousness of autonomous actors, deconstruction revealed an endless deferral of presence, with no stable ground for attributing intentions or agency.
Gadamer's hermeneutics, though less radically anti-subjectivist, nonetheless emphasized how understanding is always "historically effected"—shaped by traditions, horizons, and prejudgments that precede and constitute any individual act of interpretation. We do not stand outside our effective histories to survey them objectively; we are always already within them. Taylor's genealogies of selfhood extended this insight, showing how even our most intimate experiences of moral identity are culturally and historically mediated through "social imaginaries" and "horizons of significance."
These moves were diagnostic and, in many ways, liberating. They exposed the ideological work performed by the myth of the self-possessing subject within liberal political theory and modern epistemology. They revealed the social, historical, and linguistic mediations that constitute what Enlightenment thought imagined as pure, unmediated consciousness. But the combined effect was to render the individual agent nearly metaphysically impossible. Once all intention is traceable to discursive formation, once all will is revealed as sedimentation of language games and power relations, the actor threatens to disappear into the scene of writing or the field of power.
The problem is not that these thinkers denied that action occurs—obviously people do things. The problem is that they relocated efficacy almost entirely to the level of structures, discourses, or traditions, treating individuals as conduits or sites rather than as agents in any robust sense. Philosophy became a theater of impersonal forces, with persons reduced to positions within fields of power or moments in the play of signification.
III. The Asymmetry: When Structures Act More Directly Than Persons
The result of this overcorrection is an unacknowledged and philosophically incoherent asymmetry. Contemporary theory routinely insists that individual action is too mediated, too constituted by language and power, to bear straightforward causal or normative weight. Yet it simultaneously describes structures, discourses, projects, or systems as if they acted with clear intentionality: "neoliberalism restructured labor markets," "the Enlightenment project invented the individual," "global capitalism demands austerity," "the carceral archipelago disciplines subjects."
This is conceptually unstable. To deny efficacy to embodied, historically situated persons because they are mediated, while simultaneously attributing efficacy to abstractions that are even more abstract and impersonal, involves a double standard. It rests on what might be called the asymmetric application of mediation. Structures and discourses get treated as if they possess something like agency—they decide, organize, demand, resist—while actual persons are reduced to passive bearers of structural relations or nodal points where forces intersect.
Consider a typical formulation: "The neoliberal project reorganized global finance to prioritize capital mobility and labor flexibility." What does it mean for a "project" to reorganize anything? Projects don't deliberate, calculate trade-offs, negotiate with opposition, or enforce compliance. People occupying specific institutional positions do these things—policymakers, central bankers, corporate executives, legislators. The language of "the project" obscures rather than clarifies by attributing intentionality and efficacy to an abstraction.
Or consider: "Foucault shows how the discourse of sexuality produces subjects rather than subjects producing discourse." True enough as a corrective to voluntarism. But if we push it too far, we face a puzzle: how does discourse do anything? Discourses don't write texts, design institutions, enforce norms, or resist challenges. People embedded within discursive formations do these things. If we deny that individuals have efficacy because they're discursively constituted, we cannot then turn around and attribute greater efficacy to discourse itself without falling into mystification.
The pendulum has swung from anthropomorphic individualism to hypostatized structuralism. Abstractions—markets, systems, discourses, projects—get anthropomorphized, treated as quasi-agents with intentions and powers, while actual agents get dissolved into structural effects. This isn't progress; it's replacing one incoherence with another.
Recent efforts to restore agency from within hermeneutic and sociological traditions deserve recognition for grasping the problem's urgency. Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens each attempt sophisticated middle paths between atomistic individualism and structural determinism. Yet despite their considerable sophistication, all three ultimately attribute causal powers to abstractions in ways that replicate rather than resolve the core difficulty.
Taylor's account of selfhood insists that persons remain efficacious moral agents who engage in "strong evaluation" and reflexive self-interpretation within culturally mediated frameworks. Unlike post-structuralists who dissolve subjects into discursive effects, Taylor preserves genuine individual agency. Yet his framework simultaneously grants "social imaginaries" an "irreducible social reality" with "causal efficacy"—they "enable and constrain" action as ontologically robust forces. This is conceptually unstable: either imaginaries are patterns of shared understanding internalized in individuals and enacted through coordinated practices—in which case individuals and groups do the enabling and constraining—or they're hypostatized as independent causal powers, which Taylor officially denies yet tacitly requires.
Bourdieu's concept of habitus attempts to explain how social structures become embodied dispositions that generate practice without conscious deliberation. The habitus doesn't "act" as agents do, Bourdieu insists, yet it possesses "structuring power"—it organizes perception, generates strategies, reproduces social positions. Here again we encounter non-agential forces attributed with causal efficacy. Habitus is internalized within individuals' bodies and dispositions, yet Bourdieu writes as if "the field" or "the habitus" operates with its own logic beyond the aggregated practices of situated persons. The "structuring power" dissolves into a metaphor for what people reliably do given their socialization—useful descriptively, but doing no independent causal work.
Giddens's structuration theory comes closest to the pragmatist approach defended here. He correctly insists that only individuals possess consciousness and agency, that structures exist as "memory traces" in individuals rather than as external entities, and that research should focus on resource flows and power dynamics in specific cases rather than on a priori theoretical commitments. His practical methodological guidance—examine who controls authoritative and allocative resources, attend to reflexivity levels, trace circuits of reproduction—aligns well with scalar attribution principles. Yet Giddens insists that structures have "virtual existence" as "abstract models" existing "outside time and space" with independent ontological reality that constrains action. This metaphysical commitment proves superfluous when examining Giddens's later applied work. In The Politics of Climate Change (2009), faced with analyzing who and what drives climate inaction and what might enable effective response, Giddens focuses on nation-states controlling regulation, corporations controlling capital investment, technological capabilities, and political institutions—concrete actors with real resources and powers. The "virtual structures" of his ontological framework play no role in this analysis. When pushed to explain actual outcomes at scale, even Giddens attributes influence to concrete actors and mechanisms, revealing that the metaphysical apparatus does no explanatory work that pragmatist attributions don't accomplish more parsimoniously.
The pattern across Taylor, Bourdieu, and Giddens is consistent: each recognizes that pure structuralism eliminates the possibility of meaningful historical explanation and moral evaluation, so each attempts recovery. Yet each also reserves special ontological or causal status for abstractions—social imaginaries, habitus, virtual structures—that function in their theories much as "discourse" or "episteme" function in post-structuralism, only now with hermeneutic or sociological rather than post-structuralist vocabulary. Whether framed as having "causal efficacy" (Taylor), "structuring power" (Bourdieu), or "virtual existence" (Giddens), these abstractions end up doing theoretical work that concrete agents and their patterned interactions could do more parsimoniously.
IV. Blunden's Attempted Recovery and Why It Replicates the Problem
Andy Blunden's work exemplifies another attempt to restore agency from within the Marxist and activity theory traditions. Blunden, drawing on Hegelian and Vygotskian resources, seeks to avoid reducing subjects to passive effects of structure by locating agency in collective projects and activity systems rather than in isolated individuals. His goal is admirable: preserve some notion of historical efficacy and intentionality without returning to atomistic individualism or the sovereign subject.
Yet this solution re-reifies at a different level. "Projects" and "activity systems" become the new quasi-agents, endowed with continuity, purpose, and causal power. The core problem afflicting structuralism—treating abstractions as if they were subjects—reemerges in slightly different vocabulary. We've moved from "discourse produces subjects" to "collective projects actualize through individuals," but we haven't escaped the underlying difficulty.
Moreover, privileging collective agency over individual agency obscures crucial asymmetries within collectives. The Bolshevik project, the Zionist project, the European integration project—all contain internal heterogeneity, competing factions, and depend heavily on the contingent decisions of key individuals acting within institutional fields. When we say "the Soviet project of socialist construction" produced collectivization and terror, we've abstracted away from precisely what makes that history intelligible: Stalin's specific choices, dispositions, and actions within (and transforming) the party-state structure he inherited.
Blunden's move appreciates that passive, effect-only subjects won't do for historical explanation or normative evaluation. But his solution—elevating collectives to the status of primary agents—just relocates the reification rather than dissolving it. We still face the question: when the "collective project" makes a decision or changes direction, aren't we actually talking about specific persons in specific roles making choices with real consequences? And if so, why the detour through collective abstraction?
V. The Stalin and Mandela Cases: Why Privileging Collectives Fails
The case of Stalin exposes the inadequacy of any theory—whether Foucauldian, Derridean, or Blundenian—that attempts to demote or dissolve individual agency in favor of structural or collective agency. Consider the historical facts: Between 1928 and 1953, the Soviet Union underwent radical transformations—forced collectivization, industrialization at breakneck pace, the Great Terror, strategic decisions during World War II, postwar occupation policies in Eastern Europe. These developments occurred within a relatively stable structural context: a Bolshevik party-state system, command economy, conditions of international isolation and later Cold War pressures.
Now suppose we adopt the position that attributes primary agency to "the Soviet project of socialist construction" rather than to individuals actualizing that project. What does this buy us explanatorily? We would have to say something like: "The project demanded rapid industrialization, the project required the elimination of kulak resistance, the project executed the purges of 1936-38."
But this obscures more than it clarifies. The same party-state system, operating under similar structural constraints, produced dramatically different outcomes under different leaders: Lenin's New Economic Policy involved market mechanisms and tactical retreats; Stalin's approach involved forced collectivization and mass terror; Khrushchev initiated de-Stalinization and limited reforms; Brezhnev presided over stagnation; Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika contributed to the system's collapse. If "the project" is the primary agent, how do we explain this variation?
The structuralist or collectivist faces a dilemma:
Option A: Attribute these differences to changing structural conditions (international pressures, economic circumstances, technological capacities). But the structural variations across these periods, while real, are insufficient to explain the dramatic differences in policy and outcomes. The party-state system remained fundamentally similar; what changed were the specific individuals at its apex and their dispositions, ideologies, and choices.
Option B: Deny that the differences are significant—claim that beneath surface variations, structural continuities dominated. But this is historically implausible and explanatorily weak. Soviet history under Stalin versus Soviet history under Gorbachev are not minor variations on a structural theme; they represent profoundly different trajectories with world-historical consequences.
Option C: Acknowledge that individual leadership mattered, that Stalin's paranoia, ruthlessness, ideological rigidity, and tactical calculations shaped Soviet outcomes in ways that Trotsky's leadership or Bukharin's would not have. This is the most historically defensible position—but it requires attributing significant agency to Stalin as a historically situated individual, not just as an "actualizer" of collective determinations.
The meaningful counterfactual—"Soviet history 1928-1953 would have been significantly different had someone other than Stalin led"—is only coherent if we grant that individual agency, however mediated by structures, made a real difference. If we try to cash out Stalin's role entirely in terms of "the project" or "the structure," we lose the ability to explain variation, attribute responsibility, or make sense of contingency.
This is not a return to Great Man history. Stalin's efficacy was thoroughly mediated by the party-state apparatus he controlled, the ideological commitments of Bolshevism, geopolitical pressures, economic conditions, and the legacy of War Communism and civil war. But mediation is not elimination. Stalin, operating within and through these structures, made choices that bore his particular stamp—choices that reflected his distinctive combination of paranoia, ruthlessness, Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, and political cunning. Those choices mattered. They shaped outcomes. A different individual in that structural position would have produced different outcomes.
This analysis applies equally to individual agents whose considerable influence operated constructively rather than destructively. Consider Nelson Mandela's role in South Africa's democratic transition. Between 1990 and 1999, South Africa underwent a profound transformation from apartheid state to constitutional democracy. These developments occurred within constraining structural conditions: deeply entrenched racial capitalism, threat of civil war, international pressures, economic inequality, competing liberation movements, and the organizational resources of both the apartheid state and the African National Congress.
Suppose we adopt the collectivist position and attribute primary agency to "the liberation project" or "the democratic transition process." We would say: "The project demanded negotiations, the transition required reconciliation, the democratic movement produced the new constitution." But the same structural context—the same apartheid legacy, the same economic pressures, the same competing factions within the ANC and National Party—could plausibly have produced radically different outcomes under different leadership.
Consider the counterfactuals: Had the ANC been led by someone committed to immediate revolutionary transformation and redistribution, the transition might have descended into prolonged civil war. Had negotiations been led by figures less committed to reconciliation, South Africa might have achieved formal democracy while remaining mired in cycles of retribution. Had leadership lacked Mandela's particular combination of moral authority from imprisonment, strategic patience, and commitment to constitutional procedures, the fragile compromises enabling transition might have collapsed.
Mandela's specific qualities—his capacity for forgiveness after 27 years of imprisonment, his political prudence in balancing ANC factions, his strategic use of rugby and other symbolic gestures for national reconciliation, his willingness to serve only one term despite immense popularity, his insistence on constitutional constraints even when commanding overwhelming democratic legitimacy—shaped outcomes in ways that cannot be reduced to structural determinations or collective projects. Another individual in that position, facing the same constraints, would plausibly have made different choices producing different trajectories.
The meaningful counterfactual—"South Africa's transition would have been significantly different without Mandela's specific leadership"—is only coherent if we attribute genuine agency to Mandela as a historically situated individual operating within and reshaping structural constraints. If we dissolve his choices entirely into "the liberation project" or "structural dynamics," we lose explanatory purchase on what actually happened and why.
This is not Great Man historiography. Mandela's efficacy was thoroughly mediated by the ANC's organizational strength, the particular form of South African capitalism, international anti-apartheid movements, the weakness of the apartheid state after the Cold War, and the democratic aspirations of millions of South Africans. But mediation is not elimination. Mandela, operating within and through these structures, made choices that bore his particular stamp and influenced outcomes. A different individual in that structural position would have produced a recognizably different transition.
The same logic applies in everyday contexts far removed from world-historical figures. Clinical family-systems work, from Salvador Minuchin onward, routinely describes how particular members' characteristic responses reshape the family "system" under shared structural pressures, without denying those larger forces. Consider a household in which one parent—say, the mother—is struggling with addiction, frequently absent, and leaving the children in precarious circumstances. That situation is plainly shaped by broader forces: the availability of substances, economic stress, gendered expectations about care work, and so on. Yet within that shared context, different fathers can make dramatically different contributions to what happens next. In one scenario, the father is indecisive, needy, and easily overwhelmed; he allows the family to slide into deterioration. In another, the father is galvanized; he mobilizes intelligence, diligence, and a strong sense of responsibility to stabilize routines, seek help, and buffer the children from some of the worst effects. Here too, the meaningful counterfactual—"were it not for this particular person's dispositions and responses, much in this family would have unfolded differently"—tracks a real difference in mediated influence, without positing any sovereign ego outside structure. Family-systems therapists and case studies regularly describe how specific members' characteristic responses reshape the "system" under shared structural pressures, acknowledging both individual agency and broader constraints.
The attempt to solve the agency problem by demoting individuals and promoting collectives or structures just creates a new version of the same problem: you end up attributing intentions, decisions, and responsibility to abstractions—"the project," "the system," "the discourse"—which are less tractable as agents than historically situated persons ever were.
VI. The Neo-Pragmatist Alternative: Symmetrical Mediation and Scalar Efficacy
A more defensible path forward draws on pragmatist resources, particularly Dewey's and Mead's accounts of action and selfhood. For Dewey, action is experimental inquiry: a process of reconstructing problematic situations through creative adaptation of means to ends within changing environments. For Mead, the self arises through internalized social interaction—the "generalized other" becomes part of individual consciousness—yet the self retains capacity for novelty and reflexive reorientation through what Mead called the "I" moment of experience. The "generalized other" here functions as a useful way of talking about converging forces—values, norms, beliefs, stocks of knowledge, tacit assumptions, customs and habits—that shape individual consciousness, not as any kind of "being" with independent ontological status.
These pragmatist insights point toward an account of agency that is neither sovereign nor epiphenomenal but weak in metaphysical commitment, mediated in practice, and contextually efficacious. Agency, on this view, is not a property of isolated individuals standing outside social relations, nor is it a mere illusion masking structural determinations. It is the socially constituted yet experientially real capacity of situated actors to intervene in ongoing processes, to reconstruct habits and institutions, to make choices that, while always constrained and enabled by contexts, nonetheless make a difference to outcomes.
Crucially, this framework insists on symmetrical mediation. Both individuals and structures are constituted through relations; both are mediated by historical, linguistic, and social factors; neither possesses pure, unmediated causal power. The question is never "do structures or individuals really act?" but rather "at what scale and under what conditions does efficacy operate most saliently for the question at hand?"
This leads to a negative methodological principle: never fix the level of analysis or locus of agency a priori. Determine the appropriate scale of attribution from the specific question being asked and the evidence available. Different inquiries require different scales of explanation:
When structural scale dominates: Consider the question "Why have atmospheric carbon concentrations risen since 1850?" Here, searching for a small set of responsible individuals would be misguided. The phenomenon reflects systemic features: fossil-fuel-based industrialization, capitalist growth imperatives, regulatory failures, international coordination problems, technological path dependencies. Even specific corporate CEOs or policymakers are largely replaceable within this system—the structural logic would produce similar actors making similar choices. Attribution belongs primarily at the structural level.
When individual scale matters significantly: Consider Napoleon's reshaping of European politics and law between 1799 and 1815. Here, structural factors (the French Revolution's legacy, European monarchical systems, military technologies, economic conditions) clearly mattered. But Napoleon's specific qualities—his military genius, administrative vision, political ambition, capacity for rapid decision-making—were not structurally determined or easily replaceable. A different individual leading post-Revolutionary France would have produced a recognizably different trajectory. The counterfactual "without Napoleon specifically, European history 1800-1815 would have been radically different" is historically meaningful because individual-level efficacy was salient here.
When institutional scale dominates: Consider US lawmaking. How laws get made reflects primarily institutional and collective processes: congressional procedures, committee systems, party coalitions, interest group lobbying, federalism, judicial review. Individual legislators matter at the margins—particular skill in coalition-building, key committee positions—but outcomes largely reflect aggregated actions within strongly constraining institutional logics. Attribution belongs primarily to institutional analysis.
When individual scale is decisive: Consider lawmaking in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Here, while structural constraints existed (oil economy, sectarian divisions, international sanctions, Ba'athist ideology), Saddam's personal dictatorship meant that laws and policies reflected his individual choices to an extraordinary degree. The same structural conditions under a different leader would have produced markedly different governance. Individual attribution is not just defensible but necessary for explanation.
The critical move is recognizing that the appropriate scale of attribution varies with the question and the evidence. There is no a priori answer to whether individuals or structures matter more. Sometimes structures overwhelmingly dominate (carbon emissions), sometimes individuals are highly consequential (Stalin, Napoleon, Mandela, Saddam), and often—indeed usually—it's complex interaction at multiple scales (individuals operating within structures they both inherit and transform).
Talk of "scales" here is not quantitative. It does not imply that influence can be measured in units or apportioned in percentages. Rather, it is a way of talking about which level of description—global system, state, organization, household, person—yields the most illuminating answer to a given question. This is not a call to operationalize "degrees of agency" in numerical form; attempts to quantify complex historical roles often obscure more than they reveal. The point is to make explicit, and defend, the qualitative judgments that inform explanation when we say that certain actors or structures "mattered considerably" to a given outcome.
This also helps clarify why we should speak of influence rather than causation. "Causation" carries connotations of unilateral determination—A causes B, decisively and independently. "Influence" better captures the situated, mediated, contributory efficacy that both individuals and structures exercise. Stalin influenced Soviet history profoundly, operating through and reshaping the party-state structure; he did not unilaterally cause outcomes independent of those structural mediations. Similarly, capitalist imperatives influence corporate behavior without mechanically determining every choice.
This framework shows why, for inquiry that aims to explain variation and contingency, scalar attribution to individuals is philosophically coherent. Some historians—Lynn Hunt's work on the French Revolution is one example—employ individual agency in their substantive work while grappling with post-structuralist skepticism in their methodological reflections. Such practitioners need not feel methodological tension: they can continue using individual-level attributions where these illuminate their questions, without theoretical embarrassment. When writing about the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, focusing heavily on Kennedy's and Khrushchev's specific decisions, dispositions, and judgments makes sense because at that scale and for that question, individual agency mattered considerably, even though structural factors (Cold War bipolarity, nuclear deterrence logic, bureaucratic politics) were also operative. When writing about the rise of industrial capitalism, focusing on systemic transformations—enclosure movements, technological innovations, market expansions—makes sense because individual capitalists or even political leaders are largely replaceable within that structural dynamic.
The problem arises when theory tries to legislate in advance that only one scale ever matters. Some theories insist everything reduces to individual choices; others insist individuals are epiphenomenal. Both are wrong. The pragmatist alternative treats scale of efficacy as an empirical question, not a theoretical axiom, refusing to prescribe in advance where agency must be located for all inquiry.
VII. Methodological and Normative Payoffs
This rehabilitation of weak agency yields several important payoffs for interpretive inquiry and normative evaluation:
First, it enables meaningful counterfactual reasoning. If we want to say "Persian governance might have looked different under an emperor more like the Assyrian kings," we're making a claim about individual agency—that Cyrus's specific choices (however mediated by Near Eastern imperial traditions and geopolitical constraints) made a difference to outcomes. This counterfactual is impossible to formulate coherently if individuals are merely sites where forces converge. Yet such counterfactuals are essential for historical explanation.
Second, it allows fitting attribution of responsibility. We can say Stalin bears significant responsibility for the Terror and forced collectivization—not sole responsibility (the party-state structure enabled his actions, Bolshevik ideology shaped his worldview, international pressures created perceived threats), but genuine responsibility arising from his choices within that context. This is impossible if agency resides only in "the Soviet project" or "the discourse of socialist construction." Abstractions can't bear responsibility; persons in positions of power making consequential choices can be held answerable for their actions.
Third, it makes virtue ethics possible for historically situated agents. Virtues—dispositions like epistemic humility, tolerance, courage, practical wisdom, attention to consequences—must be borne by persons, not by discourses, structures, "the project," "social imaginaries," or other abstractions. We can say "Cyrus exemplified epistemic humility in recognizing that Persian ways were not the only ways, and tolerance in allowing subject peoples to maintain local cults and governance structures." This attribution is defensible without claiming that Cyrus possessed sovereign agency or that his choices were unmediated by imperial traditions. It requires only that we grant him weak agency—the capacity to make choices within constraints that bore his particular stamp and influenced outcomes.
Fourth, it respects the interpretive character of historical inquiry while maintaining defensibility. Historical sources are incomplete, contested, propagandized, and mediated by successive layers of interpretation. The case of Cyrus exemplifies this: we have his own propaganda (the Cylinder inscription), Xenophon's idealized portrait, biblical celebration, Enlightenment reception, Persian and Iranian nationalist appropriations, and recent revisionist scholarship (like van der Spek's) emphasizing continuities with Assyrian/Babylonian practices. There's no view from nowhere, no unmediated access to "what really happened."
Yet we still must make interpretive judgments. We cannot simply average competing interpretations or throw up our hands in agnostic paralysis. Given the messy, contested evidence we have, we make the most defensible judgment we can: that Cyrus's governance reflected distinctive choices about tone, frequency of terror, systematic use of local elites and cults that marked Persian rule as different from Assyrian precedents, even if (following van der Spek) we acknowledge greater toolkit continuity than older scholarship supposed. This judgment is provisional, revisable, and contestable—but it's not arbitrary. It's constrained by evidence, answerable to criticism, and better than alternatives (pure hagiography, pure structural determinism, or refusal to attribute at all).
In one important strand of interpretive, case-based historical work, practitioners make these scalar judgments constantly, informed by tacit knowledge developed through immersion in sources and historiographical debates. They don't follow algorithms or apply decision procedures. They exercise judgment—and that judgment, while fallible and contestable, is nonetheless often defensible and improvable through argument.
What the neo-pragmatist framework provides is not a shortcut to correct interpretation but a philosophical defense of this practice against theoretical moves that would rule it out in advance. It shows that attributing agency to individuals is not naive or ideological but coherent and defensible. It clears conceptual space for those who want to make defensible interpretive judgments about who and what influenced outcomes, at what scales, under what conditions, without methodological embarrassment.
Finally, it enables the virtue-ethics project. My larger work attempts to identify what I call Tier-1 virtues—dispositions like fallibilism, epistemic humility, tolerance, compassion, attention to consequences—that enable cooperation and inquiry across deep cultural and metaphysical differences. These virtues must be exemplifiable by historically situated persons, not just by abstract "traditions," "practices," "projects," "social imaginaries," or other reified abstractions. We need to be able to say: "Cyrus exemplified these virtues in these ways, and Persian governance might have looked different without his particular dispositions and choices." The account of weak agency defended here makes such attributions philosophically coherent for those who want to pursue virtue ethics with historical exemplars.
VIII. Conclusion
The interpretive turn's critique of the sovereign subject was necessary and valuable. Enlightenment humanism's picture of autonomous, self-transparent, disembedded individuals was indeed ideological and ahistorical. But the solution is not to dissolve individuals entirely into structural effects or to relocate agency to abstracted collectives and discourses. That move replaces one philosophical problem with another.
The neo-pragmatist alternative defended here treats both individuals and structures as mediated, neither as possessing pure unmediated efficacy. Agency operates at multiple scales; the appropriate scale for attribution depends on the question asked and the evidence available. Sometimes structures dominate (carbon emissions, systemic economic transformations), sometimes individuals matter profoundly (Stalin, Napoleon, Mandela, Cyrus within their respective contexts), and usually it's complex interaction requiring attention to multiple levels.
This framework makes no claim to algorithmic precision or quantitative measurement. Historical interpretation remains an art requiring judgment, tacit knowledge, and immersion in contested sources. What this account provides is a defense of practices that attribute mediated agency to individuals—a defense against theoretical positions that would foreclose such attribution, whether through structural reductionism that eliminates individual efficacy or through residual anxieties about returning to naive individualism.
Individual agency is neither sovereign nor epiphenomenal, but weak in the pragmatist sense: demanding little metaphysically while explaining much historically. Stalin's catastrophic efficacy and Mandela's transformative leadership exemplify not "weak" power but weak theory—agency that operates without requiring transcendental subjects or ahistorical rational actors. Agency is weak in its philosophical commitments, strong in its capacity to support defensible attributions of influence, counterfactual reasoning, and calibrated assessment of responsibility. This is sufficient to make talk of individual virtues, counterfactuals, and responsibility philosophically coherent and defensible for those inquiries that want to pursue them—without reviving sovereign subjects or denying the insights of the interpretive turn.
Once we've established this philosophical groundwork, we can return to substantive questions: Did Cyrus exemplify epistemic humility and tolerance? Did Akbar's policies reflect practical wisdom? How did Mandela navigate the tensions between reconciliation and justice? These are interpretive questions admitting of contestable but defensible answers—and the account of weak agency defended here shows why such questions are both coherent and worth pursuing.
Bibliography
Blunden, Andy. "The Origins of Collective Decision Making." Historical Materialism (2005).
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.
Giddens, Anthony. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. New York: Penguin, 2017.
Lodge, Tom. Mandela: A Critical Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Minuchin, Salvador. Families and Family Therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Muller, Jerry Z. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Porter, Theodore M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
van der Spek, Bert. "Cyrus the Great, Exiles and Foreign Gods: A Comparison of Assyrian and Persian Policies on Subject Nations." In Extraction & Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper, ed. Michael Kozuh et al. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2014.
Xenophon. Cyropaedia. Trans. Walter Miller. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
No comments:
Post a Comment