Agency, power, modernity: A manifesto for social theory

ABSTRACT

In this article, we propose a new direction for social theory, based on a distinction between action and agency, a reconsideration of sociological theories of power, and a rereading of the transition to modernity. Drawing on Aristotle, Carole Pateman, Hannah Arendt, and Ernst Kantorowicz, we propose a conceptual model of power centred on the sending and binding of another to be one's agent in the world, and the varying representation of this relation and what it excludes. This approach allows a different understanding of modernity than is offered by accounts of power derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. With reference to the French Revolution and twentieth and twenty-first century presidential politics in the USA, we manifest the utility of the framework for the construction of a research programme in historical and political sociology.

KEYWORDS:

• Aristotle
• Hannah Arendt
• French Revolution
• action
• liberal democracy
• political philosophy

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jennifer Bair, Irit Dekel, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Risto Heiskala, Daniel Hirschman, Emily Erikson and Matthieu Desan for comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Consider that Anthony Giddens’ Central Problems in Social Theory was published in 1979; Pierre Bourdieu's Le sense pratique was published in 1980; Jurgen Habermas’ Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I in 1981, and Jeffrey C. Alexander's Theoretical Logic in Sociology, volume 1 in 1982. While the substantive content of the synthetic ambition of these texts was certainly anticipated in earlier works of the 1970s (not the least of which was Bourdieu's Esquisse d’une theorie de la pratique, precede de trois etudes d’ethnologie kabyle), we would simply note that one can trace a certain arc in social theory from these texts to the present day.

2. Aristotle examined quite different phenomena than those that typically are taken as foundational for contemporary social theory. Furthermore, the question we ask below, about rectors, actors, and others in the politics of modernity, was not available to him.

3. The classic account of dunamis in this sense can be found in Metaphysics, Theta (Aristotle, 1999, Book 9). In ‘Aristotle's Defense of Dunamis’ (Chapter 1 of Ways of Being Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics; 2003), Charlotte Witt provides an authoritative account of what dunamis amounts to, and how its hierarchically subordinate position to energeia (act, actuality, activity) relates to but is not exhausted by a gendered ontology. The gendering involved in Aristotle's ontology and metaphysics of action, correlates with the expressly political sense that remains in dunamis, even when deployed in this ontological context. Feminist appropriations and critiques of Aristotle thinking about dunamis will be discussed further below, as we account for why contemporary social theory would do well to reconsider its reception of Aristotle as it comes to terms with the unfinished project of modernity.

4. Important here is Hans Joas’ reconstructive introduction of the instrumentalisation of the body in modern thought. Joas notes, for example, that

If we compare this [means-ends, ego-as-cause account of action] with the ideas of the Ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle's philosophy of action, it soon becomes apparent that a causalistic interpretation of action is anything but self-evident. However, the modern mind has great difficulty in accepting the Ancient Greeks’ idea of the ‘telos’ as a moment of maturation and completion intrinsic to an action. In the transition from antiquity to modernity, the concept of purpose has acquired a radically subjective meaning (2005, p. 152).

In particular, in suggesting that a historical investigation is required to understand and explain the development of an instrumental relationship to the body by individuals who are and are not their bodies, Joas articulates the Aristotelian line of thinking we follow here, namely that the idea of mind as principal and body as agent cannot be a metaphysical starting-point for the analysis of all action.

5. Here we follow the ‘relational turn’ in social theorising, but suggest that its insights must be taken much further than they have thus far. See our discussion of the work of Stuart Clegg, below. See also Vandenberghe (1999) and Emirbayer (1997).

6. The two most widely influential arguments that individual projects only have meaning and worth from within the horizon of shared understanding are found in the work of Michael Sandel, for instance, Justice (2009), and Alasdair MacIntyre, especially in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality (1989, 2007).

7. This language of rector, actor, and other was first introduced in Reed (2017). The choice of the somewhat unusual ‘rector’ is derived from the Latin for ruler, and is chosen because of its multiple meanings and associations, so as to avoid a conflation of the vocabulary with a specific power formation (such as state rulers, family heads (fathers or mothers), employers, etc.).

8. Most explicitly Lukes engaged Robert Dahl's research program for political science and his study of pluralism and democracy. But the methodological discussions in Lukes echo clearly not only Dahl but Hobbes’ comment that ‘the power of the agent, and the efficient cause are the same thing’ (Hobbes, 1966, p. 127).

9. Ricoeur locates the hermeneutics of suspicion in the convergence of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud:

Freud's ‘reality principle’ and … its equivalents in Nietzsche and Marx – eternal return in the former, understood necessity in the latter – brings out the positive benefit of the ascesis required by a reductive and destructive interpretation: confrontation with bare reality, the discipline of Ananke, of necessity. While finding their positive convergence, our three masters of suspicion also present the most radically contrary stance to the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as the recollection of meaning and as the reminiscence of being (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 35).

10. At the end of Humanitarian Reason, Didier Fassin reaches for language to describe the critique of humanitarian reason that he has just concluded. Beginning with a contrast between Plato's allegory in Book VII of The Republic and Walzer's hermeneutics, he then makes clear how this is the essential dividing line between Bourdieu and Thévenot:

For some, the task is to unveil. For others, it is to translate. Those on the outside denounce the social order. Those on the inside offer a grammar of social worlds. Among sociologists, the tension between the two is expressed between those who make criticism a tool of their radicalism and those who take it as the object of their analysis: critical sociology versus the sociology of criticism … I would venture a reformulation of this duality by suggesting the possibility of a critical thinking … on the threshold of the cave … at the point where one step to either side takes us out into the light or plunges us into the darkness.

Averring that his critique has been ‘supported by the lucidity and reflexivity of actors’, Fassin insists that the sociologist cannot be alone outside the cave, but rather must somehow critique in such a way that ‘proceeds from an ethical and intellectual rigor in which respect for informants does not preclude the exploration of areas where they are unable or unwilling to go’ (Fassin, 2011, pp. 245–246). We find this a compelling direction for thought, particularly because we wish to explore, in new terms, the relationship between power and authority, with all of the latter's reference to authorship and thus the possibility of a good rector, and because we want a critique that can be both radical and recognise complexity, ambivalence and the compromises of human existence. As Fassin writes:

There are also situations in which the interpretations are delicate and the issues uncertain, in which relations of power shift and are even sometimes reversed. Facing these actors and these facts, which resist all attempts at reduction, critique must precisely give an account of this irreducibility. The fragility but also, without doubt, the greatness of the social sciences lie in the fact that they must always come to terms with realities that are complex and even indeterminate simply because they result from human intentions and actions (Fassin, 2011, pp. 245–257).

11. The increase in the speed of the movement of capital indeed both spurs and relies upon the enhancement of communication and transportation capacities, as Harvey has shown in such detail; to capture this and related processes outside of Harvey's specifically Marxist problematic, we propose, in opposition to the term ‘network society’, whose unfortunate neutrality masks as much as it reveals, a theoretical image of the globe wherein places are increasingly bound more and more tightly together by chains of power and their representation (Reed, 2017). For further discussion of Rosa's social acceleration argument, see Reed (2016).

12. We have in mind, principally, Chantal Mouffe, Return of the Political (1993), Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), and Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception (2005). The point needs to be borne out with argument concerning the persistence of sovereignty (and domination) in democratic republics and the problematic modes by which such sovereignty and domination get distributed within contemporary democratic societies. We offer such an argument in a companion paper-in-development, ‘The People's Two Bodies and the Renewal of Right Wing Populism,’ a preliminary version of which was delivered by Weinman at Philosophy and Social Science conference, Prague, 16 May–20 May 2018.

13. On Eichmann's various versions of himself as (merely) the agent of his superiors, and thus as making judgments of himself in light of superiors, see especially Arendt's (1963) discussion of his narration of his own complicity or guiltlessness in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Chapter VII (especially pp. 112–116), but also Chapter XV, especially pp. 234–235 and 246–247).