Realism and the Problem of Agency

The central problem of theorising agency is how to conceptualise the human agent as someone who is both partly formed by their sociali ty, but also has the capacity partly to transform their society. The diff iculty is that social theorising has oscill ated between these two extremes. On the one hand, Enlightenment thought promoted an ‘undersocialised’ view of man, one whose human constitution owed nothing to society and thus was a self-suff icient ‘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 thus becomes such a dependent ‘ insider’ that he has no capacity to transform his social environment. Instead, if we are to understand and model the human being as both ‘ child’ and ‘parent’ of society, then social theory firstly needs a concept of man whose sociality does make a vital contribution to the realisation of his potential qua human being. Secondly, however, it requires a concept of man who does possess sufficient relatively autonomous properties and powers that he can reflect and act upon his social context, along with others li ke him, in order to transform it. It is argued that both the ‘undersocialised’ and the ‘oversocialised’ models of humankind are inadequate foundations for social theory because they present us with either a self-suff icient maker of society, or a supine social product who is made. The preliminary part of this paper seeks to show how these two defective models of the human being have sequentially dominated social theory since the Enlightenment, and to indicate their deficiencies for social theorising. The bulk of the paper attempts to substitute a better conceptionof man, from the perspective of social realism, which grants humankind (i) temporal priority, (ii) relative autonomy, and (ii i) causal efficacy, in relation to the social beings that they become and the powers of transformative reflection and action which they bring to their social context, powers that are independent of social mediation.