Summary
Contents
Subject index
In this penetrating and assured book, one of the leading commentators in the field argues that social theory is moving in the wrong direction in its reflections on human freedom and autonomy. It has borrowed notions of 'agency' and 'choice' from everyday discourse, but increasingly it puts a misconceived individualistic gloss upon them. Against this, Barnes unequivocally identifies human beings as social agents in a profound sense, and emphasises the vital importance of their sociability. Notions of 'agency', 'freedom' and 'choice' have to be understood by reference to their role in communicative interaction; they are key components of the discourse through which human beings identify each other, and have effects upon each other, as soci
Speculations and Evaluations
Voluntaristic notions do work for individual human beings in the course of their social interactions. But to understand what work they do, and how, it is necessary to understand something of the human beings who deploy them. If human beings are modelled as interdependent social agents, then a very different conception of what underpins the form of voluntaristic discourse emerges from that implied if human beings are modelled as independent rational individuals. In the first part of this book the case was made for accepting the former model, and rejecting the latter. The first model, needless to say, remains an idealisation, like the second, and inadequate to that extent, like the second. But the suggestion is that it is nonetheless ...
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