Agency

Approaches to Agency

The most common approach to agency is one that sees agents as individuals and politics as a realm constituted by individual agents. Their agency is ascribed to certain characteristics, among which rationality is typically privileged. In rational choice approaches, agents are perceived as decision makers with the rational capacity to make strategic choices. From this perspective, all citizens might be regarded as political agents (for instance, as voters), although it is often more interesting to consider elite actors, whose decisions carry more weight.

Others, in particular those inspired by Kantian philosophy, focus on the moral agency that is involved in being held accountable for one's acts and being capable of assuming responsibilities and duties as well as bearing rights. Exercising moral agency requires autonomy, freedom, and logical or reflective capacities to guide normative decisions.

Sometimes, organizations are treated as rational agents, while in international relations, it is common to find states being treated as agents that [Page 12]make decisions about national interests. Most exponents of individualist approaches would nonetheless maintain that individual decision makers within organizations or states are the ultimate source of agency.

Some Critiques

Despite their prevalence, these rather formal approaches to agency incite significant critical objections, among which three are especially salient. First, agency may be recognized as a historical and particularly modern phenomenon, which suggests that it may accordingly be lost as well as gained. Thinkers since Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill have worried about a decline of agentic capacity in modern democracies. Once one considers empirical individuals operating within concrete political conditions, moreover, it becomes evident that they do not all enjoy equal or identical capacities for agency. In the history of political thought, many categories of human—notably children, women, laborers, imbeciles, criminals, and members of particular racial or ethno-religious groups—have been deemed deficient in such abilities and therefore regarded as naturally passive or dependent members of society rightfully excluded from exercising political power.

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