Is Agency a Useful Historical Concept?

Abstract

Concerns about “agency” in history are generally misplaced. Agency is pervasive in human interaction, not, as is often assumed, a relatively rare or heroic achievement. We live within social structures that are reproduced by social practices—but that are also constantly bent or reinterpreted in action, sometimes in minor ways but sometimes transforming the animating structures. I illustrate how this conceptualization works by recounting how French workers, previously divided into rivalrous single-trade organizations, arrived at a form of proto-socialist class consciousness in the years after the Revolution of 1830—by adopting, adapting, and repurposing the new regime’s liberal language and organizational forms. But “agency,” I argue, was equally present in the daily efforts of the pre-1830 workers’ organizations, many of whose modes of action were officially illegal. Agency should be understood as a pervasive feature of human social life, not as a badge of heroism.