“Longing and Hope and Sadness and Anger”: Disentangling the Social and the Human

This article reconstructs the historical context in which “agency” emerged as the key concept of social history, arguing that an unstated concept of the liberal individual was smuggled into historical explanation through a humanist anthropology underlying the social history renaissance. It then asks what would be involved in salvaging social–historical explanation, including its interest in historical possibilities for social solidarity and the political power of ordinary people, while jettisoning this liberal-humanist baggage.