Deconstructing Structure and Agency

Abstract

The complex relationship between structure and agency is a perennial, if not intractable problem in modern social theory. The problem is reasonably simple to state, but not that easy to resolve. It is well captured by Marx, for example, when he prepares the ground to explain the causes and consequences of Louis Bonaparte’s dictatorship in France during the 1850s: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’. In his unusually punchy way, Marx suggests that whilst there are revolutionary moments when social agents decisively intervene in the historical process to bring about social change, ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. Indeed, just as human beings appear ‘to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before’ — in these ‘periods of revolutionary crisis’ — ‘they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language’ (Marx, 1997b, p. 329).