Morris, when he wrote: ‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’.5 History is not a process without a subject: it is ‘unmastered human practice’,6 in which each hour is ‘a moment of becoming, of alternative possibilities, of ascendant and descendant forces, of opposing (class) definitions and exertions, of “double-tongued” signs.’7 The crucial medium in which men and women convert objective determinations into subjective initiatives is through their experience—the junction between ‘being and consciousness’, by which ‘structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters into history’.8 It is through such experience, for example, that they make themselves into social classes-groups conscious of antagonistic values and interests, and struggling to realize them. ‘Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are “given”.’9 Engels’s famous ‘parallelogram of forces’—in which ‘individual wills do not attain what they want’ and yet ‘each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it’,10 dismantled and dismissed by Althusser, can be reinstated once a substitution is made of class for individual volition: ‘if the historical resultant is then seen as the outcome of a collision of contradictory class interests and forces, then we may see how human agency gives rise to an involuntary result and how we may say, at one and the same time, that “we make our own history” and “history makes itself”.’11 The real lesson of historical materialism is ‘the crucial ambivalence of our human presence in our own history, part-subjects, part-objects, the voluntary agents of our own involuntary determinations’.12
The pivot of Thompson’s construction, it will be seen, is the notion of agency—a dominant in his vocabulary since his earliest writings. Attractively, often movingly, as it is employed in The Poverty of Theory, it can come to seem virtually self-explanatory. But in fact it demands very careful and discriminating scrutiny. For its apparent simplicity is deceptive. Let us recall first of all that the term ‘agent’ reveals a curious ambiguity in ordinary usage, possessing two opposite connotations. It signifies at once active initiator and passive instrument. The word is intended by Thompson exclusively in the first sense: but phrases like ‘agents of a foreign power’ and ‘agents for a merchant bank’ remind us of the currency of the second sense. Ironically, Thompson without noticing uses it himself in just this way at a number of points in The Poverty of Theory, disparaging what he calls various ‘import agencies’ for foreign doctrines13 (among them, New Left Review). The same capsizal of meaning, of course, occurs in the related term ‘subject’, signifying simultaneously ‘sovereignty’ and ‘subordination’: a striking coincidence. In the case of agency, however, we have a familiar way of distinguishing between the two senses of the word. Where necessary, speech customarily refers to ‘free agents’ to make it clear that the former rather than the latter is intended. Is this what Thompson means by agency? The answer is of some interest. A very large philosophical issue is clearly at stake here. Yet throughout his long essay, the problem breaks surface only once, in a fleeting parenthesis. ‘Whatever we may conclude, in the endlessly receding argument of pre-determination and free will’, he notes at one point, ‘it is profoundly important that we should think ourselves to be “free” (which Althusser will not allow us to think)’.14 The avowal here approaches a pure pragmatism, akin to Nietzsche’s doctrine of the ‘useful illusion’.15 In the midst of so many lengthy and unconditional arguments against Althusser, a short clause suddenly opens the gate to ultimate disarmament before him (what if truth belied comfort?). Then the dense press of refutation resumes its course again. We have been reminded, however, of a subterranean uncertainty beneath the confident ground on which agency is generally pitched in The Poverty of Theory.
Does Thompson’s momentary equivocation disable his overall case? It need not. For the notion of agency can be retained, even on rigorously determinist premises, if we mean by it conscious, goal-directed activity. Sebastiano Timpanaro has proposed a definition close to this in his work On Materialism, from a standpoint faithful to the most stoical injunctions of the late Engels.16 The problem of the ultimate sources of action can then be bracketed in a rational historical inquiry, for a study of its ends. But if agency is construed as conscious, goal-directed activity, everything turns on the nature of the ‘goals’. For it is obvious that all historical subjects engage in actions all of the time, of which they are ‘agents’ in this strict sense. So long as it remains at this level of indeterminacy, the notion is an analytic void. To render it operative, at least three qualitatively different types of goal have to be clearly distinguished. Throughout history to date, the overwhelming majority of people for the overwhelmingly major part of their lives have pursued ‘private’ goals: cultivation of a plot, choice of a marriage, exercise of a skill, maintenance of a home, bestowal of a name. These personal projects are inscribed within existing social relations, and typically reproduce them. Yet they remain profoundly intentional enterprises, which have consumed the greater part of human energy and persistence throughout recorded time. The historian of any small community plunges directly into the milieu of this universal agency: Leroy Ladurie’s study of a 14th century Albigensian village, Montaillou, is an archetypal instance. There have also, of course, been collective or individual projects whose goals were ‘public’ in character: quantitatively far fewer, involving lesser numbers in more fitful endeavours, but normally more interesting and important for the historian. Will and action here acquire an independent historical significance as causal sequences in their own right, rather than as molecular samples of social relations. The difference is typically inscribed in historical records themselves: to take two late medieval documents, say, between the Paston Letters and Froissart’s Chronicles. Religious movements, political struggles, military conflicts, diplomatic transactions, commercial explorations, cultural creations, have been among the staple types of such public agendas. However, these too in their overwhelming majority have not aimed to transform social relations as such—to create new societies or master old ones: for the most part they were much more limited in their (voluntary) scope. The goals pursued have been characteristically inserted within a known structural framework, taken for granted by the actors. The foundation of the Benedictine Order in the Dark Ages, the building of Notre Dame, the Habsburg-Valois wars in Italy, the Treaty of Westphalia or Utrecht, the competition between Hats and Caps in parliamentary Sweden, Commodore Perry’s voyage to Japan—most familiar historical events or processes of this kind, whatever their misery or grandeur, have been marked by the pursuit of local objectives within an accepted order over-arching them. Large-scale military conquests themselves, which might appear an exception, have generally sought no more than to impose a new political and economic authority in otherwise unaltered lands: the Mongol Empire, the greatest of all, is a classic example. The consequences of foreign annexation could, of course, be far more drastic, in ways unimagined by the conquerors (the demographic collapse of the Mexican population after Cortes). But this is equally true of any of the forms of historical initiative just described. By definition, it is intentional reach rather than involuntary result that distinguishes one form of agency from another.
Finally, there are those collective projects which have sought to render their initiators authors of their collective mode of existence as a whole, in a conscious programme aimed at creating or remodelling whole social structures. There are isolated premonitions of this phenomenon, in political colonization, religious heterodoxy or literary utopia, in earlier centuries: but essentially this kind of agency is very recent indeed. On a major scale, the very notion of it scarcely predates the Enlightenment. The American and French Revolutions are the first historical figurations of collective agency in this, decisive sense. Originating as largely spontaneous explosions and ending with politico-juridical reconstructions, however, they still remain at a great distance from the manifestation of a full popular agency desiring and creating new social conditions of life for itself. It is the modern labour movement that has really given birth to this quite new conception of historical
