Frank Welz, Lost in Agency? Kant, Foucault and the Task of Sociology (2010)

Frank Welz, ‘Lost in Agency? Kant, Foucault and the Task of Sociology’
Paper delivered at the Social Agency. Theoretical and Methodological Challenges of the 21st Century Humanist Sociology Conference, Wrocław, Poland, on 20-22 October 2010

Abstract
No sociology without agency: Without the discovery of social agency there would not be any sociology. (1) If anything laid the foundation for the birth of sociology, it has been, first, the breakthrough of the European industrial revolution that changed the prior perception of human history (the unintended consequences of social agency); secondly, the experience of the modern political revolution (the intended consequences of agency); and thirdly, the modern scientific revolution that made clear that our understanding of the world does not represent adequately the latter, but is being created by agents – by us.
(2) Re-emphasizing this starting point, my paper aims to discuss one of the perennial questions of sociology as an intellectual controversy on social agency between Immanuel Kant, on the one hand, and Michel Foucault. Kant provided modernity with its voice. He articulated that it is “us” who shape the phenomena: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Men make history. Foucault, on the other hand, identified the limits of agency – circumstances that men did not select themselves. According to Foucault, there is no autonomous centre of agency. On the contrary, the human subject is regarded as a point of intersection between different forces.
(3) Finally, sociologizing the contrasting positions and reminding us of the task of sociology, I will discuss whether there can be a way out of the current aporetic dilemma between the sociological understanding of the triumph of the individual, under the current regime of post-fordist flexibilization of production and its promotion of “promotional” selves, and its opposite, the sociological deletion of the agent in recent post-structuralist and systems-theoretic approaches that eclipse the (formerly) basic axiom of sociology.