[Xmca-l] Re: Leontyev's activities

[Antti Rajala <ajrajala@gmail.com>]

Larry,
I am just reading Margaret Archer's wonderful book about agency: Being
human. Archer reviews thoroughly four positions on agency. The first is
enlightment's detached agent that reduces social structure to individual.
The second is post modern social constructionist agency that reduces
everything to social structures. She also refutes whar she calls
the central conflationist position of Giddens that starts from the middle,
seeing individual and social as constituted in relations. Her own critical
realist position gives primacy to the causative powers of both individuals
and social structure that are inter-related.

Her writings bring to my mind a xmca debate about Billig's article a few
years back. I guess chat people would pick a position similar to either
third or fourth position on agency. I myself prefer the third one but I am
sympatethic to the fourth one as well.

Antti