Butler and bad writing

[Brad De Long]

>Good.  We need to explain agency not as "an unexplained attribute" of
>a subject nor as "a fatalistic determinism" (a tendency found in
>Marxism, perhaps?).  Butler plies between this Scylla and Charybdis by
>granting that although "the subject is socially constructed", "this
>does not mean the erasure of agency".  Ok, at least I can begin to see
>the fog lifting.

It's amazing how much progress we have made since the 1852 formulation that
"[people] make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own
choosing..."

Brad DeLong