Angelus Novus
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I'd be interested a more nuanced discussion about the role of agency because it has a long debate history in philosophy and the social sciences.
Carrol's objections to figures of speech like personification, seem to confuse a rhetorical device with something I can't pin down but appears to be somehow linked to agency. It would be nice if he made an argument.
There are all kinds of conflicts going on about agency. There is the legal reality that assigns individual responsibility to individual conduct, acts, and intention.
Then too, institutions have pretty explicit agency in the form of mission statements and legal charges of duty. Congress shall make no law. There is the category expressing the will of Congress. There are preambles that express the intent of the legislation to follow.
"Capitalism is Not a Conspiracy of the Few. It Works Because You Work."
Hmm. Not so sure about this opposition. I think both are true to varying degrees. The US bankers seem to engage in conspiracies of all sorts. If they didn't hide much of their work, they wouldn't get as rich as they have and more would be in jail.
I've been chewing on agency for the last couple of days. I think I've decided the only place to really get rid of the concept is in some of the sciences. Even there, if you listen to common expressions you'll hear all kinds of talk that imparts will, agency, and even self to things and processes that have none of these. Biology is particularly prone to this kind of talking and thinking. I've decided that a lot of this furry thinking has to do with the extraordinary fluidity of language.
I think agency belongs to the human constructed world in the form of something like an operation (in the sense of a mathematical class of operators) rather than a fixed construct to either abolish or embrace. If you think of agency and its relation to mystification, reification, abstraction, you can see it as a mode of thinking. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
For example, most cosmologies impart a host of agencies who basically run the world like a human society. On some level animating both the human and physical world is a domain of human thinking.
There is another issue involved which has to do with the problem of cause and effect versus the hegelian dialectic. This is something Harvey mentions in passing. Hope he gets back to it. The basic idea is that within Marx's framework of change or flows, there is a dialectial process between multiple components of society, such that cause and effect are not directly involved in the way that classical economists assume they are. I take it this means you can not just get rid of the bankers, but you must change minds and concepts.
What do I think about this opposition? I am very ambivalent. Cause and effect are pretty well established relationships in much of the physical world at Newtonian scales. Cause and effect relationships seem very poorly established in the human world of societies. And one of the reasons is that mathematical particles have motions, magnitude, directions, etc but no intention. Meanwhile people are full of intentions, wills, choices, etc. This opposition leads into the free will v. determinism forest, where I really don't want to go. Just noting it's there.
Hegelian dialectics works particular well in a human world, but not very well in the physical world. Well that seems to be the history, where social, political, economic and cultural theories were heavily influenced but physical theory was not.
On the other hand, Cassirer makes some remarkable use of Hegel in his Substance and Function. The basic idea (I think) is that the material world is constructed of a collection of relational functions, and not of substances. In crude terms an atom is not a thing, rather a set of relations. There is the Bohr complimentary idea, but Cassirer got much deeper long before...
CG