Agency, wellbeing and the politics of left and right

The concept of agency refers to an individual’s capacity to make choices and take purposive actions on their own behalf. In sociology, agency is seen to interact with social structures, which may support or limit a person’s capacities or opportunities for agency. An essential structure-agency question is, to what extent are people’s behaviours determined either by their internal, self-motivated aims and choices, or by the social and cultural structures in which they live, or by a mix of both?

Although it’s not often recognised, ideas about human agency plays a significant role in contemporary politics. Why, because the beliefs that political actors hold about human behaviour can strongly influence their attitudes and decisions on policy issues. These beliefs may be hidden under the surface of everyday politics, but nevertheless they are there, shaping political actors’ perceptions of the causes of various social problems and of the appropriate policy ‘solutions’ to apply. These beliefs about human agency are not just held by individuals but operate as shared norms within political organisations or groups.

In this article I firstly unpack some of the core beliefs about structure and agency which shape political positions on both the right and left of the political spectrum, and how these interact. I then propose an alternative view of agency, already present in the ways people work on social issues, but perhaps not often clearly defined. This view has a political role to play, to challenge right-wing politics, and improve social democratic strategies from the left.

The political right’s view of agency

The standard ‘individualist’ beliefs about agency underpinning the political right are that people’s behaviour is largely determined from within, by (presumed) individual attributes such as character, talent, willpower, ambition or responsibility-taking. These beliefs become visible in the ways they’re deployed. For example, standardly, they are used to explain socioeconomic inequalities in a capitalist economy. Those who ‘succeed’ in conventional, material terms are seen to do so through a sustained application of desirable personal attributes such as effort, determination, and forward-thinking. Conversely, socioeconomic disadvantage is seen to result from a lack of such application. People subject to disadvantage are seen, in effect, to have largely brought that situation on themselves by being lazy, feckless or irresponsible. The political right love stories of the occasional person who overcomes disadvantage to achieve wealth or fame. ‘See’, they say, ‘anyone can do it if they try.’ In a nutshell, this is the idea of an economic system based on merit.

This view of agency is convenient to those with wealth and privilege, implying that their success is evidence of personal superiority. At the same time, it underpins right-wing policy responses to socioeconomic disadvantage. If the essence of the problem lies with individual deficiencies, then equally individualised ‘solutions’ seem to naturally follow; to correct the deficiencies with disciplinary regimes of ‘improvement’ or control. ‘Tough-on-crime’ strategies using the criminal justice system and punitive approaches to people on unemployment payments are two obvious examples of the genre. The underlying attitude was crystalised in an infamous cartoon by Bill Leak, falsely asserting that problems of Aboriginal disadvantage come down to a lack of personal responsibility-taking.

Similar issues occur in health policy, where health problems associated with poor diet, smoking or alcohol abuse are individualised as purely a matter of bad choices or poor health literacy, and ‘solutions’ devised accordingly.

The political left’s view of agency

Meanwhile, those on the left side of the political spectrum tend to adopt a social and structural view of human behaviour as strongly conditioned from without, by the social, economic and cultural conditions in which a person lives. Thus, socioeconomic inequalities are seen to arise not from differences between individuals but from structural features of society which act to distribute resources unequally. These structural features give rise to inequalities in conditions of living, with subsequent differential impacts on people’s lives and life chances. While the ‘traditional’ Marxist focus was on social class, the left’s focus has also expanded to recognise effects of discrimination on various groups according to characteristics such as sex/gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, or age. Thus, the left’s preferred policy responses to social problems associated with disadvantage are not to correct or improve individuals but to improve social conditions and reduce inequalities.

Thus, the political left tends to downplay the notion of agency in determining people’s live and life chances. The right’s appeal to agency as a response to socioeconomic disadvantage is rejected as ‘victim blaming’. If there is an active concept of agency there, perhaps it resides in notions of individuals becoming engaged in collective forms of resistance or advocacy.

The interactions of right and left views

There are a few reflections which emerge. One is just to note the obvious; on the structure-agency question – positioned in the context of a capitalist society – the right’s view is strongly agency-centred and downplays the influence of structures, while the left’s approach centres on structures and is weaker on questions about the role or value of agency.

Secondly, the weight of evidence from my own field of public health and other disciplines overwhelmingly supports the contention that human lives – beliefs, attitudes, skills, resources, opportunities and health – from birth through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and ageing – are indeed strongly affected by the social conditions in which a person happens to live. Thus, to presume, as the political right do, that personal attributes can easily trump harsh or harmful conditions – if only the person tries hard enough – is simplistic at best and hardly a basis for sound social policy.

Nevertheless, the right’s concept of agency maintains popular appeal and provides a political advantage in a country like Australia, precisely because it appeals to a ‘common sense’ view widely shared in Western individualist cultures, that behaviour and ‘success’ really do stem from personal traits.

This advantage can be used to make the left appear out of touch with ‘mainstream’ values. For example, a characteristic strategy of the political right – especially during elections – is to pick out a disadvantaged social group perceived to be ‘behaving badly’ and mount arguments for ‘tough on crime’ measures. When people from the left respond with calls for more social and structural responses, it is all too easy for the right to represent these as ‘soft on crime’ or as a denial of ‘personal responsibility’.

So, what to do?

As a social scientist in public health, I accept the evidence telling me that socially produced conditions of living enter and shape people’s lives in multiple ways. Systemic differences in conditions between social groups produce differences in life chances and health outcomes. The fact that there are exceptions doesn’t change the rule. I understand the motivations of those who seek to balance the right’s individualist, agency-centred politics with evidence-based structural perspectives.

However, for several reasons, I believe nevertheless that the politics of the left would benefit greatly by adding a convincing view of agency to its existing structural perspectives. And this is not difficult, because such a view is already near at hand. To define it I will start with a story.

Some time ago I had a conversation with a friend, a teacher with forty years’ experience and a commitment to left politics, talking about his work with Aboriginal students. He said firstly that if he were to project a view characteristic of the political right; something to the effect that ‘we all have equal opportunity in Australia, so it’s up to you to improve your own life,’ this would fail at the first step. The students would reject such a message, implying that social barriers they experience first-hand such as racism are not real. Instead, he said, the right approach was to demonstrate empathy and understanding on the reality of these issues, but nevertheless also say, in effect, ‘you still have an opportunity to take some actions to improve things for yourself, and some supports and resources here (at the school) to help you do that.’

What I took from this is that one can recognise structures and conditions of living and the need for change at that level, while still holding out a valuable role for agency, but with two crucial differences to the standard rightist conception. Rather than invoking the idea of the self-made individual who ‘does it’ on their own by sheer force of will, this is a view of agency enacted by an individual but with access to suitable supports. Second, and more subtly, the object and thus the nature of agency itself is understood differently. Rather than the preferred, narrow supposition of the political right, to aim for individual achievement in career or wealth within the ‘competitive market’ paradigm, it is more about development of one’s potential as a person and in skills for constructive social functioning.

It is here in the conception of agency as human development, that agency intersects with a public health approach to wellbeing. An understanding of wellbeing and how it is shaped by social conditions fills in details in terms of defining the objects of agency-as-development and the kinds of supportive conditions it requires. This understanding can be applied in public policy to support healthy development from the outset – from conception onward – but it can also be applied to working with people in contexts such as unemployment services or the criminal justice system.

An appreciation of this view of agency then can be readily extended to recognise what is in fact the profound limitations of the right’s view as a basis for policy. The individualised conception of agency which seems plausible when applied to those with advantaged, high-status social positions soon falls apart when applied to those ‘less fortunate’. Compared with a development approach, the model of incentivising people with few social resources to ‘get their sh-t together’ by subjecting them to harsh regimes of compliance is exposed as overinflated rhetoric: good for playing to the crowd but useless in any practical sense. In fact, given the supposition that ‘these’ people are social ‘failures’, it is all too easy to slip from failing systems of ‘improvement’ into enforced systems of punitive control.    

So then when the political right makes their regular appeal to agentic concepts such as personal responsibility, rather than resort to accusations of victim blaming, a far more powerful position for left is to say, ‘yes, indeed, we all want people capable of exercising agency in their own lives, but these capabilities don’t come from nowhere; they are developed by people through their own efforts but also with access to supportive conditions.’ If the right really cared about agency, they’d be pursuing policies to support young families, early child development, universal access to high quality education, access to meaningful work, and comprehensive primary health care.  

This is the exacting but rewarding work of real social development as described by my teacher friend. It’s a lot harder than issuing pompous exhortations for self-improvement to people struggling to get by.