Nobody to shoot?

Power, structure, and agency: A dialogue

This is a debate entered around the key terms of power, structure and agency and the social and
political factors that shape both the moral and political responsibilities appropriate when it comes to
the study of power as the authors argue that human agency and social structure are central in such a
study of power. It is a dialogue between the two authors about how power shapes freedom as they
disagree when it comes to resolving difficult cases whereby some agents or individuals in society
are clearly put under various social constraints on freedom, yet no powerful actors are actually
responsible for these constraints.

The authors are clearly divided between the structures and agents that constitute the subject of
power as seen in their dialogue that has been broken down between power’s relationship to agency
and structure, power of the powerful and power without the powerful. The first author, Lukes begins
the argument on power and agency by quoting Peter Morris's' question on why we need concepts of
power and addresses it in three ways that is, the practical, moral and evaluative contexts that we
want to know the capacities of others, who is responsible for what actions that affect everyone as a
whole and we want to know to what extent power gives freedom to social agents and to what extent
citizens can meet their own needs and wants respectively. Lukes attempts to align power with
responsibility by arguing that agents within society should be held accountable for the power they
hold over other social agents. For example, landlords who discriminate against would-be renters
and the the lack of access to decent and affordable housing by the poor and racially oppressed. The
case of discriminatory housing patterns especially in older American cities factors in as not only a
social issue, but a political one as well in which powerful agents are not only held responsible, but
are also punished or rewarded based on past actions or future results. The final point is to identify
powerful agents in order to assign responsibility for the effect of their action or inaction.

Hayward begins her argument by identifying Lukes’ view on power and agency as intuitive and
goes on to demonstrate the appeal and the limitations of such an agent-focused view which affixes
responsibilities on powerful agents in society. Hayward shares the same conviction as Lukes that
among the most important uses to which the concept of power is put are critical and evaluative uses.
For instance, should housing markets benefit the wealthy and the racially privileged, and
disadvantage the poor and the racially oppressed? What would be better ways to organise the
political economy of the American metropolis? According to Hayward, these are the types of
questions students of power typically ask. The author goes on to state that the power debate, after
all, is a debate driven by a commitment to human freedom and political equality, to the idea that
people should have a hand, and that they should have a roughly equal hand, in helping shape the
terms that govern their existence. The author highlights what is intuitive in the first author’s view of
the housing issue by stating how most people would hold a discriminating landlord morally
responsible for the adverse effects of her actions on the housing choices of others, but most would
not hold responsible for her unintended role in producing such effects someone who moves her
family out of a city in order to live in its suburbs. The author also illustrates the limits to the first
author’s agent-centred understanding of power by saying that the constraints on human freedom
that are typically identified as ‘structural’ are social in origin. What is more, their effects are very
often susceptible to change. Hence, they are relevant to the critical project that lies at the heart of
the power debate: the project of identifying, evaluating, and elaborating methods for changing
differential remediable social constraint on freedom.

Hayward then sites how the work by legal theorists exploring institutional challenges to local
municipal autonomy provides an example of how to criticise and think about changing differential
social constraint on freedom, without identifying agents who are morally responsible for that
constraint. She goes on to explain how she is not suggesting that there is anything wrong with
holding individual and collective actors morally responsible however, it would be a mistake to
combine that effort with the project of identifying significant, inegalitarian, and remediable social
constraints on human freedom. What is more, the author agues, even the bad actions of ‘bad’ men
often are shaped by remediable social constrains on freedom, which do – and which should –
concern theorists of power. One might want to hold morally responsible the discriminating landlord,
for example, and the local political official who makes exclusionary land use decisions. At the same
time, if the concern is to criticise and to change the overall pattern of such actions and such
decisions, one should attend, as well, to the social constraints that structure each agent’s actions.

Lukes commences the argument on the power of the powerful by acknowledging how Hayward
correctly attributed the view that the powerful are those judged or held responsible for significant
outcomes. The analysis developed by Hayward makes Lukes realise the complexity of this view
than previously realised. Lukes goes on to state how the the impact of housing markets brings out
an important aspect of the attribution of responsibility that affects how people locate the powerful
and assess the extent of their power as a particularly relevant issue to political contexts. Unlike
Hayward, however, Lukes continues to think that the concept of power should remain attached to
the agency that operates within and upon structures. Lukes is not contending the idea that agency
and structure are always equally relevant to the study of power. Lukes goes on to reiterate as
suggested in the power and agency argument, that responsibility is attributed to agents, individual or
collective, in several different ways, in different contexts. When they are held morally responsible,
they are either praised or blamed. Lukes does not see why confining the attribution of power to
agents obstructs the projects Hayward endorses, and similar such projects. Nevertheless, he goes on
to state the reason why he believes that retaining the link between power, agency, and responsibility
is important as it enables us to keep in focus the very question of the difference that agents can
make to outcomes and to cast a critical eye on attempts by powerful agents to escape their own
responsibilities by ‘blaming the system.’ Human agents, whether individuals or collectivities, have
power or are powerful within structural limits, which enable and constrain their power. The natural
way to distinguish between power and structure is to say that we attribute power to agents when it is
in their power to act or not to act. They have two-way powers: they have power when it is in their
power to act otherwise. If they are so structurally constrained or determined that they are unable to
act otherwise than they do, then they are powerless to do so, and so they are powerless, not
powerful.

Hayward commences the argument on power without the powerful by stating how agents act within
limits that are partly set by the actions of other agents and how they act in contexts that are
structured by rules, laws and social norms that act as boundaries to action, which, like the actions of
other agents, limit what they can do and what they can be. Hayward goes on to say that as agents act
and interact within structural limits, they develop expectations about what it is that one does, and
what it is that one ought to do, in particular contexts. They develop not just subjective, but also
objective understandings of the meanings particular actions hold. These social expectations and
meanings always mediate between, structural constraints and the action and the inaction of human
agents. Hayward further elaborates that structure shapes social action through social meanings,
which agents continually interpret and re-interpret and the social actions by agents should
correspond in a way that is informed by relevant expectations. Hayward does note, however, that
actions by agents in society do not always meet expectations therefore structures do not determine
action, then, but they produce predictable patterns of action and the patterns, which rightly capture
the attention of those who analyze and who evaluate relations of power. She goes on to argue that
the analyses and evaluations on relations of power should focus on inter-agentive forms of
domination. When focussing on discriminating landlords, for example, who limit housing options
for the poor and the racialised the dominant do not always determine the actions of those they
oppress. The author does not claim the poor and the racialised, for instance, cannot ‘resist,’ The
author finally reiterates her point that systematic structures instead of agents are the cause of
dominance and lead to constraints on freedom rather than the individual acts of specific agents.