The agency-structure antinomy as social form: Towards a historical critique of sociological reason

Abstract

This article argues that the agency-structure antinomy, far from constituting an ontological feature of social reality or a mere product of conceptual confusion, is a historically specific social form produced by and through capitalist relations of objectification. Through an immanent critique of the post-Parsonian proposals of Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer, it is argued that successive attempts to transcend this antinomy have reproduced it at a new level of abstraction, due to shared neo-Kantian presuppositions. Drawing on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism as developed by the Neue Marx-Lektüre and WertKritik traditions, the article argues that an adequate sociological account of the antinomy requires understanding it not as the basis of explanation, but as what must itself be theoretically constituted and historically explained.