Agency’s Moral Universe

Abstract

Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe historians think we inhabit. Using the example of post-1945 West Germany, the essay asks whether a shift toward increasingly diffuse forms of agency across various fields may be part of a larger historical, and not merely historiographical, pattern. In the “post-truth” early twenty-first century, will historians’ accounts of the past continue to be shaped by the idea of a benevolent and graspable universe, or will chaos make agency seem like an unrecognizable relic from a lost world?