Agency
The Psychological History of Human Progress
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 8 sept 2026
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- $349.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $349.00
Descripción editorial
From the world’s most influential psychologist and bestselling author of Flourish, a landmark work spanning ancient Greece to the age of AI that identifies agency—the fusion of efficacy, optimism, and imagination—as the hidden engine of human progress, and shows how we can unleash it to build a better future.
What actually drives human progress? Ecologists point to geography and climate. Sociologists invoke wars and class. Economists follow the money. But none of these accounts explains why innovation and human thriving occurs in some eras and stalls in others—often under identical material conditions. The missing variable, Seligman argues, is the psychological state known as: agency.
Agency is built from three interlocking capacities: efficacy, the confidence that you can accomplish a specific goal right now; optimism, the expectation that your efforts will pay off far into the future; and imagination, the breadth of goals you can envision. When all three align, civilizations leap forward. When they collapse, societies stagnate—no matter how rich their resources or how brilliant their citizens.
Drawing on six decades of pioneering research and a sweeping reexamination of the last twenty-five hundred years—from Periclean Athens and the Hebrew Torah to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Civil Rights Movement—Seligman reveals how surges and declines in agency have quietly steered the course of history. With a clear-eyed look at an AI-transformed future, Agency makes the case that the power to create the next great era of human flourishing is already alive within each of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can-do attitudes have defeated religious fatalism and powered human advancement through the centuries, according to this ambitious, wide-ranging study. University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Seligman (The Hope Circuit) extends his positive psychology principles—i.e., that people can break free of learned helplessness by cultivating an optimistic mindset—to explain long-past societies. His central example is medieval Europe under the sway of St. Augustine's theology of original sin and predestination; the idea that humans could do nothing to save their souls, Seligman contends, contributed to a "stagnation in progress... from 400 CE to 1400 CE, accompanied by a widespread belief in lack of human agency." Things picked up, he argues, as the West abandoned such dogmas in subsequent centuries, leading to an explosion of innovation that helped ignite the Industrial Revolution. Later chapters provide tips for boosting one's agency—after a failure, one should ask, "What will I do differently next time?"—and an upbeat take on artificial intelligence, which the author frames as a tool that enables humans to carry out goals. While readers may question some of Seligman's judgments—how stagnant was a medieval Europe that invented mechanical clocks and universities?—he presents an intriguing and robustly argued worldview that puts the creative human mind at the center of history. It's a provocative take on the roots of individual and societal advancement.
