On Agency (Central Issues‪)‬

Sitting down to write a paper about the New Social History has been hard for me. Hard because it has made me face some of the manifest tendencies in my own work, and consign them to the purgatorial category of "my past," which allows me to keep believing, at least for the moment, that I am making progress. But harder still because it has made me re-think and re-evaluate the work of the historian whose example drew me to this field in the first place, and whose words seemed like a beacon of intellectual clarity and ethical righteousness as I tried to sort through the dreary muddle in my own mind. I am speaking, of course, of Herbert Gutman, and particularly his injunction, drawn from Sartre and central to his influential rethinking of labor history, that the essential task of the humanist intellectual is to determine not "what 'one' has done to man, but what man does with what 'one' has done to him." (1) I want to counterpoise that formulation with what I have come to see as a very different way of thinking, one which I think allows for a better understanding of the two-sidedness of the relationship between what Gutman might have called "power" and "culture," and one which I think helps me see the way to a better, more useful, and I'd even say more radical version of history: the formulation offered by Karl Marx at the outset of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." (2) I want to try to develop this contrast through a reconsideration of what I take to be the master trope of the New Social History: "agency." It seems important to specify the stakes of the critique, because I am not at all interested in diminishing the accomplishment of historical work that has been done under the sign of "agency." Indeed, as I argue in the last section of this paper, the call to write a history of the "agency" of the enslaved did important intellectual and political work in the formative years of the New Social History. The quality and success of that work, as well as the changing political context of academic work generally, however, have made it both possible and necessary to ask a new set of questions of the past. And this, 1 believe, will be easier to do if we lay aside the jargon of "agency" even as we try to make good on the New Social History's promise of a history rooted in the experience of enslaved people. I say all this not because I am somehow against writing a history which emphasizes the "agency" of enslaved people or of dispossessed people generally; I remain passionately committed to that project. Nor because 1 believe that all who set out to write social history in general or the social history of slavery in particular (as, indeed, have I) use the idea of "agency" in the way I am going to be describing, or that even when they do they do so consistently or evenly throughout their scholarship. It is rather because I think that there is a thread in the way we write and talk about history that nobody has tugged very hard for quite some time: the idea that the task of the social historian is to "give the slaves back their agency." Indeed, though the idea of an unvariagated "slave agency" has been implicitly and explicitly critiqued in any number of books written over the past twenty-five (even seventy-five) years in, for example, the intellectual traditions of Black Marxism, Black Nationalism, and Black Feminism, the New Social History's "agency" remains, in residuum, the master trope around which historians understand arguments about slavery. It has, I am arguing, become impossible to read W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction or C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins, John Blassingame's The Slave Community or Lawrence L