Jean-Pierre Dedieu, « La importancia del actor. Reflexiones sobre el porvenir de la historia social », Estudis: Revista de historia moderna, 47 2021: 183-200
Recent sociology developed a complex view of the relationship between individual actors and collective actors. Social history focuses on this same problem. Social historians consequently had to follow suit. This paper tries to set some order in this new complexity, as seen from the point of view of the historian’s practice, by analysing the distribution of agency among various classes of actors: individual actors; collective actors, endowed with agency; nominal groups, deprived under normal conditions of agency; artefacts, deprived of personal will, but generating force fields which organize and set limits to the agency of other actors.
Recent sociology developed a complex view of the relationship between individual actors and collective actors. Social history focuses on this same problem. Social historians consequently had to follow suit. This paper tries to set some order in this new complexity, as seen from the point of view of the historian’s practice, by analysing the distribution of agency among various classes of actors: individual actors; collective actors, endowed with agency; nominal groups, deprived under normal conditions of agency; artefacts, deprived of personal will, but generating force fields which organize and set limits to the agency of other actors.
