Summarizing the general view among Marxists, Ellen Wood succinctly characterized agency as "the possession of strategic power and a capacity for collective action founded in the specific conditions of material life" I would add that "capacity" is a developable potential for conscious and consequent activity, for self-making, not a disposition that arises automatically and inevitably from social conditions. (p8)
Making History is about the question - central to social theory - of how human agents draw their powers from the social structures they are involved in. Drawing on classical Marxism, analytical philosophy, and a wide range of historical writing, Alex Callinicos seeks to avoid two unacceptable extremes - dissolving the subject into an impersonal flux, as poststructuralists tend to - and treating social structures as the mere effects of individual action (for example, rational-choice theory). Among those discussed are Althusser, Anderson, Benjamin, Brenner, Cohen, Elster, Foucault, Giddens, Habermas, and Mann.