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This chapter presents the theoretical basis for the study. It places the analysis in historical context, arguing that changes in American penal sanctioning were central to the remaking of American democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. Penal sanctioning, an expression of the state's power to punish and willingness to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others, clarifies, sorts and classifies the conditions of citizenship and social inclusion. This chapter develops an account of penal regime variation based on variation in the democratic process, conceptualized as: political structures, the institutional and administrative capacities of the state, and collective agency, varying forms of social mobilization and political participation. It introduces the key elements of the case studies: California's polarized populism and retribution; Washington State's deliberative democracy and the principle of parsimony; New York's elite pragmatism and managerial penal regime.

This chapter critically examines the belief that commonality – and common agreement in particular – is necessary to produce collective agency. According to this belief, when citizens disagree and disidentify with decisions made in their name, democracies are illegitimate and exclusionary. Taylor serves as both an exemplar of this position, and as inspiration for an alternative view of agency. In his democratic writings, he draws on commonality to address the problem of exclusion: if democracies can correctly identify what citizens share, then exclusion can be avoided. This is to conceptualize the people as a “sovereign democratic agency” – as a singular actor located in democratic state institutions. Drawing from his philosophical works, this chapter develops a different understanding of collective agency – “democratic interagency” – that emerges wherever and whenever subjects interact to try to shape the world they inhabit together. This demos is multiple and not tied to any particular institutionalization of democracy. From the perspective of democratic interagency, the problem of exclusion arises when interlocutors disengage or fail to respond. Democratic inclusion, then, arises not through arriving at common agreement, but through proliferating and perpetuating interaction.

This chapter identifies the chronic long‐term differences in American penal sanctioning, highlighting unexplained subnational imprisonment variation. It asks why the American states established different kinds of penal regimes when faced with similar kinds of policy problems of the late 1960s and 1970s: high crime, social unrest, war, declining trust and confidence in government. It argues that the way Americans engage in the democratic process shapes the way America punishes criminal offenders. When we see variation in democratic process, we are likely to see variation in penal sanctioning. It also links penal regime variation to the discourse on crime control that is rooted in the cultural tools and schemas of particular places rather than uniform or generalized trends. It introduces the case studies of California, Washington State, and New York.

The central aim of this chapter is to establish that collectives may have intentions and are capable of collective action. This claim is crucial to the broader claim that moral responsibility operates at both the individual and the collective level, which in turn rests on the claim that intentional action also operates on two levels, the individual and the collective. This chapter distinguishes between two types of collective agents—organizations and goal-oriented collectives—and gives an account of their respective intentional structures. It defends the view that collective intentions, from which the agency of collectives derives, are not simply collections of individual intentions, and collective actions are not simply collections of individual actions. Collective actions are the products of the intentions of collectives.

Philosophical approaches to collective moral responsibility fall into two main categories, individualist and collectivist. Individualists think of it as a reductive concept; collectivists think of it more holistically. Having argued in Chapter 1 that collectives’ intentional actions flow from their intentions, this chapter claims that we may therefore understand collective moral responsibility as operating at a different level from individual responsibility and as being justified by appeal to collective intentions and the actions to which they give rise. Collective moral responsibility is not a function of the moral responsibility of individuals. Instead, it is a function of the agency of collectives. This chapter explains, motivates, and defends a collectivist account of collective moral responsibility.

One of the most common objections to strong forms of cosmopolitanism is the charge that cosmopolitanism is unable to properly accommodate claims to collective agency and collective self-determination below the world-state level. However, as this chapter argues, this criticism of strong cosmopolitanism is unwarranted, since cosmopolitans can and should promote collective agency and collective self-determination on the sub-world-state level. In fact, within a theory which sees the realization of people’s fundamental interests, which includes an interest in avoiding global domination, as the primary task of justice, cosmopolitans want to argue for collective self-determination and collective agency on a range of different levels, highlighting the fact that claims to self-determination are always social-relational claims, which need to be justified to all those whose fundamental interests are affected. Strong cosmopolitanism thus neither rejects claims to (properly conceived) collective self-determination, nor requires the creation of a centralized world state.

Examines what is necessary for a group to constitute an agent that can display akrasia, and what steps such a group might take to establish self‐control. The topic has some interest in itself, and the discussion suggests some lessons about how we should think of akrasia in the individual as well as in the collective case. Under the image that the lessons support, akrasia is a sort of constitutional disorder: a failure to achieve a unity projected in the avowal of agency. This image fits well with the constitutional model of the soul in Plato's Republic.

Most accounts of African Americans’ relationship to the soil focus on oppression and exploitation. This book offers the untold history of Black farmers’ fight to stay on the land in the southern United States, using agricultural cooperatives as a basis for resistance and community self-determination. This chapter introduces slave gardens as resistance, the Colored Farmers Alliance, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and food and agriculture in the civil rights and Black Power movements as precursors to the examples of black agricultural cooperatives in Freedom Farmers. These cooperatives demonstrate what White calls collective agency and community resilience, using the primary strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis. The archival, ethnographic, and interview-based methods of the book are grounded in the African principle of sankofa: investigating the past to understand the present as a basis of forging a future of our own making.

The chapter examines both the context for the rise of precarity in the lives of older people as well as responses and alternative areas of practice. The chapter reviews the link between precarity and changes in the welfare state and austerity policies imposed by governments in the Global North. These developments are linked to the influence of neo-liberal policies with their emphasis on individual responsibility for managing transitions through the life course. The chapter then considers the basis for ‘collective’ forms of agency, underpinned by a recognition of issues concerning the provision of universal basic services, substantive equality and collective engagement on the part of older people.

This paper examines the meaning and significance of Sartre’s concept of “the third” within the social ontology of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Through an examination of three different types of group formation (serial collectives, statutory groups, and sport teams), this paper provides an analysis of central Sartrean insights into how individual action and collective agency are co-constituted. This paper also draws attention to the role ascribed to material objects as well as ideological views and beliefs in the formation of social agency.

This chapter discusses an argument in Ana Castillo's novel, So Far from God, in which she challenges the ubiquitous critical ascription of magical realism to texts by Latinos/Latinas. It also looks at the presumed connection that this implies between Chicano/Chicana writers and the Latin American Boom. The text discussed is centrally concerned with the theme of collective agency, and magical realism actually figures as a threat to empowered collectivity, rather than being a signifier of it.

Chapter 3 asks whether the citizen-inclusive model described in Chapter 2 meets the conditions for collective agency. A range of theories of collective agency are presented, grouped according to strength: strong accounts, moderate accounts, and weak accounts. After presenting each account, the chapter determines whether the state is likely to count as a collective agent on any of these theories. It also considers the distinction between agency and moral agency, and whether the state can be said to have the latter. The chapter concludes with a more general discussion of whether the citizenry is the kind of group likely to meet strong or moderate conditions, and argues that it is not because it is fundamentally unorganized. The conclusion is that an understanding of the state as the citizenry taken together should be rejected.

This chapter introduces the dialectics of structural violence, resulting in Dalit women’s chronic resource deprivation, and their collective agency to secure livelihood resources as entitlements. It shows that these dialectics, when located within prevailing discourses on poverty reduction, development, and human rights, raise questions regarding current approaches to development. The reality of structural non-implementation of rights arising from complex power configurations in specific socio-historical contexts demands a more contextual and actor-oriented approach. The focus thus shifts to how excluded and discriminated social groups are able to transform power relations in claiming the livelihood resources to which they feel justly entitled. In doing so, they give meaning to human rights. The examination of micro-political processes necessitates primarily qualitative, ethnographic methods, enabling the production of case studies of Dalit women’s livelihood struggles.

Liberal democracies today face many important questions about the agency of business corporations, but abstract conceptual analyses of “corporate agency” will not give us the answers. We need to distinguish instead between different types of collective agency and the roles these play in different social practices. Pluralistic functionalism is the view that there are many types of collective agency, each of which plays a role in a wider social practice. The collective agency of a basketball team is different from the collective agency of a political party, and each form plays a role in a distinct social practice—i.e. basketball, on one hand, electoral democracy, on the other. The collective agency of business corporations plays a role in a competitive market economy and understanding this role sheds light on many issues. We illustrate by considering recent US Supreme Court decisions in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell and Citizens United v. FEC.

The book concludes by demonstrating how Freedom Farmers offers a more complex – and empowering – picture of Black people’s relationship to agriculture than in typical portrayals which emphasize oppression and exploitation. Freedom Farmers also offers a rich counterpoint to social movement literature that often focuses on urban narratives of struggle and more obvious resistance strategies, such as protests. Challenging common perceptions about African Americans’ relationship to the land, Freedom Farmers demonstrates the history of Black farmers fighting to maintain their livelihoods and identities as farmers, using agricultural-based strategies to build collective agency and community resilience. This notion of community resilience demonstrated by Freedom Farmers encourages us to expand the concept of social and ecological resilience to account for the structural factors that have caused the ongoing catastrophes of racial and economic oppression. Freedom Farmers uncovers a history of African American farmers’ strategies of collective agency and community resilience to offer a historical grounding and inspiration for current food justice movements in their work toward liberation.

Two senses of “collective action” are discussed in this paper. To begin, “collective action” is interpreted as a matter of people doing something together, and it is assumed that such collective agency involves their having a collective intention to do that thing together. The author’s account of collective intentions is presented: at its core is her notion of joint commitment—a species of commitments of the will. Collective action problems in the sense of rational choice theory are then considered. These problems include the prisoner’s dilemma, which involves a degree of conflict of interest, and coordination problems, which do not. An explanation is given of how, when such a problem is interpreted in terms of the parties’ inclinations over possible outcomes, a suitable collective intention resolves the problem for agents who are rational in a broad sense other than the game-theoretical one.

This chapter fleshes out the Tripartite Model’s conception of collectives and defends the attribution of duties to them. It begins by giving a detailed characterization of collectives and explaining how they have the specifically moral type of agency that’s at issue in duties. It explains that this conception of collectives is permissive (i.e. its conditions are easy to satisfy). The conception is compared with other prominent accounts of corporate agency or personhood. The final section argues in favour of including collectives’ duties within our ontology. This argument has two planks. First, collectives are able to make decisions based on duties. Second, those decisions are to produce an outcome that would not be produced if each of the collective’s members severally made decisions: the outcome of robust multilateralism (coordinated role-performance) amongst members. At a general level of description, a collective’s duty will be a duty to produce multilateralism amongst members—a decision that no member can sensibly take on their own.

The debate over firm moral responsibility has often grown quite heated, and this chapter suggests that the smoke of battle may have obscured some real gains. There are many issues yet to be settled, some of which are alluded to below, but this chapter contends that we have also achieved some real consensus about the moral obligations of firms—far more than we usually acknowledge. Specifically, almost all participants in the debate agree that (1) the members of firms have moral obligations, even when acting as members; (2) firms themselves (the-members-acting-collectively) have moral obligations; and (3) a satisfactory account of the moral agency, obligation, and responsibility of firms must address both individualist and holist (extra-individual) aspects of corporate practice. The chapter offers an account of corporate moral agency as an attractive option.

In light of the failure of the preferred model to count as a collective agent on the strong or moderate accounts, this chapter turns to the citizen-exclusive state. It outlines the structure of two versions of the model—one accounting for the separation of powers and one including only the smallest group with decision-making power in government. It argues that the bigger group is characterized by two important features: it has a hierarchical power structure, and it includes ‘nested’ agency (some of its members are collective agents rather than individuals). The chapter concludes with a general discussion of whether this group has both agency and moral agency, and argues that it does.

What are the propositional attitude(s) involved in collective epistemic agency? There are two opposing camps on this question: the ascribers have defended an extended notion of belief, while the rejectionists have claimed that groups form goal-sensitive acceptances. Addressing this question, however, requires providing responses to four preliminary queries. (1) Are group attitudes reducible to the participants’ attitudes? (2) Is epistemic evaluation sensitive to instrumental considerations? (3) Does accepting that p entail believing that p? (4) Is there a unity of epistemic rationality across levels? Both “believing” and “accepting as true”, as applied to plural subjects, fail to provide satisfactory answers to these four queries. An alternative analysis for epistemic group attitude called “accepting under consensus” is proposed. This attitude is shown to reflect actual group agency, and to offer consistent and independently justified answers to the queries. On this analysis, an individualist epistemology cannot simply be transferred to collective agents.