Agency
I’m working on a co-authored paper on the notion of agency in Amartya Sen’s work. Agency as related to empowerment and autonomy, and not as an institution such as a real estate agent. Suddenly I recalled that when I was teaching on Sen in Louvain-la-Neuve two years ago, I was told that there is no word in French for ‘agency’. So now I am wondering: is this true? And if so, are there more languages that do not have a word for ‘agency’? (in fact, I even have a hard time to come up with an appropriate translation in Dutch). I checked it with an internet translator, which only translates it (for Dutch and French) as an institution, not as a property of human beings. Weird.
posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm
As George W. Bush is said to have remarked while in the U.K., “The trouble with the French is that they don’t have any word for ‘entrepreneur’.”
There are lots of words the French don’t have a word for. ‘Shallowness’, for example, has to be rendered as ‘manque de profondeur’, or ‘caractere superficiel’, depending on whether you mean it literally or figuratively.
‘Gender’ as used in Anglo-American academic discourse, has almost no grip in French, partly because the literal translation, ‘genre’, already has so many other meanings.
Funny stuff, language.
I tend to be sceptical of this “such language doesn’t have a word for” game, even though Dave is right that French is not very apt at turning adjective into nouns, there still exists a word “superficialité” (smoothness might be harder, but that never prevented mathematicians to use “lissité”). As for agency, my dictionnary defines it as “action or intervention, esp. such as to produce a particular effect”. In that case, I don’t see how the French “action” or “acte” wouldn’t be appropriate.
I can’t recall seeing a Danish or Swedish version of agency in the meaning you are referring to. Agent, agentur etc. exist as terms for institutions.
A term in Chinese that comes closest to a property of human beings, as opposed to an institution, is liliang, which suggests “power” or “physical strength.” Perhaps, then, Sen is assuming that individuals already have a certain power as an aspect of their agency….Or, is the power question simply elided?
Just a second thought – I think we might use autonomi to cover Sen’s concept.
And back in the day, a Reaganite worried that there was no word in Russian for detente, the story goes.
Well—even in English, the social theory use of agency is jargon (in an entirely non-disparaging sense—it’s a technical use of a term that has a different common-use meaning.)
When the French had to create a data protection agency on foot of the original EU data protection directive in 1995, they dragged their feet for ages. What I heard at the time was they simply had no concept politically or philosophically of an agency funded by the state but autonomous of it in its decisions.
The CNIL was eventually created, but I think it presented some constitutional problems to begin with because of the rather limited French concept of even an institutional agency.
Michel Callon talks about agencement. No the same, but it’s kind of interesting.
Callon, Michel (2004) ‘Europe wrestling with technology’,
Economy and Society, 33:1, 121 – 134
What I heard at the time was they simply had no concept politically or philosophically of an agency funded by the state but autonomous of it in its decisions.
Bullshit. Regie autonome des usines Renault anyone? Societe nationale des chemins de fer? The bloody sodding central bank?
As far as agency goes, libre arbitre would seem to capture it. (PS, my fn key doesn’t work under this linux distro, so I beg forgiveness for the lack of accents.)
The ____ don’t have a word for ____ is just about always wrong. Particularly where the first blanc is filled by “French.” I won’t even recount the number of such formulations I’ve heard that were little more than slanders.
On the other hand, my very good friend, a native Slovene with essentially perfect English, who has studied clinical psychology here, says that her native language is lousy for making the kinds of distinctions we do here in that area. So who knows.
Also, I don’t even understand what “[a]gency … as related to empowerment and autonomy” means in English, much less French. The legal definition at common law, I could have given you once upon a time.
Zelfstandigheid seems to come close in meaning, at least when applied to everyday use.
I would agree with Samchevre that this a technical term, meaning that if no official Dutch translation exists, I suppose you’re free to make one up if the normal meaning of the word is close enough.
Isn’t agency something that Marxists use? If so, one would expect that at least a German original for the word exists that can probaly be easily translated to Dutch.
Neither does the agent suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
In an eternal action, an eternal patience.
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
Murder in the Cathedral T.S. Eliot
Which I did not understand at all when studying for A level in 1972 – but thought it sounded dead good. Must have done because still remember it …
“Pouvoir d’agir” in a number of cases I can find of explicit translation, in many cases with the English word in parentheses next to it.
8: I think that the term “agency” in the philosophical sense is not merely technical language, but also fairly recent (last several decades). Worth looking into.
Agent / patient, active / passive, action / passion. I’m sure that there’s a trail of breadcrumbs through the French woods which would end up with something nominizable.
I heard a conversation on this issue at Berkeley anthro about a decade ago. Paul Rabinow stated that he knew of no direct translation into French but a French philosophy student chimed in that one could use “agencement” but that in philosophical circles they did not use the term in any way like anglophone philosophers
@david in ny: And let us not forget the variation – “the ____ have 10/20/150 words for _____”.
Language Log on the Eskimo lexicon
My English-Danish dictionary translates ‘agency’ to ‘handlen’ (a noun derived from the verb ‘at handle’- to act). But in this meaning it corresponds more to ‘an act’ than ‘agency’ as ‘the potential for acting freely’. We also have the Latin (?) term ‘agens’ for ‘the acting person or thing in a sentence’, but that is not used in everyday language as I suppose is the case with ‘agency’ in the social science meaning.
A brief google for “choix” “raison pratique” and “philosophie” revealed several possibilities (some referring directly to Sen):
1. “agency” – the English in inverted commas.
2. l’agency – the English as a French neologism.
3. l’autonomie morale de l’agent.
Seconding John Emerson about recentness…
I got a Ph.D. in English in the mid seventies, but I never “practiced” English as such, there being few jobs when I got free to look for one, and little enthusiasm on my part anyhow. So I had been out of touch with the field for thirty years, give or take, when my daughter took her first college English class and asked me if she could run some of the ideas by me, since she wasn’t sure she had entirely grasped what the lecturer was trying to say. One of those ideas was “agency.” I had to tell her: clearly I’m a fossil; I have no idea what you’re talking about.
No I think janiem and emerson have it wrong. The OED references
Edwards, Jonathan
Works v.d. (1804–47)
A careful and strict enquiry into the modern prevailing notions of that freedom of will, which is supposed to be essential to moral agency, etc. 1754.
I would not be surprised to learn that the modern social theory use of agency grew from the older term moral agency, but they seem to me quite distinct concepts. Moral agency (being a moral agent) is much closer to the common-language use of agent, and is very closely tied to a theology that sees all people as owing God service (thus, as God’s agents).
Spanish doesn’t really have an equivalent of “agency,” either. Sometimes people use the rather ugly neologism “agenciamento.” But this is quite obviously a direct transplant from English.
A few years ago, while I was still living in Argentina, I had a conversation with my cousin about Amartya Sen’s Ethics and Economics. I remember how, in the course of that conversation, it eventually became clear to us that there was no Spanish equivalent for the English word ‘agency’ (in Sen’s sense). Neither ‘agencialidad’, which doesn’t exist and sounds ugly, nor ‘agencia’, which does exist but means something different, are adequate translations.
The don’t have a word for is just about always wrong
Yeah, right, that’s why accurate translation of complex concepts is so easy…
[or as the French say “like a woman: if she is beautiful, she is not faithful; if she is faithful, she is not beautiful.” N.B. I do not endorse these sentiments, I merely report them…]
That cite didn’t come out right, I was quoting the first line of #12. Bloody HTML.
This can’t be too hard. There’s a cross-pollinated intellectual genealogy here. The word “agency,” for example, is sprinkled through English versions of P. Bourdieu and C. Levi-Strauss. Of course, they don’t mean the exact same thing as Sen, but it’s close enough to use the same word. One could check the original of “La Pensée sauvage” or “Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle” to find out how people have addressed this question in the past. If anyone does this, I’d be interested in the result.
In much economic writing “actor” and “agent” are treated as synonymous, and I think Sen’s use is consistent with this. But English has no word for “the property of being an actor”.
I read ‘agencéité’, in a paper I read just one week ago, as a translation of Sen’s ‘agency’, but no one understands this word. Pouvoir d’agir (as suggested in # 17 or capacité d’agir seems much better.
Jacob,
i think the swedish version of agency is agens, at least i remember seeing it. In philosophy, agent is the same as in english.
I agree that ‘agency’ is a technical term, though surely not only from social choice—I recalled that when I took some courses in feminist theories there was lots about agency there too, as there is in sociology of course too. But then this prompts (at least for me) the question what it means if we don’t have a word in a particular langauge for a technical or new word; the same happened in Dutch, as Dave (#2) pointed out for ‘gender’, ‘computer’ and ‘capability’. In the former two, everybody now talks in Dutch about ‘gender’ and ‘computer’ as if it are Dutch words; for ‘capability’ (in the technical meaning from the capability approach) all translations I’ve seen so far fall short, so I tend to use the same—I just call them ‘capability’ and ‘capabilities’ – an English word pronounced in Dutch. Not particulary beautiful but the best way to deal with this translation issue, in my opinion.
… but then one may encounter the problems that Geert points out, that people don’t understand this newly created word. Indeed, funny stuff, language, and even funnier stuff, translations.
I have to second Alex’s suggestion of “libre arbitre.” That at least is how “free agency” is translated by French mormons. I believe it ties in to volonté or will appropriately too.
What’s wrong with ‘vaardigheid’ as translation of capability?
14: “zelfstandigheid” is more independence than agency, imo; I would use “vrijheid van handelen” or an equivalent phrase.
38: “vaardigheid” != capability. Vaardigheid is skill, while capability is not something you know how to do, but something you are able to do. Gelegenheid?
Since English is now the linga franca of science and enginering and the like, it’s no wonder more jargon is generated in it and only awkwardly translatable in Dutch.
Hebrew does not have a word for agency, other than ‘Sokhnut’, used for the institutional meaning (CIA = Sokhnut HaBiun Hamerkazit).
We don’t have a good word for actor, either, as Sakhkan, a stage actor, is also player, and contains the ‘play’ element, which is unwanted here. Makes things a bit difficult.
Lucky for us, we have quite a good translation for capabilities, Mesugaluiot.
great zamfir: I tried really hard to translate ‘capability’ into Dutch, but I think it simply doesn’t work without losing part of its meaning. If I’d explain in a sentence what capabilities are, I’d say that these are genuine opportunities to be the person you want to be and do those things you want to do, taking into account both internal capacities (like talents) and external constraints. So the most-often seen Dutch translation, ‘menselijke vermogens’, is also not getting close enough to my taste. So no surprise that the Dutch translations of Nussbaum’s work make me want to cry… (Funnily enough there seems to be much less demand for Dutch translations of Sen’s work).
Hippity-bippity-bop
According to the Disney song, “the thing-a-ma-bob that does the job is hippity-bippity-bop”. So now, if only you can find the translation for “hippity-bippity-bop” in any given language, you have your translation of “agency”.
If that doesn’t help, perhaps the problem is the namby-pambification of the old concept of virtue. Like the Theological Virtues specifically, the idea of virtue in general has been drained of the original potency that the etymology of the word implies, the ability to act effectively that an earlier age associated with manliness. It almost means the exact opposite of agency nowadays, as we think of virtue as involving the refusal or inability to do what we want to do, or what is in our interest to do. The prominence off this connotation makes “virtue” useless in English to mean “agency”, and is basically why the latter needed to be coined. Perhaps you will find that in some languages, the local cognate of “virtue” hasn’t been emasculated, though perhaps the risk there will be that it also hasn’t lost the connotative implication that agency is a masculine trait.
I am also skeptical about “language x has no word for x”. Quite often, the language in question has a perfectly appropriate way to say the same thing using more than one word. Some other language may have a word for “having agency”, and find it amusing that English-speaking people needs two words for that.
As for agency, leaving aside for the moment the fact that English-speaking philosophers could discuss the precise meaning of the “agency” for hours in a row, I think “pratique” would do in some contexts, “action” in others. In some contexts, “devenir” as in Deleuze.
There might be some overlap between devenir and capability, I’m not sure.