Agency

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 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.

Just a second thought – I think we might use autonomi to cover Sen’s concept.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

That cite didn’t come out right, I was quoting the first line of #12. Bloody HTML.

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”.

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.

What’s wrong with ‘vaardigheid’ as translation of capability?

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.

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.