Agency, Free Will, Self-Constitution: New Concepts for Historians of German-Jewish History between 1914 and 1938?

Abstract

This article discusses recent work on German-Jewish agency between 1914 and 1938. To find out whether 'agency' might be a helpful category for examining the crises facing Central European Jewry in this period, the article addresses the subject from the perspectives of individual and collective agency, applying classifications that philosophers have employed to make sense of human conduct. As I hope to show, these delimitations are only a preliminary step in trying to determine the explanatory power of agency. Whether the latter can serve as a tool in future work on modern German-Jewish history depends on the suitability of more specific philosophies of agency. Here the work of Christine Korsgaard and especially Michael Bratman may prove helpful in reflecting both on the self-understanding of German Jews in the first decades of the twentieth century and on their 'freedom of action' once this self-understanding was called into question. There is reason to see planning structures-grounded in the diachronic organization of our temporally extended selves-as basic to our individual and collective agency. Without 'planning agency', I will argue, 'agency' refers to mere action or choice.'Human beings are condemned to choice and action', writes philosopher Christine Korsgaard. 1 And she continues: 'Maybe you think you can avoid it, by resolutely standing still, refusing to act, refusing to move. But it's no use, for that will be something you have chosen to do, and then you will have acted after all. Choosing not to act makes not acting a kind of action, makes it something that you do.' 2 'Agency', if we accept this account, is ubiquitous wherever and whenever entities 'act on each other and interact with each other'. 3 Insofar as German Jews in the first decades of the last century were entities like you and me, we might ask how the subject of 'German-Jewish agency' could be examined constructively.