Rethinking Power and Agency through the Lens of Intersubjectivity

This article is about the phenomenon of power and its relationship to human agency. Power is a complex phenomenon. It can be both harmful and helpful; divisive and unifying; tangible or almost spherically relational. This article grapple with this complexity. Not as a problem to be fixed or simply a point worth repeating, but as a quality that needs to be explored, since it holds valuable contributions to our understanding of human agency and current challenges to it. On a foundational level, power pertains to agency, in the sense that power relates to a capacity for action that is also constitutive of agency. To explore the nature of power is therefore, to some extent, to explore the conditions of human agency. This seems particularly relevant today since our agency are threatened by a number of social crisis: rapid climate change, and a diminishing trust in democracy, science, and the rule of law. In this article I relate these problems to insufficiencies in our understanding of the phenomenon of power, not least collective powers we have long relied upon when dealing with agentic challenges. Furthermore, I argue that psychology has a key role to play in this drama. Not because these problems are psychological by nature, but because they relate to a failure of psychology to relate human agency to social and political power in a sufficient way.