Abt. Geschichtswissenschaft

Anna Yu. Krylova et al., "The Agency Dilemma: A Forum," American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (2023): 883–937.

Few categories sit closer to the foundations of social and cultural history than agency, and few have been stretched so far that they risk meaning nothing at all. In her lead essay for this AHR forum, Anna Krylova argues that historians have expanded agency until the harder task is no longer finding a historical subject who has it but finding one who does not. A category that detects creative, contesting, resourceful action everywhere, she contends, has quietly stopped asking historians to make choices in their analyses. The essay turns this worry into a research programme through one arresting case: the Soviet front line of the Second World War, where male officers ordered to command women pilots confronted situations their inherited gender knowledge could not render legible. From their stalled attempts at meaning making Krylova builds the figure of the "not-knowing actor," a protagonist who confronts the limits of learned competence rather than deftly deploying it, and who, collectively and over time, helps reconfigure the very terms through which a society allocates power.

What makes this forum genuinely valuable is its form. Krylova's argument is answered by five historians whose own work she examines, including William Sewell, whose theorisation of agency she takes as her foil, and Judith Walkowitz, whose Victorian London supplies a counter-case. Their replies test her claims from within: Sewell defends agency as an ordinary capacity rather than a rare prize; Walkowitz asks whether professed incomprehension is itself a long-standing rhetorical trope; Eley, Zimmerman, and Tejada extend the question toward collective politics, Hegelian negation, and Native American history. Krylova's rejoinder then reframes the whole exchange around ideology and power. The result is a rare thing in a journal: a live, unresolved argument about a concept most of us use without examining it.

For anyone working on gender, war, prosopography, or the history of women's collective action, the forum offers both a sharp conceptual vocabulary and a model of how to historicise agency instead of merely attributing it. It rewards reading in full, responses included.

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