Reflexivity, exercised through the internal conversation, has been examined as the process that mediates the effects of structure upon agency. However, such mediation depends upon agents exerting their personal powers to formulate projects and to monitor both self and society in the pursuit of their designs. The last three chapters have examined people who are capable of doing that. This chapter turns to those who are not. Human powers are like all others: they are generative mechanisms which may be activated, or whose exercise may be suspended – by the intervention of other such mechanisms or by contingency.

Some of those who will be examined here are people whose powers of reflexivity have been suspended. In other words, they previously possessed the power to hold an internal conversation about self and society, which allowed them some control over their relationship. However, subsequent contingencies had rendered these personal powers inoperative. The particular mode of reflexivity that they had developed no longer enabled them to deal subjectively with the objective environment they confronted. These have been called ‘displaced persons’. By rough analogy, they are like someone who, having learned French then finds himself in an exclusively German culture and is unable to participate, until or unless he begins to master the new language. Alternatively, since all human powers only exist in potentia, events may also intervene which inhibit the realisation of the potential for conducting inner conversations.