AGENCY

This book has put forward a broad view of the range of topics that can be cogently and usefully grouped together under the rubric of ‘language and politics’ — cogently because, despite their surface diversity, they are linked by virtue of all being cases where language impacts directly upon the politics of identity, interpersonal relations, the relation of the individual to the community and the state, or all of these; usefully because of the light they shed upon one another, for example when an analogy from the use of familiar pronouns helps us to understand something about language change or the sort of bonding that occurs among people who swear profanely in each other's company.

Another thread has run through the chapters of this book, joining them rather loosely, and it is the job of this final chapter to pull it tighter. That thread is the issue of agency — the extent to which one's actions as an individual are freely chosen; or directed, either by invisible forces like ‘society’ and ‘power’ or by more tangible ones in the form of institutions, particularly those controlled by government; or even determined, by some power that can be imagined as a historical movement (evolution), a physical key (the genetic code) or as fate or Nature or God. We are emerging from a historical period, the second half of the twentieth century, in which language itself was widely taken to be the directing or determining master code — this was the impulse behind structuralism, and it largely endured in the post-structural ideas that followed in its wake.