We are proud to present Prof. Colin Hay from Sciences Po for our next IPW Lecture at the Department of Political Science. On January 22 at 5 pm he will hold a IPW Lecture in the Konferenzraum at the NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 2nd floor, 1010 Vienna) on “Homo politicus and the ‘problem of agency’: the missing subject of modern political science” – no registration necessary.
Prof. Hay is a Professor of Political Sciences at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences Po in Paris, where he also serves as Director of Doctoral Studies, and he is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Sheffield (UK).
His research spans European integration, globalisation, political economy, welfare states, and political analysis, and he is recognized as a leading figure in constructivist institutionalist approaches to political and social change.
Hay has published widely award-winning books and numerous academic works, and he holds editorial leadership roles in major political science journals such as New Political Economy and Comparative European Politics.
Abstract:
Political science, it is hardly contentious to suggest, is concerned with political action – what political actors do. As such it is difficult to imagine a concept ostensibly more central to political analysis than that of agency. Yet the concept of agency, though ubiquitous in modern political science, is seldom if ever the focus of explicit analytic attention, sustained discussion and debate. His aims in this lecture are four-fold: (i) to explain why – and in the process to reveal something of political science’s ‘problem with agency’; (ii) to consider what a philosophically (ontologically) adequate conception of human nature and political agency might be; and (iii) to consider the implications of substituting this for what we currently have. He concludes by seeking (iv) to tease out the implications for what we might regard to constitute an adequate explanation of an observed or anticipated political outcome.
