David Ruyer

I'm always interested in how controversial historians and political scientists (on the left and right) selectively wield the concept of agency. The easiest way to revise history is to assume highest agency for your villain and lowest agency for your anti-villain. So you get - Churchill's decisions created WWII (high agency) but the Holocaust was just an accident born out of Nazi panic (low agency) - Or, the US is to blame for making Russia invade Ukraine (high agency for us/low agency for Putin) - Or leftist historians, like Chomsky, who often seemed to assert that *everything* bad that happened in the developing world was ultimately the result of colonialism/US foreign policy (no agency for the developing world, infinite agency assigned to "the West"). Of course, it's important and interesting to think about influence and recognize real power imbalances. But I think the revisionist heads should be more discerning about how these narratives often operate off the bigotry of low expectations.