Political Action: on the Relation of Goals and Collective Agency

The article explores the relationship between goals and collective agency in political action. It is argued that the experience and shaping of collective agency cannot replace goal orientation in politics, but must be understood as a resilience condition for the existence of political action. First, the article critically discusses theories of political action that are centered on collective agency. The article then reconstructs this approach from Hannah Arendt's writings and places it in the context of existing theoretical approaches as well as insights from research on insurgency and rebellion. Finally, reflections are made on how to improve the modeling of political action. Here, among other things, the distinction between main and by-products and the two-stage nature of political action are important. These reflections then allow for incorporating collective agency into a more complex goal orientation. This, in turn, leads to a correction of approaches centered on both instrumental and collective agency.