Agency

= book, and concept

The Concept

Phases

Peter Thiel, via Daniel Nash:

Peter "Thiel maps the intellectual decline of individual agency across three distinct epochs:

Early Modernity: Unshakeable faith in individual genius as the driver of history. Francis Bacon envisioned scientific conquerors mastering nature, while Tsar Alexander I and European commentators viewed Napoleon Bonaparte as the literal incarnation of the Antichrist, the apocalyptic Abaddon or “beast from the sea” . Napoleon himself mimicked this archetype, crowning himself in the presence of the Pope in an explicit reversal of Charlemagne.

Middle Modernity: The erosion of hero-worship into satire and doubt. Jonathan Swift mocked specialized, feckless intellectuals in Gulliver’s Travels, and Thomas Carlyle attempted a defense of grand agency in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, a text deplatformed after World War II when it was revealed Goebbels read Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great to Hitler in the Führerbunker. Meanwhile, John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain documented how 19th-century society abandoned the belief that the Papacy was the Antichrist as outdated superstition.

Late Modernity: Total denial of individual capacity. Modern leaders are reduced to administrative cogs, their pretensions mocked (such as Emmanuel Macron’s “Jupiterian” posturing) or their reputations dissected by social media archive-digging. Figures like Nick Bostrom argue that individual scientific genius is inherently dangerous and must be subjected to global preventive regulation."

(https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-consolidation-velocity)

The Book

* Book: Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress. by Martin E. P. Seligman.

URL =

From the publisher:

"From the world’s most influential psychologist and bestselling author of Flourish, a landmark work spanning ancient Greece to the age of AI that identifies agency—the fusion of efficacy, optimism, and imagination—as the hidden engine of human progress, and shows how we can unleash it to build a better future.

What actually drives human progress? Ecologists point to geography and climate. Sociologists invoke wars and class. Economists follow the money. But none of these accounts explains why innovation and human thriving occurs in some eras and stalls in others—often under identical material conditions. The missing variable, Seligman argues, is the psychological state known as: agency.

Agency is built from three interlocking capacities: efficacy, the confidence that you can accomplish a specific goal right now; optimism, the expectation that your efforts will pay off far into the future; and imagination, the breadth of goals you can envision. When all three align, civilizations leap forward. When they collapse, societies stagnate—no matter how rich their resources or how brilliant their citizens.

Drawing on six decades of pioneering research and a sweeping reexamination of the last twenty-five hundred years—from Periclean Athens and the Hebrew Torah to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Civil Rights Movement—Seligman reveals how surges and declines in agency have quietly steered the course of history. With a clear-eyed look at an AI-transformed future, Agency makes the case that the power to create the next great era of human flourishing is already alive within each of us."