Agency as Precondition or Purpose? Survival and Relational Equality in Okeja’s Deliberative Agency

Abstract

Abstract In Deliberative Agency, Okeja offers a vision of politics that re-centres the citizen and their agency – their ability to co-create meaning and purpose together – and so aims to put power back into citizens’ collective hands in a context where many experience powerlessness and politics as meaningless as a response to this powerlessness to change their circumstances. This is a deeply important aim and Okeja offers an innovative method and set of insights to ground a compelling case for the new political ideal of deliberative agency. In this contribution I engage with three interrelated ways in which the theory left me seeking more elaboration and occasionally more clarity. I do this with the aim of contributing towards the theory’s development and our shared aim of a more just society, and a politics that enables this justice rather than (as it often does) works against it. First, I engage with the method of conceptual creativity and offer a caution around the uneven costs and resistance to conceptual change. Second, I provide a brief synthesis of the core argument of Deliberative Agency before, third, seeking clarity on the sometimes-ambiguous framing of deliberative agency as a political ideal. In the last two substantive sections, I argue that regardless of our interpretation of deliberative agency as a core goal of politics or a necessary foundation of politics, more needs to be said about its ability to ground normative principles that speak to survival and relational equality.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Philosophia, 2026 · DOI ↗