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

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.