Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe historians think we inhabit. Using the example of post-1945 West Germany, the essay asks whether a shift toward increasingly diffuse forms of agency across various fields may be part of a larger historical, and not merely historiographical, pattern. In the “post-truth” early twenty-first century, will historians’ accounts of the past continue to be shaped by the idea of a benevolent and graspable universe, or will chaos make agency seem like an unrecognizable relic from a lost world?

中文翻译：

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 机构的道德世界


能动性属于对宇宙的明显道德理解，并以对最终公正且可知的宇宙的信念为支撑。在某种程度上，历史学家相信善有善报。但是，看看代理概念造成认知失调的那些时刻——例如，当大屠杀肇事者的“代理”被用来为邪恶服务时——揭示了历史学家认为我们所居住的道德宇宙的一些事情。本文以 1945 年后的西德为例，提出了跨不同领域向日益分散的代理形式的转变是否可能是一个更大的历史模式（而不仅仅是史学模式）的一部分。在二十一世纪初的“后真相”中，历史学家对过去的记述是否会继续受到仁慈且可理解的宇宙这一理念的影响，或者混乱会使代理看起来像是来自失落世界的无法辨认的遗物？