Group Agency

I am sitting in a hotel room with a horrid summer cold. At least I have the company of a good book. Christopher List and Phillip Pettit have written Group Agency, which is an investigation into the behavior of groups. They are particularly concerned with understanding what it means to attribute agency to a collection of individuals. Using recent work in economics, social choice theory, and philosophy, they argue that groups possess agency apart from the individuals that compose them. And, this agency must be accounted for in social thought. Their conclusions are significant for many legal issues that we discuss today.