Human Agency in the Humanist Movement: A Discourse Analysis of Humanist Institutional Texts and Humanists' Accounts

This paper aims to explore how human agency is discursively constructed by the Humanist movement. The Humanist movement represents a non-religious worldview, establishing its own secular values and system of meaning, to which human is central. This paper analyses publications and institutional websites of Humanists, atheists, and agnostics organisations in the UK and Italy, and an international umbrella association, as well as interviews with their members and supporters. While the study is conducted with the conceptual tools of the critical sociology of Dorothy Smith, results are put into dialogue with agency theories to examine the construction of institutional discourses in terms of Humanist perspective towards human as a powerful and responsibilised actor. From the lenses of modernism, liberalism and relationality, this paper argues how on institutional textual and discourse levels the current Humanist movement attributes an agentic identity to human as (1)a skilled author; (2)rational and responsible agent and (3)activist for future generations. By doing so, it contributes to the unpacking of the perception of the human in current belief landscapes in Western Europe.