Reading :: The Origins of Collective Decision Making

 The Origins of Collective Decision Making

By Andy Blunden

The link above goes directly to the PDF hosted on Blunden’s website. In this 2016 book, Blunden — who has been involved in Left activism for his entire life — considers how collective decision making works. Specifically, he considers “Collective decision making, that is, the determination by a group of individuals of their collective will” (p.1), as it developed mainly in the Left political tradition of England and the US. 

Blunden argues that such an investigation is badly needed: “there has never been an historical investigation of collective decision  making, far less an historical investigation of how the internal decision making processes of a project prefigure the decision making processes of a larger community” (p.2). I’m not familiar with this realm of scholarship, so I was wary of this claim — but some quick Googling turned up multiple scholarly reviews of the book that agree with Blunden. So there you go.

Blunden grounds his approach in Marx: “Marx began Capital with a consideration of the commodity exchange, which he took to be the ‘germ cell’ of bourgeois society. In the same spirit, I take a group of people in the same room, deciding what to do together as the ‘germ cell’ of collective decision making” (p.2). He carefully (and, I think, prudently) distinguishes two cases:

In one case, all the  individuals in the room already take it for granted that in the matter athand they all share the same interests, and it is only a matter how best to further an alreadyformed collective will. In the other case, two or more groups are seeking a modus operandi forwhat are taken to be and to remain distinct parties with distinct interests. 

It is only the first case which I take to be collective decision making, and which is to be the focus of the historical investigation to follow. (p.3)

He identifies four paradigms of collective decision making, based on ethical principles:

• Majority: “The participants take each other as mutually independent and morally equal individuals with an equal stake in what they do together. In the event that consensus cannot be found, a decision is taken by majority vote.” (P.4)
• Consensus: “a decision may only be made to which every individual participant may freely consent.” (P.5)
• Counsel: “one of the participants … takes the advice of the other participants, but bears sole moral responsibility for the decision.” (P.5)
• Sortition: “the decision is made by lot or some other arbitrary means” (P.5). Sortition is a paradigm, but does not play a significant role in collective decision making.

He also identifies three paradigms of collaboration:

• “Negotiation: The parties engage in a bargaining process, each with the aim of furthering their own project.”
• “Solidarity: One party voluntarily places themself under the direction of another, despite the fact that the parties are independent agents.”
• “Command: The Commanding Officer or Director simply tells everyone else what to do, and neither invites nor accepts advice.” (P.6; he suggests that this could also be called “Colonization.”

To examine how these have historically emerged, Blunden goes into a number of historical case studies. For Majority, these include the British trade unions, guilds, and the Methodist church, the London Correspondence Society, the Chartists, communist secret societies, and general workers’ unions. For Consensus, these include the English revolution and the Quakers, Levelers, and Diggers, New England town meetings, the Civil Rights Movement and women’s rights movement in the US, and the anarchist tradition. Finally, in Part III, he discusses the rise of alliance politics. 

This discussion is very much the result of Blunden discovering and reading sources. For this reason, each chapter tends to rely heavily on just 1-2 sources, and in some of the chapters focusing on recent events, these sources are actual interviews with members of these movements who are recalling their own experiences. The result is personalized: Although these chapters are not broadly based on multiple sources, they go deeply into each source. 

Overall, I found the book rewarding, but especially the framing chapter, which gives us a taxonomy of paradigms that we can use when categorizing and thinking through collective decision making. If that sounds interesting to you, definitely click through and grab that PDF. 

Reading :: Agency and the Will

 Agency and the will: Committing to make a difference

By Andy Blunden

I’ve linked directly to the PDF supplied by the author so that you can download this 2026 book. Blunden, who is thoroughly steeped in Hegel, Marx, and Vygotsky, considers a topic that especially fascinated the latter: The will. What is human will, and what is agency? Most importantly, how can we make a difference? This question is vital to Blunden, whose background is in activism.

Blunden argues that “Beginning with the conversion of Augustine of Hippo in 386 CE, the concept of  the ‘Will’ became the vehicle for concerns about whether it was possible to ‘rise above your own nature’ and act contrary to your natural inclination” (p.5). So Part I of his historical inquiry begins here, with Augustine, before wending its way through Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Fichte. 

In Part II, the question is taken up by Hegel. In four chapters, Blunden examines how Hegel — and Rousseau — took up questions of the Will and adjacent questions about freedom, personal autonomy, ethics, rights, morality, ethical life, responsibility, and conscience. 

This leads us to Part III, focused on the psychology of will. These three chapters focus on Vygotsky’s work with higher psychological functions, the development of will through childhood crises, and then on to adulthood, with the latter chapter explicating Perezhivanie.

Part IV moves on to sociology: in functionalism (Blunden centers Leontiev here), Althusser’s structuralism, and Bordieu’s structuralism. Part V examines pushback from Giddens and from Alasdair MacIntyre.

In Part VI, Making a Difference, Blunden moves on to the practical questions of how will and agency have been (and should be) taken up in activism. 

Personally, I got a lot out of this book. The word “agency” is like the word “solidarity,” with an overly general meaning and at least a few highly specific ones, and it’s not always easy for me to follow which meaning is being used. But here, Blunden does his homework, building from Augustine to the present so we can understand the sense in which he is using the word. I appreciated the clarity and especially how this work built up a historical background for Vygotsky’s project and his focus on self-mastery. 

If you’re interested in the intellectual history of agency and will, and especially the intellectual tradition that influenced Vygotsky, definitely click through and get this PDF.