On Collective Action: underpinning the plural subject with a model of planning agency

This thesis aims to give an account of collective action. It starts with a detailed presentation of its underlying phenomenology. It is argued that in order to understand this phenomenology, we must move beyond the framework of individual agency; thus rejecting Michael Bratman's Shared Cooperative Activity Account. Doing so opens up a space for Margaret Gilbert's Plural Subject Theory. Plural Subject Theory is presented as capturing this phenomenology by allowing that we can act as collective agents. However, it also creates a puzzle centring on the relation between individual autonomy and constraint by the collective will. The solution to this puzzle, this thesis argues, is to apply Bratman's planning theory of agency to the collective agent. In doing so, Gilbert's theory is improved, such that it is better able to capture the sense in which living social lives entangles our sense of individual agentive identity with our sense of collective agentive identity.