The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 0, Number 0, 2019, pp. 1–23 The Question of the Agent of Change* Ben Laurence Philosophy, University of Chicago A CCORDING to a widely shared view, nonideal theory addresses pressing and urgent matters of injustice that confront us in our actual political life. In nonideal theory, the political philosopher seeks to identify an injustice, synthesize social scientific work to diagnose its underlying causes, and propose morally permissible and potentially efficacious remedies that ameliorate or overcome this injustice. This article explores the role in nonideal theory of the identification of a plausible agent of change who might bring about the proposed remedies. I argue that the question of the agent of change is connected with the other core tasks of diagnosing injustices and proposing practical remedies to ameliorate or overcome them. It is a proper and unavoidable topic for nonideal theory. In this connection, I criticize two linked postures that nonideal theorists sometimes adopt: a technocratic mode of neutral policy recommendation, whereby philosophers say what “we” must do to address some problem, without attending to the way agency enters into the problem and its possible resolution; and the tendency to treat nonideal theory as primarily consisting in an enumeration of duties we are failing to fulfill, and a specification of who is under what additional duties in light of this shortfall. If one combines these technocratic and moralistic elements, one arrives at a view on which the main task of nonideal theory is enumerating our collective sins and naming the policy fixes we must adopt to atone for them. My argument is that these tendencies fail to register in a coherent way the practical character of political philosophy as this is expressed in nonideal theory. Here is a sketch of the argument to come. In Section I, I argue that the use of an unspecified first-person plural subject in nonideal theory can obscure questions about the agent of change and the obstacles it confronts. In nonideal theory, the practical subject must often be conceived in narrower terms. In Section II, I argue that identifying an agent of change cannot be treated in a second, merely “pragmatic,” stage of investigation that picks up after the (technocratic) specification of policy fixes has been concluded. The proposal of remedies and © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd doi: 10.1111/jopp.12204 *I must thank Matt Boyle, Chiara Cordelli, Anton Ford, Pablo Gilabert, Matthias Haase, Burke Hendrix, Gabriel Lear, Martha Nussbaum, and Jim Wilson, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for feedback on this article. Thanks also to the participants at the Practical Philosophy Workshop and the Thinking Across Borders Conference, both at the University of Chicago.