The Agent-Structure Problem

I can't seem to escape from it, it's everywhere I go. *agent-structure agent-structure agent-structure ad infinitum*

On this blog, I often refer to neo-Marxist/Frankfurt School theories without any academic rigour at all. Yet, what is the tendency to focus on society and hegemony and economic and ideational structures? Merely an assumption of the ascendance of structure over agent - an assumption that I don't question often enough. At the same time, the 'call to arms' by the more optimistic FS theories, the call for revolution puts the emphasis on agency.

Ditto for neo-realism - structure over agent. And I just can't divorce the IR inter-paradigm debate from the agent-structure question. Perhaps the solution I find most satisfactory is the constructivist one of mutually constitutive structures and agents.

The only context in which I believe I can take a definite stance of the ascendancy of structure over agency is the religious one - ie. the question of free will. And that is because the structure of the world is predicated (at least in monotheistic religions) on the existence of the ultimate agency that determines structure. In that sense, the assumption of a unitary agency that is Alpha and Omega, an agency that is prior to structure (though help me out, is it good & evil before God, or God before good and evil? I never figured that out), therefore determines all structures, and negates other agencies' ability to influence or transcend structure. If this is so, then perhaps it is not helpful to talk of structure, or of human agency, but of the single, ultimate, structuring agency that is God.

Disclaimer: I know this sounds like I'm trying to complicate things, but all I'm trying to do is to frame the old debate in agent-structure terms.

Disclaimer no.2: I'm no Bible scholar, and I refer primarily to Christianity because that is the religion I am most familiar with. However, I would think that the above could refer to any monotheistic religion that posits and omnipotent, omnipresent God.(correct me if I'm wrong)

Anyway, since I mentioned Alpha and Omega, here's an interesting link to this online Catholic encyclopaedia that argues translations from Hebrew to Greek have resulted in a de-emphasis of the idea of God as truth (as opposed to goodness).

I have absolutely NO idea how true the article is (see Disclaimer no.2 above), but it seems to me that this demonstrates the untranslatability (is there such a word?) of languages. And this is coming from a Catholic source, mind you.