Margaret S. Archer has developed a very important concept of the human person on the grounds of sociology. This concept clearly fits in with her work on structure and agency. She proves that the human person is both child and father of society, meaning that on one hand structures, socialization and society have an important influence on our development as human beings. On the other, human persons are active, not passive agents who by means of their many human powers, such as reflexivity, have the capacity of changing, leaving their imprint on society. Having identified these characteristics of the human person, M. S. Archer questions the two models of the human person that are promoted in today’s sociology: that of Modernity’s Manand Society’s Being, the former being an under-socialized view of man, and the latterbeing his over-socialized version. In this paper I provide a brief portrait of each of these models of the human being and present Professor Archer’s concept of the relational subject, who needs to maintain relations with all orders of society and cannot escape from either one of them.
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