The central theme of the manuscript I'm finishing is about agency and its importance in African history, and I'm very much arguing in favor of a classically liberal conception of agency (e.g., something rather like "free will"). This is why your summary here bugs me a bit, on two points.

The first is that you're being very reductive in your (dare I say, snarky) sketch of various philosophical and theoretical positions that human agency isn't what classic liberalism says it is. I don't agree with those positions myself, but they're complex arguments that deserve some degree of intellectual respect. People who want to argue for a theory of agency which is more like "free will" need to take seriously a wide variety of challenges to that position, some of which are not modern or leftist. Moreover, some of the most powerful challenges out there now don't come from humanists, philosophers, etc., but from cognitive scientists and neurobiologists, who are a little harder for you to just wave off as ideologues. This is one of the oldest and deepest problems in human thought, in fact. Don't just wave aside centuries of profound debate or act like it's all so easy and obvious.

Second, don't act as if there's only a few brave stalwarts out there still writing in the tradition that you prefer. I've found plenty of people across the disciplines whose conception of agency is fairly proximate to a free will or classically liberal ideal. I understand that a blog entry is a short thing, but you're shortchanging your readers when you portray this as a hopelessly embattled, unfashionable position which is only just beginning to peek its head up once again. A little erudition on this point would help a lot. Doesn't mean that it isn't an argument that is in some fashion bracketed off by other bodies of theory--in fact, that's one of my central claims about African history, that many scholars have a theory of agency which is implicitly based on classical liberalism but that they don't recognize the implications of that view because they're also trying to support other bodies of social theory that are antagonistic to that perception.

Part of what I think we ought to be doing for our readers is translating the richness of what's out there in the scholarship while also giving critical readings of the blindspots in scholarly canons. So I'm not at all opposed to the general point you're raising here--I just think that the way you raise it is unfairly simplifying in a number of respects.