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The Passive
The agentless passive is the oldest tool in the grammar of authority — a construction that makes outcomes appear while making the people who chose them disappear
On August 9, 1974, a statement was released from the White House. It contained eleven words that became among the most analyzed in American political history: "Mistakes were made." The speaker was not identified in the grammatical structure of the sentence. The mistakes were not specified. The passive construction accomplished something that an active sentence could not have accomplished: it acknowledged wrongdoing while ensuring that no one acknowledged doing wrong.
"Mistakes were made" is the famous example, but it is famous precisely because it is such a pure instance of something that runs throughout the full corpus of American institutional language — in statutes, regulations, court opinions, agency enforcement documents, executive orders, and administrative records going back to the founding of the republic. The agentless passive is not a political evasion deployed in moments of crisis. It is the standard operating grammar of institutional authority. Crisis only makes it visible.
Post II is a forensic examination of that construction: where it comes from, how it works at the sentence level, what it consistently produces across different institutional domains, and what would have to change about the exercise of power for the grammar to change. The passive voice is a technical grammatical category. But in the context of institutional language, it is also a decision — made by drafters, codified in style guides, reproduced across centuries of legal documents — about where responsibility attaches and where it does not.
In ordinary English grammar, the passive voice moves the object of an action into the subject position of the sentence. "The officer seized the property" becomes "The property was seized." The officer — the agent, the person who did the thing — moves out of the subject position and into a prepositional phrase ("by the officer") or disappears from the sentence entirely. When the agent disappears entirely, the construction is called the agentless passive. This is the variant that does the most consequential work in institutional language.
The agentless passive produces three specific effects that are consequential for accountability. First, it removes the actor from the grammatical subject position — the position where the reader's attention naturally attaches and where responsibility is conventionally assigned. Second, it makes the deleted agent optional: the sentence is grammatically complete without specifying who acted, which means the reader must supply the agent from context or give up knowing. Third, it transforms an active decision into a passive outcome — the thing that happened, rather than the thing that someone chose to do.
These effects are not theoretical. They appear in the documentary record of every major accountability failure in American institutional history — in the passive constructions of the memos that authorized COINTELPRO, in the regulatory language that governed financial instruments before 2008, in the administrative records of the agencies that managed the opioid epidemic, and in the enforcement documents of every federal agency that has ever been subjected to a congressional oversight investigation. The passive voice is where accountability goes when no one wants to be accountable.
What the agentless passive converts, consistently across the full range of institutional contexts, is a human decision into an institutional outcome. This conversion has a specific value for institutions: it makes the outcome appear to be the product of a process rather than a person. And processes, unlike persons, cannot be held individually accountable. You can challenge a process in the aggregate — argue that the regulation is unconstitutional, that the policy is arbitrary, that the procedure violates due process. But you cannot demand that a process explain why it made the specific choice it made in the specific case before you. Only a person can be asked that question. The passive construction ensures that the person is not in the sentence when the question is asked.
The passive construction is not where grammar ends and politics begins. It is where the grammar is the politics — a sentence-level decision about who is visible and who is not when power is exercised.
The Grammar of Authority · Series AnalysisThe agentless passive has a genuine defense, and the defense is important to understand because it is part of the insulation. Not every passive construction deletes an agent for purposes of accountability evasion. Some genuinely reflect institutional rather than individual action — decisions made by bodies rather than persons, outcomes produced by systems without a single responsible agent. "The bill was passed by the Senate" is a passive construction that accurately describes a collective action with 51 or more agents. "The regulation became effective on January 1" describes a scheduled outcome with no meaningful single agent at the moment of effectiveness.
The forensic question is not whether a passive construction appears — they appear throughout legitimate institutional language for legitimate reasons. The forensic question is whether the deleted agent exists and is knowable, and whether the deletion serves a function beyond description. When a specific officer made a specific decision in a specific case, and the document recording that decision renders the officer invisible through passive construction, the deletion is not a grammatical convenience. It is a choice — about whether the person who exercised power is present in the record of that exercise.
Post III turns to nominalization — the second mechanism, and in some respects the more sophisticated one. Where the passive voice deletes agents from sentences, nominalization converts the act itself into an abstraction: not "the agency decided" but "the determination." Not "the officer seized" but "the seizure." The actor and the action both disappear, leaving only the noun — and a noun, unlike a verb, has no subject at all.
The "mistakes were made" construction and its political history are extensively documented in American political and linguistic scholarship; the phrase appears across multiple administrations as a documented rhetorical pattern. The corpus linguistic claim regarding elevated passive rates in federal regulatory text is supported by research in legal linguistics, including work published in journals including the Journal of Law and Society and Legal Communication and Rhetoric; specific rate figures cited here are illustrative of documented patterns rather than precise measurements from a single study. The passive ledger constructions are composites drawn from documented patterns in federal administrative, immigration, and law enforcement language; they are not quotations from specific identified documents. The immigration enforcement dissection specimen is a composite illustrating documented grammatical patterns in administrative removal proceedings, not a quotation from a specific identified notice. The forensic analysis — reading passive constructions as functional accountability architecture rather than stylistic choice — is the series' analytical judgment, building on the critical discourse analysis and legal linguistics traditions identified in the FSA Wall for Post I.
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