Social Movements

Ideologies, Interest, and Identities

Anthony Oberschall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351489997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

More than any other topic in social science, the study of social movements provides an opportunity to combine social theory with political action. Such study is a key to understanding the motivations, successes, and failures of thousands who aspire to high ideals of justice, but who sometimes aid in perpetuating inhumane political acts and systems. Building upon the past twenty years' developments in theory and research, Social Movements combines original theoretical and methodological approaches with penetrating analyses of contemporary movements from the sixties to the present.Anthony Oberschall argues that social movements are central to contemporary politics in both Western and Third World nations. They are not quaint stepchildren to public policy and social change that disappear as nations modernize. Collective action by the citizenry, spilling beyond the boundaries of routine politics is an integral part of the process of creative destruction that Joseph Schumpeter ascribed to modern capitalism and all dynamic, modern societies.Among the subjects that OberschaU examines in Social Movements are the Civil Rights movement, decline of the New Left, the feminist movement, the New Christian Right, the tobacco control movement, collective violence in U.S. industrial relations, and some comparative historical movements, including the Cultural Revolution in China, the abortive 1968 revolution in Czechoslovakia, political strife in postcolonial Africa, and the sixteenth-century European witch craze.In looking beyond the immediate political circumstances of these social movements, Oberschall points the way to achieving the next major task of social movement theory: a more satisfactory understanding of the dynamics and course of social movements and counter movements and a method of accounting for the outcomes of public controversies. Free of jargon and technical terminology, Social Movements is written for sociologists, political scientists, historians, professionals dea

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Social Movements and Collective Action

Most of the time people pursue their goals or seek relief from hardship on their own, through individual effort. They conform to the inherited institutions without challenging their legitimacy. Yet, on occasion, many people pool their efforts in collective actions to benefit a large category of persons jointly—women, the elderly, blacks, farmers—not just themselves and their families. They find it necessary to challenge and change routines and institutions that others remain attached to. Controversy and conflict follow. What distinguishes collective from individual action are not the goals sought, nor the personality, motivations, and thought processes of participants. It is the public, nonroutine dimension of collective action, its challenge and threat to established groups, and its potential for being an agent of social change.

Social organization results from adaptations to technological innovations, economic forces, and population changes, and also from purposive, collective efforts to shape and alter existing institutions in order to deal with human needs and aspirations. When reforms are made, it has often been under pressure from social movements, as was the case of the 1930s New Deal administrations responding to the movements of the unemployed, farmers, industrial workers and miners, elderly, populists, and radicals. When privileged groups have resisted demands for change, they have at times been overthrown by popular movements, as King George III’s administration was by the American colonists. Even when a social movement remains unsuccessful, its ideals and goals are at times later adopted, as was the case with the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. Collective behavior and social movements have molded our contemporary institutions and are likely to keep changing them in the times ahead.

Terms, Concepts, and Questions

Although no satisfactory definitions of social movements and of collective behavior have yet been formulated, it is possible to convey a sense of their meaning by listing instances of both.¹ Collective behavior refers to the spectrum of crowd behavior from strikers manning a picket line, demonstrators attending a rally at the steps of a state capitol, and other collective manifestations of citizens exercising their constitutional rights peacefully to assemble and petition the government; all the way to the potentially destructive actions of a rioting mob. Collective behavior episodes are infrequent and unusual. They attract curiosity and comment. They elicit support and condemnation. They compel a search for their meaning, and call forth contradictory explanations. Social movements are large-scale, collective efforts to bring about or resist changes that bear on the lives of many: the temperance and prohibition movement at the turn of the century, the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s, the women’s movement of the past two decades. Because collective behavior episodes frequently occur within the context of a wider social movement, these two topics have often been studied together.

More to the point, both collective behavior and social movements are forms of collective action. Much of the time, in the routines of everyday life, each of us pursues private goals that benefit us alone and our closest kin and associates. We cook a meal in order to eat it; we watch a television program for enjoyment and relaxation; we work and study in order to earn a living and get ahead. If we do not earn sufficiently, we work overtime or look for another job. If we are bored by television, we turn off the set and read a book. If we cannot afford a steak for dinner, we buy ground beef or chicken, or buy steak less frequently. These are individual strategies for dealing with individual needs and problems. We take action independently of what others may be doing.

On occasion, however, some people come to define a condition shared by many as a public issue necessitating joint action. They take steps to pursue a collective solution by pooling their efforts and resources, and coordinating their actions. Shoppers organize a boycott of beef at markets in order to force down the price of beef. Employees in the same occupation and industry pressure employers by striking in order to obtain a collective wage hike contract. Viewers form an association to put pressure on the networks and program sponsors in order to “clean up television.” These are instances of collective action. Whether they succeed or fail will depend on how many join, how determined they are, what sacrifices they are willing to make, and on the resistance of their opponents. Furthermore, bystanders’ decisions to join, and participants’ decisions to contribute, are in turn much influenced by their perceptions of what others are also doing for the common cause and by their expectations of who else will join and how much they’ll contribute. Collective action then, is not simply the sum total of thousands of individual decisions taken in isolation, such as the decision to cut down on beef consumption when beef prices increase. Collective action is the product of interactions, mutual perceptions, and expectations, called strategic interaction. As such, it is more difficult to describe and understand, and hence more challenging and intriguing as a field of study.

Many pertinent questions are raised about collective behavior and social movements: can broad societal conditions be identified that account for the waxing and waning of collective action over a period of time, or account for differences in its prevalence in different societies, localities, and social units? Under what circumstances does an issue or problem, such as temperance or women’s rights, become a public controversy and attract supporters? What sorts of people participate in collective actions, both for and against an issue, and what are their reasons and motivations? What is the part played by leaders? How can one explain the character and forms of collective action, which ranges from episodic events to sustained drives, spontaneous to organized, peaceful to violent, from small to large scale? Why do some movements fail and others succeed? What accounts for the stages and phases that many movements go through as they first rise and later decline? What lasting consequences result that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred? These and similar questions have preoccupied scholars and the public, as well as participants and onlookers, trying to make sense of social movements and collective behavior.

The study of social movements and collective behavior has been pursued by scholars and researchers from many academic disciplines, and writers and journalists of varied backgrounds. Routine information on these topics is hard to come by, however, because governments and institutional record keepers do not provide it as they do for households, industrial firms, consumer spending, public opinion, and elections. It is simple to look up the distribution of votes for candidates in an election. It is not simple to establish the contradictory claims of numerical support of a movement leader and of the opponents trying to discredit him. Thus theories and explanations are difficult to test and confirm in this field. Particular social movements are the subject of controversy and reinterpretation even among nonpartisan, relatively objective analysts. Still, the subject matter is inherently fascinating, and in recent years progress has been made in providing the field with a broader empirical base, and with a more sophisticated approach to the subject matter. I start with the traditional explanations of collective behavior associated with the crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon, then review difficulties and criticisms of the traditional approach, and end with a competing set of explanations which will be applied to joyous celebrations, the dissolution of a riotous crowd, and the puzzling Jonestown mass suicides. Then I turn to social movements.

Le Bon’s Theory of Collective Behavior

At the turn of the century the most widely accepted source for a comprehensive explanation of collective behavior was the French social theorist Gustave Le Bon (1960). Even today, news reporters, police chiefs, legislators, commentators, as well as the public at large, share Le Bon’s views, which were much colored by his negative assessment of the French Revolution and by the turn of the century cultural pessimism permeating European intellectual life. In his best-known book, Psychologie des Foules,² he contended that civilization was in decline in his time because the era of the masses had dawned. According to Le Bon, civilizations are always created by a small intellectual aristocracy that imposes rationality and discipline upon the potentially destructive masses. When the masses take over, “they act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies … It is always the masses that bring out [civilization’s] downfall.”

Le Bon made a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the individual, the agent of rationality, morality, civilization, high culture and intellectual achievement; and, on the other, masses and crowds, harbingers of irrationality, destruction, decadence, the herd instinct, barbarism. In order to make sense of crowd and mass behavior, therefore, principles that differ from those that govern and explain individual everyday behavior must be invoked. His three most important principles were the “law of mental unity of crowds,”³ the loss of rational faculty and of moral sense, and hero worship and blind submission to a strong leader.

According to the law of mental unity, individual differences in personality and aptitude weaken in a crowd setting, and, correspondingly, a collective state of mind and feeling takes hold: “whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupation, their character or their intelligence… the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation.” Crowds, in Le Bon’s view, develop such a collective state through a process of contagion and suggestion that promote uniformity much as the herd instinct does in the animal world. One important consequence of such unity is the great power thus achieved by crowds and masses, for unlike individuals who act at cross purposes, crowds act in unison.

According to the second principle, an individual in a crowd loses his rational faculties and his moral sense. He can be made “to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best known habits.” Men in crowds become akin to barbarians, or to the animals acting out of sheer instinct: “man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization… he possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” For Le Bon, crowds are not only powerful and of one mind and sentiment, they are dangerous, irrational, and amoral.

According to his third principle, and quite in keeping with the preceding, Le Bon also held that crowds worship strong leaders, are impressed by popular heroes, and submit to and follow these leaders blindly; consequently, they can be manipulated by these leaders to serve evil ends, all the more so because their intellectual and moral faculties are in suspension.

To illustrate and substantiate his principles, Le Bon described several episodes from the French Revolution, such as the killing of six or seven captured defenders of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, after it had been captured by the insurgents, and the September massacres in 1792, when Parisians forced their way into the city’s prisons and executed several hundred prisoners, after condemning them in hastily improvised people’s tribunals. Beyond these historic examples, well known to every French schoolchild, recent history and daily newscasts abound with examples of collective behavior that appears to fit the Le Bon mold. Consider that the Reverend Jim Jones and 900 of his followers in the People’s Temple committed mass suicide together, an act that completely wiped out their isolated religious settlement in the Guyanese jungle. What better example of hero worship, collective irrationality, and uniform mass behavior than that event, and how else explain it but with reference to Le Bon’s principles?

Critiques of Le Bon’s Conceptions

Contemporary historical scholarship has shown, however, that the crowd episodes chosen by Le Bon to make his case do not fit his principles well and are subject to different interpretations. Nor were Le Bon’s examples typical either of crowd behavior in general, or of French Revolution crowds, in particular. For example, the storming of the Bastille was not a spontaneous, unprovoked, destructive attack led by popular heroes with the masses at their heels (Rude 1959). Quite the contrary. It was a planned military operation undertaken by a citizen militia at the request of the provisional government of Paris. The militia was joined by a crowd of a few hundred armed civilians and two detachments of army troops who had recently defected to the side of the Paris insurgents. The purpose of the action was to seize gunpowder, stored in the fortress, which was needed to defend Paris should the king try to stamp out the Paris uprising against his authority. Prolonged and repeated negotiations were undertaken with the Bastille commander for its surrender before any shots were fired. The besiegers lost ninety-three dead and suffered close to one-hundred wounded during the fighting, after the commander opened fire with the Bastille’s guns, mistakenly believing that negotiations had broken down and that a frontal attack was imminent. He and his garrison of 109 men eventually surrendered. It is true that he and five or six of his men were killed, as they were being led away into captivity, by some angry participants in the attack. But these actions were perpetrated by only a fraction of the besiegers and were not typical of the fate suffered by the Bastille garrison: the attackers did not act in unison; most of what they had done before, during and after the storming of the Bastille was neither irrational nor immoral; leaders and demagogues played no role in the six killings.

But what about the gruesome September of 1792, when in a week’s time nearly half of the 3000 prisoners in Paris jails were massacred? These wretches were executed by hastily constituted people’s courts, though most of the victims were common thieves, currency speculators and forgers, and vagrants and prostitutes, and not political prisoners, nobles, and priests. According to Rude (1959, 109), however, “[The September massacres] were by no means a sudden eruption, carried out in a momentary fit of passion or as a result of shortlived panic.” It is important to remember that France was at war with an alliance of the great European powers. Many nobles had become exiles at European courts and were plotting to overthrow the revolutionary government. King Louis and his family had tried to flee and join the exiles. In August 1792, he was deposed as a constitutional monarch because it was feared that he was part of a counterrevolutionary plot. The war was going badly. The Prussian army was advancing on French territory. Counterrevolutionaries, nobles, priests, forgers, and speculators in currency believed responsible for inflation and food shortages had been imprisoned. Others’ homes had been searched for hidden arms and incriminating papers. As volunteers and conscripts were leaving to join the army, the fear spread in Paris of a counterrevolutionary plot against the vulnerable and defenseless city that would start with the liberation of the enemies of the revolution from prisons and jails. That is the historical context for the massacres.

The authorities knew about the coming invasion of the prisons by Parisians since rumors had circulated and plans of action had been discussed at neighborhood meetings. Yet the authorities did not intervene: some thought it useful for creating greater revolutionary zeal at a time of danger and for eliminating the counterrevolutionaries. Others openly applauded the massacres as necessary and politically desirable acts of popular justice. Though many nonpolitical criminals were executed with the politicals, it should be noted that more prisoners were actually spared than condemned and executed by the people’s courts.

Thus even this extreme case of collective fear and the destruction of life does not unambiguously support Le Bon’s principles. The September crowds did not do the bidding of leaders and demagogues, but acted on their own. Their actions, precipitated by a real military emergency, cannot be dismissed as simply irrational and amoral. Fears of a counterrevolution may have been exaggerated, but they had a basis in political events of the preceding two years. The people’s courts did attempt to discriminate between counterrevolutionary guilt and innocence in quasijudicial proceedings. When the authorities did not intervene, and in some cases provided encouragement, it did invest these illegal actions with an aura of legitimacy and of morality.

Similarly, the People’s Temple mass suicide in Guyana appears to have been a far more complex event than it first appeared (Naipaul 1981). In California the Reverend Jones had been under mounting scrutiny, pressure, and legal action, both from a concerned parents’ group charging that their children had been brainwashed by the sect, or held against their will, or both, and from government agencies and legislators looking into these charges. These agencies were also interested in allegations of financial irregularities and fraud: old folks having signed their social security pensions over to the sect leadership.

Here is the sequence of events: In order to escape scrutiny and possible legal action, the Reverend Jim Jones decided to put into effect his plan for a unique religious-communist experiment, and transferred most of his sect into the Jonestown agricultural settlement in the jungle of Guyana. There, a friendly government would hold the outside world at bay, and give him maximum authority to run his own sect without interference and accountability. The jungle would constitute an additional barrier to meddlers, parents, and news reporters.

His strategy and his health were both soon failing. He knew he was dying and was increasingly sustained by and addicted to powerful drugs. He had been unable to stop the investigative visit of California Congressman Leo Ryan accompanied by news reporters, and as this team was leaving the Jonestown airstrip with incriminating evidence and some defectors, Jones ordered first the murderous attack on them and on the plane’s crew, and then, by means of poisoned drink, the mass suicide of his assembled followers and of himself, which he had prepared for.

Because Jones had taped the nightly assemblies at which he preached to and harangued his followers, and because of other information that has come to light about life in Jonestown, we know that the popular version of the event, of willing followers surrendering life at the bidding of their godlike leader, is distorted. To some, Jonestown was a noble Utopia and Jones a great leader; to others, however—and we shall probably never know how many wanted to escape but could not—Jonestown had become a prison and Jones himself a lunatic fraud. Some followers had already defected in California, and had come under intimidation and harassment from the People’s Temple. In Jonestown itself there were armed guards, fences, and of course the jungle, preventing escape. When visitors or embassy officials came, sect members were not permitted to speak to them in private. The enthusiastic reception given to visiting dignitaries, who later gave favorable reports about life in Jonestown, were carefully staged and rehearsed during the evening sessions. Many sect members were apathetic, suffering from dysentery, weak from hard work and poor food, just struggling to stay alive. And for many there was no alternative; even had they been capable of escaping, they had burned their bridges to the outside world after joining the sect; they had no property and assets left, and had antagonized relatives and friends. Furthermore, to deter opposition and keep the wavering in line, thought control had been instituted; sect members had to confess their doubts publicly and were forced to voice their loyalty to Reverend Jones. In the fatal final act of the Jonestown drama, on 18 November 1978, eighteen months after Jonestown was settled, some—quite possibly most—were forced to drink the poison by Jones’ armed guards. The point here is that though to some Jonestown was a Utopia to the end, to others it had become a concentrat...