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In this important contribution both to the study of social protest and to French social history, Roger Gould breaks with previous accounts that portray the Paris Commune of 1871 as a continuation of the class struggles of the 1848 Revolution. Focusing on the collective identities framing conflict during these two upheavals and in the intervening period, Gould reveals that while class played a pivotal role in 1848, it was neighborhood solidarity that was the decisive organizing force in 1871.
The difference was due to Baron Haussmann's massive urban renovation projects between 1852 and 1868, which dispersed workers from Paris's center to newly annexed districts on the outskirts of the city. In these areas, residence rather than occupation structured social relations. Drawing on evidence from trail documents, marriage records, reports of police spies, and the popular press, Gould demonstrates that this fundamental rearrangement in the patterns of social life made possible a neighborhood insurgent movement; whereas the insurgents of 1848 fought and died in defense of their status as workers, those in 1871 did so as members of a besieged urban community.
A valuable resource for historians and scholars of social movements, this work shows that collective identities vary with political circumstances but are nevertheless constrained by social networks. Gould extends this argument to make sense of other protest movements and to offer predictions about the dimensions of future social conflict.

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Minor debts, derisive remarks, a fight over a parking space, butting in line—these are the little things that nevertheless account for much of the violence in human society. But why? Roger V. Gould considers this intriguing question in Collision of Wills. He argues that human conflict is more likely to occur in symmetrical relationships—among friends or social equals—than in hierarchical ones, wherein the difference of social rank between the two individuals is already established.
This, he maintains, is because violence most often occurs when someone wants to achieve superiority or dominance over someone else, even if there is no substantive reason for doing so. In making the case for this original idea, Gould explores a diverse range of examples, including murders, blood feuds, vendettas, revolutions, and the everyday disagreements that compel people to act violently. The result is an intelligent and provocative work that restores the study of conflict to the center of social inquiry.
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Minor debts, derisive remarks, a fight over a parking space, butting in line—these are the little things that nevertheless account for much of the violence in human society. But why? Roger V. Gould considers this intriguing question in Collision of Wills. He argues that human conflict is more likely to occur in symmetrical relationships—among friends or social equals—than in hierarchical ones, wherein the difference of social rank between the two individuals is already established.
This, he maintains, is because violence most often occurs when someone wants to achieve superiority or dominance over someone else, even if there is no substantive reason for doing so. In making the case for this original idea, Gould explores a diverse range of examples, including murders, blood feuds, vendettas, revolutions, and the everyday disagreements that compel people to act violently. The result is an intelligent and provocative work that restores the study of conflict to the center of social inquiry.

Why most modern revolutions have ended in bloodshed and failure―and what lessons they hold for today's world of growing extremism
Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?, Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world―from the late eighteenth century to today―to provide important new answers to these critical questions.
From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, You Say You Want a Revolution? explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others―and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms.
A powerful account of the unintended consequences of revolutionary change, You Say You Want a Revolution? is filled with critically important lessons for today's liberal democracies struggling with new forms of extremism.

Like many organizations and social movements, the Third Republic French labour movement exhibited a marked tendency to schism into competing sectarian organizations. During the roughly 50-year period from the fall of the Paris Commune to the creation of the powerful French Communist Party, the French labour movement shifted from schism to broad-based solidarity and back to schism. In this 2001 book, Ansell analyses the dynamic interplay between political mobilization, organization-building, and ideological articulation that produced these shifts between schism and solidarity. The aim is not only to shed light on the evolution of the Third Republic French labour movement, but also to develop a more generic understanding of schism and solidarity in organizations and social movements. To develop this broader understanding, the book builds on insights drawn from sociological analyses of Protestant sects and anthropological studies of segmentary societies, as well as from organization and social movement theory.

This book illustrates a set of tools - story grammars, relational data models, and network models - that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research. A story grammar, or Subject-Action-Object and their modifiers, is the linguistic tool the author uses to structure narrative for the purpose of collecting event data. Relational database models make such complex data collection schemes practically feasible in a computer environment. Finally, network models are a statistical tool best suited to analyze this type of data. Driven by the metaphors of the journal (from ...to) and the alchemy (words into numbers), the book leads the reader throughout a number of paths, from substantive to methodological issues, across time and disciplines: sociology, linguistics, literary criticism, history, statistics, computer science, philosophy, cognitive psychology, political science.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil struggled to rebuild its democracy after twenty years of military dictatorship, experiencing financial crises, corruption scandals, political protest, and intense electoral contention. In the midst of this turmoil, Ann Mische argues in this remarkable book, youth activists of various stripes played a vital and unrecognized role, contributing new forms of political talk and action to Brazil's emerging democracy. Drawing upon extensive and rich ethnography as well as formal network analysis, Mische tracks the lives of young activists through intersecting political networks, including student movements, church-based activism, political parties, nongovernmental organizations, and business and professional organizations. She probes the problems and possibilities they encountered in combining partisan activism with other kinds of civic involvement. In documenting activists' struggles to develop cross-partisan publics of various kinds, Mische explores the distinct styles of communication and leadership that emerged across organizations and among individuals. Drawing on the ideas of Habermas, Gramsci, Dewey, and Machiavelli, "Partisan Publics" highlights political communication styles and the forms of mediation and leadership they give rise to - for democratic politics in Brazil and elsewhere. Insightful in its discussion of culture, methodology, and theory, "Partisan Publics" argues that partisanship can play a significant role in civic life, helping to build relations and institutions in an emerging democracy.

Between 1750 and 1840 ordinary British people abandoned such time-honored forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favor of marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created--perhaps for the first time anywhere--mass participation in national politics.
Charles Tilly is the first to address the depth and significance of the transmutations in popular collective action during this period. As he unravels the story of thousands of popular struggles and their consequences, he illuminates the dynamic relationships of an industrializing, capitalizing, proletarianizing economy; a war-making, growing, increasingly interventionist state; and an internal history of contention that spawned such political entrepreneurs as Francis Place and Henry Hunt. Tilly's research rests on a catalog of more than 8,000 "contentious gatherings" described in British periodicals, plus ample documentation from British archives and historical monographs.
The author elucidates four distinct phases in the transformation to mass political participation and identifies the forms and occasions for collective action that characterized and dominated each. He provides rich descriptions not only of a wide variety of popular protests but also of such influential figures as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Daniel O'Connell. This engaging study presents a vivid picture of the British populace during a pivotal era.

In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience?
Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.

Author Alice Echols wrote in the introduction to this 1989 book, “It has been over twenty years since the emergence of the women’s liberation movement and yet, with the exception of Sara Evans’s ground-breaking monograph Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left, there has been no book-length scholarly study of the movement… It is my hope that this study will begin to fill the lacuna in the literature. This book analyzes the trajectory of the radical feminist movement from its beleaguered beginnings in 1967, through its ascendancy as the dominant tendency within the movement, to its decline and supplanting by cultural feminism in the mid-‘70s. This is not a comprehensive history of the contemporary women’s movement… Rather, this is a thorough history of one wing of the women’s movement.” (Pg. 5-6)
Later, she adds, “My task is to make the ‘60s, or at least the women’s rebellion of that era, more comprehensible. It is also my hope that by excavating the history of radical feminism I can demonstrate that radical feminism was fare more varied and fluid, not to mention more radical, than what is generally thought of as radical feminism today… it is my hope that by illuminating the reasons for the movement’s decline, this study will help to stimulate discussion on how the movement might be revitalized.” (Pg. 19)
She defines ‘radical feminists’ as those “who opposed the subordination of women’s liberation to the left and for whom male supremacy was not a mere epiphenomenon of capitalism… Radical feminism rejected both the politico position that socialist revolution would bring about women’s liberation and the liberal feminist solution of integrating women into the public sphere. Radical feminists argued that women constituted a sex-class, that relations between women and men needed to be recast in political terms, and that gender rather than class was the primary contradiction… And in defying the cultural injunction against female self-assertion and subjectivity, radical feminists ‘dared to be bad.’” (Pg. 3-4)
She laments, “by the early ‘70s radical feminism began to flounder, and after 1975 it was eclipsed by cultural feminists… With the rise of cultural feminism the movement turned its attention away from opposing male supremacy to creating a female counterculture… where ‘male’ values would be exorcised and ‘female’ values nurtured… And by 1975 radical feminism virtually ceased to exist as a movement… activism became largely the province of liberal feminists.” (Pg. 4-5)
She notes, ‘Radical women agreed that they needed to organize separately from men, but they disagreed over the nature and purpose of the separation. Indeed, was it a separation or a divorce that they wanted? … Should women’s groups focus exclusively on women’s issues, or should they commit themselves to struggling against the war and racism as well?... And, perhaps most troublesome of all, what or who was the enemy? From the beginning radical women debated these questions, often hotly.” (Pg. 51)
She acknowledges, “it is fair to say that most early women’s liberationists were college-educated women in their mid-to-late twenties who grew up in middle class families… most of these women were unable to parlay their college degrees into good-paying jobs.” (Pg. 65) She adds, “These groups were composed of women whose backgrounds were very similar and who were denizens of a Movement subculture which was in some respects as exclusionary as a sorority… the cliquishness of these groups impeded the acculturation of new women outside the left and promoted parochialism within the movement.” (Pg. 72)
Of the famous 1968 protest at the Miss America pageant, she points out, “Some women… tossed ‘instruments of torture to women’---high-heeled shoes, bras, girdles… into a ‘Freedom Trash Can’ … Although the protesters had hoped to turn the contents of the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ they were prohibited from doing so by the city… The women decided to comply with the city order because they envisioned the protest as a ‘zap action’ to raise the public’s consciousness about beauty contests rather than as an opportunity to do battle with the police… The protesters were also anxious to avoid arrests because the group lacked the resources to cover legal expenses… But at least one of the organizers of the protest leaked word of the bra-burning to the press to stimulate media interest in the action. Those feminists who sanctimoniously disavowed bra-burning as a media fabrication were wither misinformed or disingenuous.” (Pg. 93-94)
She observes, “From the beginning, the women’s liberation movement was internally fractured. In fact, it is virtually impossible to understand radical feminism without referring to the movement’s divided beginnings. Radical feminism was, in part, a response to the anti-feminism of the left and the reluctant feminism of the politicos. Radical feminists’ tendency to privilege gender over race and class, and to treat women as a homogenized unity, was in large measure a reaction to the left’s dismissal of gender as a ‘secondary contradiction.’ Moreover, the politico-feminist schism was so debilitating that is seemed to confirm radical feminists’ suspicions that difference and sisterhood were mutually exclusive.” (Pg. 101)
She points out, “black women who identified with black power were typically unsympathetic to women’s liberation. Even black women who spoke out against sexism felt that racism was by far the more pressing issue. Ironically, the rise of black power, so important in fostering feminist consciousness among white women, had very different consequences for black women. Black power, as it was articulated by black men, involved laying claim to masculine privileges denied them by white supremacist society. Within the black liberation movement black women were expected to ‘step back into a domestic, submissive role’ so that black men could freely exercise their masculine prerogatives.” (Pg. 106)
Of one group, she notes, “‘The Feminists’ were the first of many radical feminist groups to interpret ‘the personal is political’ prescriptively. For ‘The Feminists,’ one’s personal life was a reflection of one’s politics, a barometer of one’s radicalism and commitment to feminism. While ‘The Feminists’ proscribed heterosexual relationships rather than heterosexual sex, it was just a matter of time before the standard became even narrower and more confining. Indeed, ‘The Feminists’ advocacy of separatism established the theoretical foundation for lesbian separatism.” (Pg. 185)
Of the ending of the New York Radical Feminists group [aka “Stanton-Anthony”], she recounts, “The dissolution of Stanton-Anthony marked the end of [Shulamith] Firestone’s and [Anne] Koedt’s involvement with the organized movement. Reportedly they felt they had been deposed because their analysis was too radical. By the time Firestone’s book ] was published in October 1970, she had already dropped out of the movement. Koedt co-edited ‘Notes from the Third Year’ and the aboveground anthology Radical Feminism, which was published in 1973, but she kept her distance from the movement… [Susan] Brownmiller’s analysis suggests that Koedt and Firestone sought personal control. But it seems just as likely that they wanted the power to define the movement and prevent its attenuation. However, by 1970, this was a power the founders were rapidly losing.” (Pg. 195)
She continues, “by 1973, the radical feminist movement was actually in decline. The groups responsible for making the important theoretical breakthroughs were either dead or moribund… A number of movement pioneers had withdrawn from the movement, often… as a result of being attacked as ‘elitist,’ ‘middle class,’ or ‘unsisterly.’ … Then there were the divisive struggles over class, elitism, and sexual preference which started to consume the movement in 1970… The radical feminist wing of the movement became so absorbed in its own internal struggles that it sometimes found it difficult to look outside itself, to focus on the larger problem of male supremacy.” (Pg. 198)
Of another important radical group, she comments, “Estranged from the larger feminist community, The Furies grew increasingly isolated an insular. In March 1972, the group challenged [founder Rita Mae] Brown on her imperious style. Brown considered it a purge, while others claim Brown left before she could be expelled. [Charlotte] Bunch contends that Brown’s departure set in motion a ‘dynamic of backbiting and internal fighting,’ which Bunch felt would continue unabated unless the group disbanded. The Furies dissolved in April 1972, a month after Brown’s departure and only a year after its founding… it is ironic that The Furies, who did so much to advance the movement’s understanding of women’s differences, were completely unable to tolerate differences among themselves.” (Pg. 238)
She states, “[The Redstockings] insinuated that Ms. magazine was part of a CIA strategy to replace radical feminism with liberal feminism. Ms. magazine had been a source of irritation to many feminists since its inception. A number of feminist writers were especially angry when Ms. first formed and went outside the movement for its writers and editors… Generally, radical feminists complained of the magazine’s liberal orientation and attributed Ms.’s denatured feminism to the magazine’s commercial orientation.” (Pg. 266)
She concludes, “By 1975 it was too late for a revival of radical feminism. The economic, political, and cultural constriction of the ‘70s and the collapse of other oppositional movements in this period made radical activism of any sort difficult. Much of the movement’s original leadership had been ‘decapitated’ during the acrimonious struggles over class and elitism. And, of course, a number of the founders had retreated from the movement when lesbianism was advocated as the natural and logical consequence of feminism… radical feminism was derailed, at least in part, by its own theoretical limitations… NOW was a major beneficiary of radical feminism’s disintegration as first the schisms and later the countercultural focus encouraged some radical feminists to join an organization which they had initially disparaged… But liberal feminism had floundered without the benefit of a vocal radical feminist movement… That the radical feminist movement was unable to sustain itself is hardly remarkable. This is, after all, the fate of all social change movements.” (Pg. 284-285)
This is a highly informative, very detailed summary of a crucial period in the development of the modern women’s movement; and Echols doesn’t shy away from discussing frankly the “problems” the movement had (“Third Wavers,” take note!). This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying the early “radical” days of the women’s movement.

Work and Revolution in France is particularly appropriate for students of French history interested in the crucial revolutions that took place in 1789, 1830, and 1848. Sewell has reconstructed the artisans' world from the corporate communities of the old regime, through the revolutions in 1789 and 1830, to the socialist experiments of 1848. Research has revealed that the most important class struggles took place in craft workshops, not in 'dark satanic mills'. In the 1830s and 1840s, workers combined the collectivism of the corporate guild tradition with the egalitarianism of the revolutionary tradition, producing a distinct artisan form of socialism and class consciousness that climaxed in the Parisian Revolution of 1848. The book follows artisans into their everyday experience of work, fellowship, and struggles and places their history in the context of wider political, economic, and social developments. Sewell analyzes the 'language of labor' in the broadest sense, dealing not only with what the workers and others wrote and said about labour but with the whole range of institutional conventions, economic practices, social struggles, ritual gestures, customs, and actions that gave the workers' world a comprehensive shape.

What makes some communes work, while others fail? Why is it so difficult to put utopian ideals into practice? Rosabeth Kanter offers a unique analysis of the nature and process of enduring commitment, basing her theory of commitment mechanisms on exhaustive research of nineteenth-century utopias, sharpened by first-hand knowledge of a variety of contemporary groups. The book moves in a lively fashion from Oneida, Brook Farm, and the Shakers to present-day phenomena such as rural communes and Synanon.

Over the past thirty-five years the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has become famous globally for its success in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers. The movement has also linked education reform to its vision for agrarian reform by developing pedagogical practices for schools that foster activism, direct democracy, and collective forms of work.
In Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau explores how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational program in public schools and universities, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. Contrary to the belief that movements cannot engage the state without demobilizing, Tarlau shows how educational institutions can help movements recruit new activists, diversify their membership, increase technical knowledge, and garner political power. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic field work, Tarlau documents how the MST operates in different regions working at times with or through the state, at other times outside it and despite it. She argues that activists are most effective using contentious co-governance, combining disruption and public protest with institutional pressure to defend and further their goals.
Through an examination of the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST's educational struggle, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land offers insights into the ways education can promote social change, the interactions between social movements and states, and the barriers and possibilities for similar reforms in democratic contexts throughout the world.

Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties offers a distinctive, coherent account of social processes and individuals' connections to their larger social and political worlds. It is novel in demonstrating the connections between inequality and de-democratization, between identities and social inequality, and between citizenship and identities. The book treats interpersonal transactions as the basic elements of larger social processes. Tilly shows how personal interactions compound into identities, create and transform social boundaries, and accumulate into durable social ties. He also shows how individual and group dispositions result from interpersonal transactions. Resisting the focus on deliberated individual action, the book repeatedly gives attention to incremental effects, indirect effects, environmental effects, feedback, mistakes, repairs, and unanticipated consequences. Social life is complicated. But, the book shows, it becomes comprehensible once you know how to look at it.

The Politics of Mass Society explores the social conditions necessary for democracy and the vulnerabilities of large scale society to totalitarian systems. Mass movements mobilize people who are alienated from the social system, who do not believe in the legitimacy of the established order, and who are therefore ready to engage in efforts to destroy. Contrary to the psychological approach prevalent in European doctrines of mass movements, Kornhauser persuasively argues that social order is the critical factor. The greatest number of people available to mass movements are located in those segments of society that have the fewest ties to social order. The book draws on a wide range of materials-from classical political theory contemporary sociological analysis, historical and intuitional studies, public opinion surveys, and other published and unpublished data. Kornhauser selected political phenomena in organizations, communities, classes, and whole societies. He examined support for communism and fascism in a variety of countries in relation to rates of urbanization and industrialization, employment, and suicide and homicide among other phenomena. In his new introduction, Irving Louis Horowitz identifies Kornhauser's book as a seminal work of the great tradition in political sociology in the mid-twentieth century. Kornhauser points out that modern democratic systems possess a distinct vulnerability to mass movements. He spells out and identifies factors that tend to increase or decrease this vulnerability-not least the health and strength of elites. In this way, the book reveals new clues to the origins and nature of mass political movements. The Politics of Mass Society remains the most complete analytical account of the sociological approach to mass society in advanced industrial societies.

In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson looks at an important phenomenon of the sixties—the resurgence of community activism—and explains its sources, challenges, and failure. Katznelson argues that the American working class perceives workplace politics and community politics as separate and distinct spheres, a perception that defeats attempts to address grievances or raise demands that break the rules of local politics or of bread-and-butter unionism. He supports his thesis with an absorbing case study of Washington Heights-Inwood, a multiethnic working-class community in Manhattan.