Collective Movements and Protest

Historical Background

Social and political transformation in the recent past and anticipated future led Americans and Europeans in the 19th century to reflect on collective movements and social protest. The social sciences emerged at this time, in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Industrialization and urbanization had brought increasing numbers of people together in new ways and added new tactics and modes of organization to long familiar forms of popular protest. The emergence of democratic politics impelled the educated and well-off to try to understand the thinking of the large numbers of their fellow citizens who were acquiring the right to vote, and to understand popular participation in transgressive as well as routinized forms of political action.

One very influential interpretation of popular collective action came to be known as the “collective behavior school” by virtue of its emphasis on the ways in which the actions of people in collectives seemed to defy what one would expect of a rational individual. This approach was developed by several important writers in late-19th-century France and continued by U.S. writers well into the 20th century. Writers in this tradition saw unusual fads, senseless panics, riotous crowds, and even social revolutions not merely as separate curiosities but as phenomena with common properties subject to common explanation. Some writers in this tradition stressed the ways in which the interactions of people could lead to a surrender of the capacity for realistic assessment of the consequences of action. In this line of thought, group members would uncritically imitate each other, buoyed up by group approval, with collectively irrational results. This variant made social psychological processes central to their explanations. The French writer Gabriel Tarde was one of the foundational figures with his stress on the sources and consequence of “contagion” as otherwise puzzling actions spread from one person to another. In the United States, a major figure was Herbert Blumer, who classified crowds into distinctive varieties and for whom crowd behavior went through a succession of lawlike stages.

A second approach was to stress the significance of social context. A very common argument in this tradition was that social transformations in the modern world, especially rural to urban migration, industrialization, and access to mass communications, broke down the traditions that had held people in their conservative grip. Consequently, they disrupted the networks of family and village that had socialized the young and monitored the actions of adults, and exposed people to an unfamiliar social world in the growing towns and the new [Page 104]routines of an industrializing order. As people moved from village to town, such processes both removed the inhibitions that had been built into rural life and exposed the urban newcomers to messages from manipulative elites that they were unable to evaluate. The combined result of such processes was dangerously irrational behavior. This argument about modernizing contexts as a source of collective irrationalism could be combined with the social psychological properties of collectives by contending that those shorn from the familiar and customary order were prone to seek companionship in mass organization and to listen to leaders promising simple solutions to the ills of modern life. Pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim influentially described modernizing change in Europe as a breakdown of customary norms and practices. The notion of breakdown seemed to several generations of social scientists to explain why contemporary Europe and North America fostered apparently irrational movements despite the advances of science and technology. In the 1960s, American sociologist Neil Smelser synthesized this line of thinking in his book Theory of Collective Behavior.

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