Customer Reviews

Social Movements, 1768-2004

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Charles Tilly decided to write this book for 2 reasons: he needed something meaningful to do during his approximately 5 month treatment of chemotherapy and secondly, Sidney Tarrow decided to not write a social movement's history.

Tilly thinks that a historical narrative is required to understand social movements. "History...helps because it identifies significant changes in the operation of social movements...and...because it calls attention to the shifting political conditions that made social movements possible" (pg. 3). Philosophically, Tilly is a historicist who refuses to "search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics" this attempt, Tilly says, has "utterly failed" (pg. 9). Instead, a better "effort necessarily depends on turning away from 'laws' of social movements toward causal analogies and connections between distinctive aspects of social movements and other variables of politics" (pg. 10).

To that end, Tilly pursues 9 main arguments in this book:
(1) From their 18th century origins onward, social movements have proceeded not as solo performances, but as interactive campaigns. (2) Social movements combine 3 kinds of claims: program, identity, and standing. (3) The relative salience of program, identity, and standing claims varies significantly among social claimants within movements, and among phases of movements. (4) Democratization promotes the formation of social movements. (5) Social movements assert popular sovereignty (6) As compared with locally grounded forms of popular politics, social movements depend heavily on political entrepreneurs for their scale, durability, and effectiveness. (7) Once social movements establish themselves in 1 political setting, modeling, communication, and collaboration facilitate their adoption in other connected settings (8) The forms, personnel, and claims of social movements vary and evolve historically. (9) The social movement, as an invented institution, could disappear or mutate into some quite different form of politics (pgs. 12-14, 35-37,150-152).

Tilly pays very little attention to the history and power of ideas (this may annoy some Political Theorists). Also, according to Richard Hogan's book review in "Contemporary Sociology," proponents of the resource mobilization model and political process model of social movements will find Tilly's overall approach as a challenge and opposing view.

The book is fine, well researched and whatever, but I felt that his approach was far too simplistic. In addition, his theory of WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment) does not even take into consideration leadership or the use of violence. In addition, his writing style is incredibly annoying - he begins with a VERY specific, in-depth example and you do not even find out what he is talking about until five pages into each chapter - so instead of giving us an outline of his argument, we are left to search through pages to find his main points.

I was required to read this book for a Sociology class. The point of the class was to study "movements" for social change. This book is very difficult to read, and is an extremely dry presentation of the material. The author skips around a lot going from movement to movement within a particular century. The early centuries are presented poorly, lumping an entire centuries worth of history for a country into 2 pages. And with that, trying to make connections between the first part of the century and the last part of the century.
This book also seems to make it a point to avoid talking about the United States. The US is given a page and a half in a 40pg chapter (including a half page chart) lumping everything from the Abolishonist movement, the Dry movement, the Women's movement, and Nativist movement without really discussing any of it.
The author also rips the spine out of these "movements" by so narrowly defining the term social movements that any type of voilent retaliation of "mob" mentality becomes eliminated from discussion.
If you have to buy this book for class, do so, just be prepared. If you want to study this material on you're own, use this book as a last resort.