Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. By Francesca Polletta. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xii, 283 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-226-67448-7.)

Abstract

In my view one reason that American social movement theory has not advanced very far is that it has not penetrated into the real-life texture of movement building, partly because of the need for comparative analysis. In Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta has produced a remarkable work of historical sociology that manages to probe the inner depths of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the New Left, and early radical feminism (and, as bookends, early-twentieth-century labor and pacifist organizing and early-twenty-first-century global justice organizing) in a way that enhances her comparative framework—in part by stressing the continuities and interconnections of those key movements. She provides the fullest theoretical picture of participatory democracy, rich with nuance, ambiguity, and irony, that this reviewer has yet seen. In each case Polletta challenges familiar interpretations of the movements and then offers a more complex alternative narrative. Her main thesis is that the experiments with participatory democracy were not merely “expressive” or “prefigurative,” not just attempts to embody one's values in the present struggle, but efforts to be politically effective, to be instrumental, indeed, “strategic,” that were more successful than not (p. 7).