The Return of The Actor. Interaction Networks Among Social Actors During Periods of High Mobilization (Italy, 1919-1922)

Abstract

In a book titled Le retour de l'acteur (The Return of the Actor), French sociologist, Alain Touraine, writes that "the object of sociology is to explain the behavior of actors by the social relations in which they are placed … . It is the relation, not the actor, that we must study." In this paper, I follow up on the prescriptions of that view of sociology's mission. I illustrate the empirical results of statistical analyses based on network models of event data for the years of high working-class mobilization (1919-20, the "red years") and Fascist counter-mobilization (1921-22, the "black years") in Italy. The data were collected from a newspaper on the basis of a "semantic grammar," the simple linguistic structure centered around subjects, actions, objects and their attributes. That structure, which has at its core Touraine's concern with social actors and relations, allows investigators to go "from words to numbers." The analysis of those numbers confirms the historians' view of that period, the dramatic shift in patterns of collective behavior from the "red years" to the "black years." The analyses also provide some preliminary evidence on the explanatory power of various social science theories of mobilization and of Fascism. More broadly, the paper explores some of the epistemological consequences of relying on story grammars and network models as tools for the collection and analysis of narrative data.