History Of Social Movements Research Articles

Heller & Originalism's Dead Hand - In Theory and in Practice

This essay considers whether and how originalism promotes the Constitution's democratic legitimacy, in theory and in practice. In the late twentieth century, critics of the Warren and Burger courts argued that judicial review lacks democratic authority when judges depart from the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution. Originalism's critics objected that giving past generations this kind of control over the living would vitiate the Constitution's democratic authority. Initially, originalism's theorists belittled this objection to dead hand control; recently, originalists have developed varied and sophisticated responses to it. But these responses generally tend to qualify originalism's claims to democratic legitimacy or to weaken the originalist character of the interpretive method they set out to defend. The dead hand objection may trouble originalism in theory, but it poses far less of a problem in practice. To show why, the essay examines originalist interpretation in Heller v. District of Columbia. While Heller purports to enforce the decisions of eighteenth-century Americans, this essay identifies several forms of internal evidence that suggest the opinion is enforcing the beliefs of Americans living long after the Constitution's ratification. This evidence, considered alone or with the social movement history of Heller that I have elsewhere examined, shows how originalism can enforce the constitutional convictions of living Americans. In practice, originalism appears to be a species of popular constitutionalism.If originalism does not enforce dead hand control, what role might constitutional history play in constitutional interpretation? To explore this question, I compare the role of historical argument in Heller and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1-a recent equal protection decision in which conservative and liberal justices fought over Brown and the post-ratification history of the Fourteenth Amendment. This analysis suggests that collective memory of past lawmaking constrains debate as it enables Americans of very different normative views to make authoritative claims about who we are and what we owe one another.

Making Sense of Feminist Theology Today

AbstractFeminist theology today denotes a widening field of scholarship that shares historic, pragmatic concerns about gender justice in diverse cultural and racial contexts, but that increasingly differs in approach. In this essay, we discuss internal, creative challenges surfacing in (largely Christian) feminist theologies and review the historical social movements that have shaped them up to the present. Theologians who use race, queer, and postcolonial theory to assert the co‐constituting dynamics of gender with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion are muddying the waters of older feminisms that focused exclusively on gender, rendering the future of feminist theologies more ambiguous, broad‐reaching, and fluid.

Historical Social Movements, Ecological Crisis and ‘Other’ World Views

Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes have suggested that social movements of protest tend to cluster during periods of economic downturns. With this in mind, can we examine world history over the long-term to enable us to provide a more insightful understanding of the transformative potential of social movements during times of socioeconomic, ecological and political disruptions as Frank and Fuentes suggested over a decade ago? This article examines the rise of two social movements that have emerged during different periods of world history when the world system was/is in crisis: Christian monasticism and Bioregionalism. Besides viewing Christian monasticism as a religious movement that arose in reaction to the turbulent conditions towards the end of the Roman Empire, I want to argue that Christian monasticism can also be conceived as a social institution formed in reaction to the excessive consumption, economic exploitation and ecological crisis that occurred prior to and during the Dark Ages of Antiquity. Almost 1,700 years later, our current era of socioeconomic, political and ecological crises has also sparked movements expounding alternative world-views and lifestyle options. One such anti-systemic movement is Bioregionalism which is a direct contrast to our contemporary world-view that underscores the themes of globalization, technologization of life and hyper consumption. Therefore, along a similar vein to early Christian monasticism's reaction to institutionalized religion then, Bioregionalism as a life-practice also plays a similar role in the contemporary crisis era. Both of these social movements can be considered as part of the family of social movements that have occurred in world history that Frank and Fuentes (1989, 1990) have written about in the late 20th century.

Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change

This article asks how questions from social history can be more closely integrated into world history and vice versa. It highlights cases in which this has already happened and suggests avenues for further development. It divides social history into three different types: history of daily life, history of social organization, and history of social movements and deliberate attempts to induce social change, whether from the top down or from the bottom up. The last kind of social history is particularly difficult to frame as world history, partly because we lack terms for collective agents that are agreed to be useful across cultural lines. But developing such a vocabulary remains necessary. The last section of the article examines how social histories of empire offer some approaches that are promising for this purpose.

Review Essay: Thinking about rights: A Review of Disability Rights

Disability Studies is threatened by centrifugal forces that may pull it apart at the seams. As paradoxical as this may sound, the solution to maintaining Disability Studies as an independent and, indeed, coherent academic discipline is to re-contextualize Disability Studies within the broader trends in contemporary academe, the history of social movements in the USA, and the struggle for universal enfranchisement. To illustrate this point, I will: Draw connections between my own experiences with disabilities as a person, a student, an educator, and now a newcomer to Disability Studies; make comparisons to the now defunct Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine; and, I will critique some presentations given at two recent Disability Studies conferences hosted by The Ohio State University (OSU). My purpose, however, is not to challenge these presenters' scholarship; rather, it is to illustrate the centrifugal forces that I see already at work within Disability Studies.

Apologia for Comparative Culture: A Neophyte's Reflections on the Sixth Annual Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability Conference at OSU

Disability Studies is threatened by centrifugal forces that may pull it apart at the seams. As paradoxical as this may sound, the solution to maintaining Disability Studies as an independent and, indeed, coherent academic discipline is to re-contextualize Disability Studies within the broader trends in contemporary academe, the history of social movements in the USA, and the struggle for universal enfranchisement. To illustrate this point, I will: Draw connections between my own experiences with disabilities as a person, a student, an educator, and now a newcomer to Disability Studies; make comparisons to the now defunct Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine; and, I will critique some presentations given at two recent Disability Studies conferences hosted by The Ohio State University (OSU). My purpose, however, is not to challenge these presenters' scholarship; rather, it is to illustrate the centrifugal forces that I see already at work within Disability Studies.

Towards a Historical Reassessment of 'Citizens' Movements' and 'Residents' Movements' in 1960s-70s Era

In this paper, from the vantage point of the history of social movements, we reassess the historical meanings of shimin undo [citizens' movements] and jumin undo [residents' movements], thereby making it clear that the movements contain some significant suggestions for recent debates on “civil society.” In discussing the issues, we criticize the escalatory developmental understandings of social movement history which extremely oversimplifies the socio-political conditions and periodization. These understandings are responsible for fatal biases in ways of discussing 'publicness' and 'civil society, .We will make the point, then, that there are important breakthroughsand interruptions in the context of understanding social movement history and also that productive outcomes of debates on movement subjects in the 1960s-70s have not yet been sufficiently evaluated. Concerning this point, the level of controversies on 'publicness' would be reassessed. By using the keyword “local egoism, ” we insist that there are some epistemological barriers in understanding the relevant contexts of social movement history from the 1970s on.

Street wise provocations: the 'Global Justice' Movement's take on sustainable development

Doran reclaims 'sustainable development' for the history of social movements and the contemporary global justice movement. Opposition to the unacceptable facets of globalisation is situated within histories of struggle against all forms of domination and enclosure, both economic and symbolic. The Global Justice Movement's approach to sustainable development is contrasted with the technocratic discourse that prevails at the United Nations. For Doran, the Movement is attuned to dimensions of sustainable development that remain invisible to the eye (or the fame) of the seasoned diplomat and many of the experts who make up the epistemic communities who construct the problematic of sustainable development during multilateral negotiations, and who remain seasled off in their very own discursive biomes.

After New Social Movements

This article combines an historical and a sociological approach. Historically, it distinguishes three main moments in the history of social movements since the 1960s. After working-class movements, which corresponded to industrial societies, came the so-called new social movements, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and these were followed by a third generation of actors deserving a new denomination as alter-globalization activists. Sociologically, this articles analyses the differences between these three figures from the point of view of the identity of the actors, of their relationship to culture, to their adversary, to their subjectivity, or to their framework for action (national or otherwise). The article introduces the concept of anti-movement, which is illustrated with the contemporary cases of ‘global’ anti-movements such as global terrorism or global anti-Semitism.

Whither history? Encounters with historicism, postmodernism, postcolonialism

Postmodernist questioning of historians' claims to historical truth has created a sense of crisis in historical consciousness. The essay argues that the crisis is not a crisis in the writing of history, as most historians still continue with business as usual, but a crisis in the cultural meaning of history. While this crisis has been associated with the so-called “linguistic turn” which was to result in a paradigm shift in historiography in the 1970s, it has other important dimensions; including Third World questionings of EuroAmerican understandings of the past and, perhaps even more importantly, the intrusion into the representations of the past of the new media. The essay argues that new kinds of history that have appeared since the 1970s from women's history to the history of social movements to “microhistory” have themselves contributed to the complication of our understanding of the past, and what might be called postmodernity's histories. It suggests that historians have always assumed the tentativeness and contingency of claims to historical truth, and argues against a premature panic concerning the status of history. Constructivism is here to stay, but that does not necessarily point to the disappearance of history, only to more complicated ways of grasping the past.

Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics

In Critical Moves Randy Martin sets in motion an inquiry into the relationship between dance, politics, and cultural theory. Drawing on his own experiences as a dancer as well as his observations as a cultural critic and social theorist, Martin illustrates how the study and practice of dance can reanimate arrested prospects for progressive politics and social change. From experimental and concert dance to more popular expressions, Martin engages a range of performances and demonstrates how a critical reflection on dance helps promote fluency in the language of mobilisation that political theory alludes to yet rarely speaks. He explores how Bill T. Jones' Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land defies attempts to separate social ideas from aesthetic concerns and celebrates multiculturalism in the face of a singular national culture; he studies the choreography in rapper Ice Cube's video Wicked, which confronts radicalised depictions of violent crime; and he discusses how racial difference is negotiated by analysing a hip hop aerobics class in a non-black environment. Revealing how mastery of modern dance technique teaches an individual body to express cultural difference and display its intrinsic diversity, Critical Moves concludes with a reflection on the contribution dance studies can make to other fields within cultural studies and social sciences. As such it becomes an occasion to rethink the terms of history and agency, multiculturalism and nationalism, identity and political economy. This book will appeal not only to scholars and practitioners of dance, but also to a wide cross-section of people concerned with the study of political theory and the history of social movements.

Cycles of Collective Action: Between Moments of Madness and the Repertoire of Contention

Moments of madness—when “all is possible”—recur persistently in the history of social movements. In such turbulent points of history, writes Aristide Zolberg, “the wall between the instrumental and the expressive collapses.” “Politics bursts its bounds to invade all of life” and “political animals somehow transcend their fate” (1972: 183). Such moments are unsettling and often leave even participants disillusioned—not to mention elites and political authorities. But they may be “necessary for the political transformation of societies,” writes Zolberg, for they are the source of the new actors, the audiences and the force to break through the crust of convention (1972: 206). In Kafka’s parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

Technology, the Economy, and Society: The American Experience ed. by Joel Colton, Stuart Bruchey

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1049 in capturing the uncertainties, contingencies, and misconceptions that invariably accompany the process of technological change. Eda Kranakis Dr. Kranakis is a member of the Department of Science Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. She has written articles on French and American technology in the 19th century. She was awarded the Usher Prize by the Society for the History of Technology for her 1982 T&C article, “The French Connection: Giffard's Injector and the Nature of Heat.” Technology, the Economy, and Society: The American Experience. Edited by Joel Colton and Stuart Bruchey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 287; notes. $35.00. Technology, the Economy, and Society is a collection of eleven essays that originated in a 1980 decision by the Paris-based International Com­ mission on the History of Social Movements and Social Structures (an affiliate of the International Congress of Historical Sciences) “to explore globally the impact of technological innovation on changes in society from the eighteenth century to the present” (p. xi). Various leading scholars responded to the call in more than twenty-five countries. Joel Colton and Stuart Bruchey served as directors of the American “research team,” presenting at meetings in Salerno and Stuttgart a synthesis of the papers written by the U.S. group. “So well received” was this that they ’’were encouraged to publish the essays by the American scholars in a separate volume” (p. xii). From those Olympian origins sprang the present volume. The themes articulated by the editors emphasize the connections between economic and technical change. Defining technology as “the way in which we transform and use energy,” Colton and Bruchey see technology in terms of both hardware and the organization or management of human effort. In their view, technology affects society only when it passes through the transforming medium of the econ­ omy. “Only when absorbed into the economy,” they declare, “does technological change increase output, raise income, and have an important impact in numerous ways on the structural transformation of society” (p. 1). This view may seem a bit narrow to some readers of Technology and Culture. It is not surprising, however, given the ties of many of the contributors to one variant or another of economic history: Stuart Bruchey, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Harold G. Vatter, Harry N. Scheiber, Melvyn Dubofsky, and Morton Rothstein are among the distinguished contributors. When such intellectual Olympic teams gather in exotic locations to contemplate what is known of large questions, the results customarily 1050 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE are restatements of the conventional wisdom. So it is here. Therefore, the most interesting portions of the book, at least to a reviewer familiar with many of the arguments tying technical to economic change, are those that fit the editors’ thesis less well. These are the essays that assess the interactions between technology and urban form (by Kenneth T. Jackson), politics (by David C. Hammack), education (by Geraldine Clifford), and religion (by Martin E. Marty). When the power of the marketplace is tempered by or mixed with other forces, the historical patterns are more ambiguous, less one-sided. This is especially dear in Derk Bruins’s interesting and innovative study of the effect of technological change on social structure in the U.S. Navy. There the power of tradition and politics often resisted the sort of technical improvements that would have succeeded much more rapidly in the economy. These essays make it plain that technological change, operating through the economic system, is now generally acknowledged to have been the most important source of changes in society since the 18th century. To be sure, there are sectors where its influence has been slowed or muted, particularly when noneconomic motivations have played a significant role. Nevertheless, its fundamental dominance is clear. And so is our ambivalence about this state of affairs. When we care most about material achievement, we celebrate technology’s triumph. When we concern ourselves with other values, however, we fear the power of technology, and we doubt our ability to control or even to influence its course. In the end the question, as Martin Marty concludes, is “not how to resist or worship technology but how to...

An approach to group communication in historical social movements: Group communication in Maoist insurgent mobilization

Rhetorical critics have been called to investigate movements’ group communication. However, the scarcity of verbatim transcripts of movements’ group interactions precludes close analysis of particular interactions. Rather than abandon investigation of movements’ group communication completely, rhetorical critics can examine movements’ selection and general strategies of group communication. Such an approach to investigating the group communication of Maoist insurgent mobilizers reveals new information about the rhetoric of movements.

An approach to dyadic communication in historical social movements: Dyadic communication in Maoist insurgent mobilization

The paucity of word‐by‐word transcriptions of movements' dyadic interactions need not completely preclude investigation of historical movements’ dyadic communication. Scholars can study the constraints that urged a movement to select dyadic communication and the general strategies used in movement dyads. Three kinds of data can be used to reconstruct general strategies used in dyads: (1) the theoretical writings of movement leaders that describe particular rhetorical strategies for use in dyads, (2) messages from movement leaders to members directing the adoption of those strategies, and (3) eyewitness accounts of a movement's dyadic activities. The use of this approach to examine the selection and strategies of dyadic communication in Maoist insurgent mobilization demonstrates that the approach can generate worthwhile results.

Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: the Quest for the New Moral World.

Robert Owen and the Owenites were associated with the rise of an early industrial society in Britain and with the development of an agricultural, frontier society in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. This book, originally published in 1969, was the first to use both British and American source material, and tells the story of Robert Owen and the movement associated with his name, from the standpoint of comparative social and intellectual history. The book directs new light on Owenism, and at the same time illuminates general problems of the history of social movements and social change in modern societies.

Theoretical History of Social Movement in the Case of American Sociology

We can distinguish three theoretical antecedents of social movement in American sociology; the theory of mass society; the psychological theory of movement, and the theory of collective behavior.The theory of mass society uniformly presumes a particular socio-political situation called mass society or state of the mass, and sorts out a specific form of social movement. Then it relates them causally, with the concept of the collapse of pluralistic structure as an explaining principle. We can find two shortcomings in this movement theory. First, as pointed out by Mr. Gusfield, it considers only the connection between the mass situation and extremist movement. It neglects another possible combination, that is, the functional aspect which mass society situations may assume. In the second place, the underlying belief of its movement theory which traces an ultimate cause of the rise of totalitarian movements to the collapse of intermediate social organization, is that the pluralistic structure is the necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of democratic society. This optimistic belief not onyl makes the theorists of mass society misconceive the present situation in the U. S. A., but also averts their attention from the fact that there are some factors within pluralistic structure which make for extremist mass movements.The movement theory of social psychological lienage generally gives priority to investigating the psychological mechanism of participating behavior, and depends on functionalism as a method. Then it applies the concept of frustration as an explaining principle. Inquiring participation from the functional point of view leads to presupposing the existence of movement or, at least, its core group as an operating agent. So the participants are reduced to the place of the manipulated. The tendency to seek in “frustration” a final motive results in conceiving the participant's behaviour as always irrational. For it has become common sense in psychology since the 1930s to think that frustration is apt to produce some irrational behaviour like aggression or regression. What this theoretical approach shows us is the subordinate behaviour and passive mechanism of people who are dominated, curbed, and driven away. It overlooks the positive behaviour and mechanism of autonomous people who participate voluntarily, take an active part, restrain leaders, and influence the direction of movement.There are three characteristics in the theoretical apprach of collective behavior. (a) It attaches importance to explaining the character and type of each kind of collective behaviour, and throwing light on the relationship between them. Therefore, in this case, the theory of social movement forms only part of a more inclusive theoretical system which equals collective behaviour theory. This fact, together with the abstractness of the theory itself, makes its contents comparatively superficial. (b) It treats the relationship between social movement and other kinds of collective behaviour not as the constructive or causal relation, but as the relation of difference in the degree of organization or institutionalization, and then conceives such a grading order as follows; elementary collective behaviour: social movements: institutional behaviour. This tends to avert the eyes of the writers from the important roles of organizational agents like trade unions or political parties which often become integrating core groups in movements. (c) The movement theory of this lineage is the general theory, the content of which consists of definition, construction of ideal types, and explanation in terms of diagrams. Although he did not direct his criticism to those American theorists we have dealt with, Mr. Shigeru Yamate who criticized several writers in this country who had developed general theories of this kind. He said that the orientation of general theory was necessarily contradictory to practical orientation,

The Place of Anarchism in the History of Political Thought

Anarchism is one of those concepts about which there generally is deep ignorance or profound misunderstanding.* “In the popular mind,” says Bertrand Russell, “an Anarchist is a person who throws bombs and commits other outrages, either because he is more or less insane, or because he uses the pretencse of extreme political opinions as a cloak for criminal proclivities.” Yet in the history of political thought, as well as in the history of social movements, anarchism has played a role which cannot be overlooked.

Unknown Chapters in the History of “Vpered”

The period 1870–1880 represents an important phase in the history of social movements in Russia. Within that decade ideas and groups merged whose influence can be discerned in the events that preceded and those that followed the upheaval of 1917.Among those groups one of the more interesting was the so-called Lavrists, or vperedovtzy, named after the publication “Vpered” (Forward), founded and edited by Peter Lavrov (1823–1900) and first published in Zurich, Switzerland, where volumes I and II were brought out in 1873 And 1874 respectively, and then in London, where volumes III, IV And V (the last-named not under the editorship of lavrov) as well as a bimonthly edition of “Vpered” were published during 1874–1877. In addition, the printing office of “Vpered” also produced several books and pamphlets.

The Bureaucrat and the Enthusiast: an Exploration of the Leadership of Social Movements

but pessimistic about man in the concrete, the bureaucrat takes the world as he finds it judges men as men, rather than as Man, whom he has never met probably never worried about. Second, the bureaucrat's agnosticism nominalism his rejection of the enthusiast's true faith abstract man -combine to make him profoundly suspicious of short-cuts; he is likely to be satisfied with piecemeal progress, scorning as fatuous unrealistic the or nothing approach which is so characteristic of the enthusiast. Half a loaf is 50 per cent better than no loaf, he submits, and tomorrow we can go after the other half. 43 To this end, he builds his cadres, convinced that ideals are no stronger than the organization engaged in institutionalizing them, that organized pressure, not doctrinal purity, is the key to success. Indeed, it is this dedication to technique, to means, which is the bureaucrat's supreme gift to a movement. It is he who builds the instruments of social action, the structural machinery necessary to channel, concretize, implement the group's aspirations, it is he who puts organizational flesh on the bones of theory. Denied the vision of the enthusiast, sneered at by the high-flying intellectual, he spends his life in the quagmire of detail, in so doing renders a unique invaluable service to his cause. While the enthusiast is out exploring the nature of the cosmos, the bureaucrat is repairing the mimeograph machine; yet, who will deny that a well-working mimeograph is as essential as correct doctrine to the effective operation of a social movement? Thus, both the bureaucrat the enthusiast supply a movement with vital components. Each by himself works badly; left alone, the bureaucrat simply goes in concentric circles around his precious organization, while the enthusiast rushes unbridled from one ideological orgasm to another. Consequently, a healthy vital social movement needs both, profits from their complementary assets. True, there will always be conflict, for to the bureaucrat, the enthusiast impatient, emotional, dogmatic, sanctimonious will always ipso facto remain a threat to the organization; to the enthusiast, the bureaucrat -timid, opportunistic, cynical, manipulative will always seem indifferent to, if not subversive of, the very ideals values from which the enthusiast draws his inspiration. But this conflict, inevitable as it is, is by no means a mere disruptive influence; on the contrary, it is a life-giving dialectical process in which each force counters the weaknesses of the other from which a movement can emerge with both dynamism stability. 43This conflict between the possibilists the impossibilists has been endemic in socialist movements; see Sturmthal, op. cit., passim; as well as in religious organizations; see Knox, op. cit., passim. 260 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.166 on Thu, 07 Jul 2016 04:24:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE BUREAUCRAT AND THE ENTHUSIAST The history of social movements is the history of this conflict. On the one hand, we find groups, such as the German Social Democratic party of 1900-1914, or the American Federation of Labor of 1900-1937, which have been stricken with bureaucratic paralysis have lost all power to move. On the other, we see those movements, such as the French Socialist party of our era, or the Puritan left of Cromwell's time, which disintegrated, or are in the process of disintegrating from the unchecked centrifugal force of enthusiasm triumphant. These are the extremes, for we can also find organizations which have moved on from generation to generation, expanding their horizons as they go, because they have attained a proper balance between these two forces. How this balance is struck is the subject of another analysis; suffice it here to conclude that the struggle between bureaucratism enthusiasm is part of a larger canvas on which similar battles, between security freedom, realism idealism, means ends, passion perspective, are waged, in which the outcome is likewise determined by the extent to which factors which are logically irreconcilable are reconciled.44 44 Passion perspective are the criteria submitted as central to political analysis by Max Weber in his Politics as a Vocation, in Gerth Mills, op. cit. 261 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.166 on Thu, 07 Jul 2016 04:24:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms