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Symbols, Positions, Objects: Toward a New Theory of Revolutions and Collective Action
Center for Studies of Social Change
New School for Social Research
October, 1995
I
In 1980, Jack Goldstone wrote an influential review essay entitled "Theories of Revolution: The Third Generation." 1 Goldstone noted that a "third generation" of theorists had emerged during the 1970s, one that placed special emphasis on the causal role of political and economic "structures" in social revolutions, especially states, transnational forces, and peasant communities. (By contrast, "second generation" theorists emphasized the role of diffuse "social strains" and their social-psychological consequences. 2 ) Today, it seems increasingly apparent that this third generation, despite its impressive theoretical contributions, has largely run its course. In fact, as John Foran has recently noted, "the first signs of a new school may be appearing on the intellectual horizon." 3 This new perspective, Foran and many other scholars agree, ought to focus much more attention on culture and ideology (as well as on agency) than did the third generation, but without losing sight of the important role played by political and economic structures.
However, while culture and agency have begun to receive much more sustained attention from scholars over the past decade or so, no generally accepted theoretical synthesis has yet emerged in the field of revolutions -- or, for that matter, in the closely related areas of social movements and collective action. 4 The very title of a recent collection of essays edited by Nikki Keddie reflects this impasse. 5 To be sure, there is a general consensus in that volume that the "third generation" represented a great leap forward, theoretically speaking; and yet there is also a sense that a new and more powerful perspective is overdue.
The sort of theoretical synthesis that many desire is more easily demanded than supplied. It is one thing, after all, to examine issues that previous scholars have slighted, yet quite another to elaborate a theoretical approach capable of integrating and relating a wide variety of potentially important elements in a systematic fashion. In our own view, moreover, such an approach ought to focus much more attention not only on culture and agency (which are often analytically conflated), but also on the social psychology and shared emotional lives of historical actors. The latter were issues of great import to scholars of the "second generation," but, unfortunately, were indiscriminately thrown out by the third along with the bathwater of irrationalism and psychological reductionism.
We shall sketch our own theoretical approach to revolutions and collective action in the second half of this essay. In the paragraphs that follow, however, we shall pause to examine more closely the debates that are currently unfolding among scholars in these fields -- debates that clearly and forcefully emerge in the Keddie volume. 6 Among the debaters may be found such distinguished scholars as Charles Tilly, Jack Goldstone, John Foran, Timur Kuran, Said Amir Arjomand, Andre Gunder Frank, Katherine Verdery, Daniel Chirot, and Fred Halliday. While we cannot possibly summarize here all of their contributions, it is worth pondering the fact that they very seldom agree with one another. That their findings should be so inconclusive, in fact, casts serious doubt upon the optimism of such commentators as Randall Collins, who suggests that while "there are contentions over points of emphasis; loose ends are left dangling; gaps and frontiers lie open . . . something very solid has been accomplished . . . at the core of a general theory." 7 The Keddie volume offers testimony to the fluidity and even incoherence of the field at present, while also pointing to ways of moving beyond its current shortcomings.
II
The red thread that winds through most of the contributions to the Keddie volume (if sometimes only implicitly) is the question of exactly how culture and agency figure into revolutions and collective action more generally. The attempt to answer this question, indeed, distinguishes the work of contemporary scholars from the more "structuralist" variants of "third generation" research. Most scholars now seem to agree that the theoretical perspective of third-generation analysts needs to be fundamentally reconfigured (and not just supplemented) through the integratioin of culture and agency as potentially autonomous explanatory forces. However, judging from recent scholarship, including the contributions to Debating Revolutions, it remains very far from clear how this might actually be done without lapsing into idealistic, voluntaristic, or simply ad hoc forms of explanation. 8
The problems raised by treating culture and agency seriously are evident (to take but one example) in the debate between Jack Goldstone and Nikki Keddie herself on whether revolutions can be successfully predicted. 9 Goldstone, whose ideas loom larger in the Keddie volume than those of any other scholar (albeit often as the target of criticism), presents a model that he believes can in fact successfully predict, at least in principle, any and all revolutions. Keddie, by contrast, argues that very few revolutions can be (or have been) successfully predicted, even if they can be explained in retrospect. (Keddie shares this sensibility, incidentally, with Tocqueville, who once observed that nothing was more inevitable and yet more completely unforeseen than the French Revolution.) A brief review of the Goldstone-Keddie exchange highlights some of the disagreements and difficulties surrounding efforts to produce a more cultural and agentic perspective on revolutions and collective action. As such, this exchange provides a bridge to our own views about what such a perspective might entail.
According to Goldstone's model, a revolution is imminent when and where a conjucture of three conditions occurs: (1) the state is in crisis; (2) elites are alienated from that state and in conflict with one another; and (3) a significant part of the population can be mobilized for protest. "When any of these factors is weak or absent," writes Goldstone, "revolution is unlikely; when all are present and strong, revolution is very likely." 10 The precise causes of these three preconditions will vary from case to case, a point that Charles Tilly emphasizes in his critique of Goldstone's earlier work. 11 But these preconditions themselves, according to Goldstone, can be detected and objectively measured by outside observers. In fact, Goldstone suggests that both the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 and the more recent upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which in each instance surprised virtually all area experts, could have been successfully predicted if only these experts had been equipped with his explanatory model.
We shall leave it to others to evaluate Goldstone's claims. (As we shall see, Keddie questions whether Goldstone's model could have predicted the Iranian Revolution.) However, two theoretical assumptions of Goldstone's approach are worth noting. First, when it comes to predicting (or explaining the origins of) revolutions, Goldstone suggests that culture and ideology simply do not matter very much. In an exchange with Jeffrey Wasserstrom that also appears in the Keddie volume, Goldstone reiterates his view -- first articulated in his book Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World 12 -- that while ideology is very important in determining whether a revolution will actually bring about a radically new social order, the causes of revolutions themselves are primarily "material." For Goldstone, in fact, it seems that an outside observer need know nothing about a society's cultural systems or extant political ideologies in order to predict whether or not a revolution will occur there. That observer need merely scour the local landscape for palpable signs of state crisis, elite conflict, and the possibility of popular protest.
The second of Goldstone's assumptions is closely tied to the first: human agency, in his model, does not figure in the origins of revolutions either. To be sure, collective action in the form of competing elites and rebellious masses does matter for Goldstone, but those who would predict revolutions (or explain their origins in retrospect) need not look for groups or individuals pursuing consciously chosen projects by means of consciously chosen strategies and tactics. Goldstone certainly does not deny that agency in this sense may somehow figure into elite conflict and popular protest; as we have seen, moreover, deliberately pursued ideological projects (or their absence) are extremely important for Goldstone in determining the outcomes of revolutions. But Goldstone's account of the origins of revolutions does not treat agency, any more than culture, as an analytically autonomous factor in its own right. Like most contemporary scholars, in fact, Goldstone seems to assume that projectivity, reflection, and judgment (whether individual or collective) are causally determined by, yet not also determinative of, structural contexts. Goldstone's model, in short, certainly begins to take culture and agency into account, but it does not do so in a fully satisfactory manner.
Nikki Keddie presents a rather more pessimistic view of the possibility of predicting revolutions. She suggests that most revolutions, and the Iranian Revolution in particular, have not been (and never will be) predicted for the simple reason that they are the largely unintentional results of the complex interactions of a large number of choices made by potentially numerous relevant actors over a sometimes lengthy period. As a result, if even one of these choices were different from the one actually made, a revolution might not occur. 13 As Keddie points out, this idea that seemingly unimportant events can have momentous consequences is similar to the "Butterfly Effect" of chaos theory -- the notion, that is, that a butterfly's slight disturbance of the air in Beijing might create a storm in New York the following month.
Keddie, to be sure, does not believe that revolutions are quite as random as this analogy might suggest. She notes, for example, that specialists have convincingly shown that several "structural" factors were especially important in bringing about the Iranian Revolution. Still, she argues that these factors were not sufficient; many or all of them, in fact, could or can be found in other societies -- including Middle Eastern and Islamic societies -- that have not had revolutions. For Keddie, the main additional developments that caused the Iranian Revolution were the transformation of Shi'i Islam into a revolutionary force and "the peculiarities of the shah and the way he ruled." 14 Keddie implies that the conjuncture of these latter elements with the sort of structural developments generally stressed by Iranian specialists (and by Goldstone's model) was simply too complex for anyone to have foreseen.
Keddie clearly brings very different assumptions about culture and agency to her thinking about revolutions than does Goldstone -- although she is not particularly explicit about these assumptions. To begin with, as her discussion of Shi'i Islam makes clear, Keddie obviously believes that transformations in cultural systems can be extremely important in causing revolutions. Those scholars who surveyed prerevolutionary Iran with an eye toward purely "material" factors, she notes, failed to predict the Iranian Revolution. And, as her discussion of the Shah's actions makes clear, Keddie also believes that human agency -- in this case, the decisions of a crucially positioned individual -- can be of utmost causal importance. More generally, her view of revolutions as the unintended and unpredictable outcomes of choices made by a variety of actors suggests that agency must be central to any systematic theoretical approach to revolutions. However, like many other scholars who are even more explicit about the need to examine culture and agency, Keddie is quite vague about what such a general approach might look like. There is a tendency in much recent scholarship, in fact, to treat culture and agency as residual "variables" that analysts should turn to after putatively more important "material factors" have been exhausted.
Ultimately, then, neither Goldstone nor Keddie provides us with an altogether convincing or coherent account of how culture and agency figure, along with other elements, in revolutions or other forms of collective action. Of course, this problem is hardly that of Goldstone and Keddie alone; it is, we reiterate, symptomatic of the current theoretical impasse in the fields of revolutions, social movements, and collective action. Like most contemporary scholars in these fields, moreover, Goldstone, Keddie, and the other contributors to Debating Revolutions essentially ignore the social psychology and shared emotional commitments of social actors; these factors, once central (and no doubt overly central) to the study of collective action, have been virtually ignored by the dominant contemporary paradigms, including recent "culturalist" studies. In our view, a more adequate theoretical perspective on revolutions and collective action must encompass economic and political (as well as civil) "structures"; cultural formations; social psychological structures; and various types of agency. We shall sketch just such a perspective in the section that follows.
III
Let us begin with a few disclaimers. First, the analytical framework that we present below is not intended as an explanation of any particular revolution or instance of collective action, much less of all such phenomena. Rather, it is a "sensitizing" framework, as Herbert Blumer might have described it -- a set of concepts and distinctions, systematically interconnected, that we believe will prove useful for the development of conjunctural causal explanations of enhanced analytical power and specificity. Second, it represents only an early, provisional attempt to elaborate such a framework; hence, we present our ideas in rather bold strokes, without extensive empirical illustration. And finally, this schema is necessarily complicated; most empirical research, however ambitious, will not be able to take into account -- nor need it take into account -- all of its many facets. In the concluding paragraphs, we shall return to this last, highly significant consideration.
Our analytical strategy rests upon a simple set of distinctions (see Figure 1). We argue that social action is embedded within, and simultaneously shaped by, a plurality of relational contexts or structural "environments"; we term these the cultural, societal, and social psychological contexts of action. 15 The ways in which actors act, in other words, are guided and channelled at one and the same time by all three of these transpersonal, structural contexts, which intersect and overlap with one another and yet are mutually autonomous; they encompass relatively enduring patterns or matrices of relationships, each of which operates according to its own partially independent logic. An adequate analysis of these ties and relationships, therefore, would require an examination of all three of their analytic dimensions as well as of the role of several types of agency in reproducing or transforming them.
Our contention is that these contexts can be reconceptualized in relational terms, that we can speak of all three using the same relational language. We proceed, in fact, from the notion that ties and transactions (including imaginary and fantasized relationships), not entities such as "the individual" or "society," should constitute the appropriate unit of sociological analysis. This idea was given classic exposition by the early American pragmatists, as well as by Ernst Cassirer in a neglected book entitled Substance and Function 16 , and has since informed the work of many thinkers, from Kurt Lewin ("field theory") and Norbert Elias ("figurational sociology") to social-network analysts in the present day.
What we term the cultural context of action, to begin with, encompasses those symbolic configurations or formations that constrain and enable action by structuring actors' normative commitments and their understandings of the world and of their own possibilities within it. Margaret Somers makes the useful point that the symbolic structures it encompasses can be seen as "conceptual networks," as structured webs, matrices, or configurations of relations among concepts "that are connected to each other by sharing the same conceptual web. The network concept," she adds, "directs us to look for the matrix of ties between [these] elements and to seek the geometric shape of the patterns they form." 17 Such formations are relatively autonomous from societal and social-psychological configurations. Moreover, a rich plurality of these structures is to be found in most actual fields of action. In other words, a cultural context or environment contains multiple cultural or symbolic networks (which actors are sometimes able to draw upon creatively -- and self-consciously to manipulate), just as a societal environment (see below) contains multiple, intersecting circles of interaction, in the Simmelian sense.
Cultural approaches to revolutions and collective action have become increasingly popular in recent years. Keddie's account of the Iranian Revolution, as noted above, emphasizes the causal role of Islam, as does Muriel Atkin's interesting essay on the collapse of the Soviet Union. 18 (See also the important book on Iran by Michael M.J. Fischer -- Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution 19 -- one of the earliest, yet still among the finest, attempts to incorporate cultural formations into "third generation" scholarship on revolutions.) A series of recent interpretations of the French Revolution further emphasizes the putatively central role of culture or ideology, including the work of François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Keith Michael Baker, and William Sewell, Jr. (In his critique of Goldstone's work, Jeffrey Wasserstrom -- a China specialist -- endorses Sewell's call to treat culture as "anonymous, collective, and . . . constitutive of social order." 20 ) Finally, the new "late-Durkheimian" turn in symbolic analysis holds great promise for research on revolutions and collective action. In a recent volume entitled Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies 21 , several analysts of collective action (including Lynn Hunt, Edward Tiryakian, and Eric Rothenbuhler) draw upon the Durkheimian notion that cultural structures encompass symbolic polarities dividing social and metaphysical reality into such antithetical categories as the just and the unjust, the pure and the polluted, the sacred and the profane. Such polarities, they maintain, allow coalitions of otherwise disparate social actors to be formed, help to explain the highly "religious" symbolisms in terms of which activists understand themselves and the societies they strive to transform, and, indeed, define for participants in revolutions and collective action the very stakes of the struggles in which they engage. 22
Although this recent "cultural turn" represents an important corrective to one-sided materialist and instrumentalist accounts, it also carries with it, from our own theoretical vantage point, several potential pitfalls. First, cultural explanations can be just as deterministic as the "structural" explanations that they are typically aimed against; actors often appear as "cultural dopes" in these accounts, simply acting out scripts -- or mouthing "discourses" -- that others have written for them. (This is an especially daunting problem for those who conceptualize culture as "anonymous.") Actors almost always have access to multiple cultural structures (as suggested above), as well as some agentic capacity to choose elements from among these that resonate with their own experiences or concerns. Second (and conversely), cultural explanations are sometimes misrepresented as agentic in nature; culture, that is to say, is equated with voluntarist action. Such explanations fail to see that cultural formations are themselves structural, albeit in a different way than (and with internal logics and organizations analytically autonomous from) other kinds of structural contexts that channel action. Finally, cultural explanations simply reflect a one-sided idealism when they fail to situate historical action in its societal and social-psychological as well as cultural contexts. 23
What we have termed the societal context of action encompasses those network patterns of social ties that comprise an institutional or interpersonal setting of action. It includes economic, state-centered, as well as civil and associational (including "public") networks of interaction. This is the familiar terrain of social-network analysis: the terrain, that is, of Ronald Burt, Mark Granovetter, and Harrison White on the economy, of Barry Wellman and Claude Fischer on urban communities, of Laumann and Knoke on the "organizational state," and (more metaphorically) of Robert Putnam on civil society and Margaret Somers on the public sphere. Each of the network structures comprising that terrain has also a symbolic reference or complement; this is one of the key insights from White's important book, Identity and Control. 24 In our framework, however, we separate societal networks analytically from those of culture, so as to avoid the pitfalls of what Margaret Archer terms "central conflation," the interweaving of conceptual and societal networks so tightly together that their "constituent components cannot be examined separately." 25 Conceptual networks and societal structures might well constrain and enable action in different, even incompatible ways. And yet if they are not disaggregated, culture will do all too little work in one's causal strategy, and its constraining and enabling influences will be left well outside the formal bounds of analysis. While in an empirical sense, cultural and societal structures do often "fit" together intimately, analytically they must be kept distinct.
The societal context of action is the relational environment most strongly emphasized in the writings of the third generation of theorists of revolutions and collective action: Jeffrey Paige, Charles Tilly, Ellen Kay Trimberger, and Theda Skocpol, among many others. Hence, classes and class conflict are the guiding concerns behind much Marxist scholarship in these areas. States as autonomous organizations with their own distinctive goals and interests (a Weberian perspective), and the complex interactions of states with economic actors and class structures (Tocqueville's contribution), are also key concerns for the new "state-centered" perspective. Both approaches have been widely criticized in the past for neglecting, or for treating reductively, both culture and agency (and, we might add, social psychology). In addition, however, we wish to suggest that analysts in the third generation have neglected yet another important domain of societal relationships that, metaphorically speaking, lies "between" the state and economy, namely, "civil society." Despite their many substantive contributions, they have left undertheorized a potentially important distinction (within the broad, overarching category of "society" itself) between economic class structures, on the one hand, and associational relations of civil life, on the other. Both have taken the basic dichotomy of "state versus society" as their theoretical point of departure, without disaggregating the concept of "society" itself into its distinct analytical components. 26
We propose, then, within the category of the societal context of action, a significant analytical role for "civil society" -- and especially for "publics" within civil society -- in revolutions and other forms of collective action. 27 Following Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, we define civil society as networks of societal interaction comprising "above all . . . the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication." 28 Publics we define as "open-ended networks of civil association and communication through which interactions take place between socially distant clusters of political participants; . . . not simply `spaces' of association where politics are discussed, as the common `public sphere' concept suggests, but . . . the relational networks and narrative media of people acting as citizens." 29
The concepts of publics (and, more broadly, of civil society) play four potential roles in analyses of revolutions and collective action. 30 First, in what we term the civil autonomy perspective, they lead us to explore the variable autonomy of actors in civil society vis-a-vis both the class structure and/or state organizations. Such actors may develop interests, identities, and (ultimately) lines of action that differ notably from (and potentially conflict with) those of social classes, special interest groups, and/or state officials. Most fundamentally, actors in civil society may pursue the expansion or revitalization of civil society itself, as opposed to the reorganization of state power and/or economic institutions. 31 Second, the civil (or public) capacity perspective inquires into the actual material or organizational capacity (or lack thereof) of "people acting as citizens" to implement successfully their distinctive agendas, even in the face of opposition from class- and/or state-based actors. 32 Third, the civil opportunity perspective examines how the responsiveness or permeability of civil or associational structures (as opposed to the "political" factors stressed in recent studies of "political opportunity structures" 33 ) influences the ability of groups within a divided or splintered civil society to act collectively in pursuit of their agendas. (Civil society plays a double role here precisely because it constitutes both the "terrain" and the "target" of so many forms of collective action.) Finally, the civil constructionist perspective inquires more macroscopically into how patterns of relationships within civil society unintentionally shape the very interests and identities of various actors. The focus here is not so much on how civil society encourages or inhibits certain repertoires of action as on how it shapes the self-understanding of actors -- including, for example, their identification as "activists" or "revolutionaries."
Finally, we speak of a social-psychological context of action, which encompasses all those psychical structures that constrain and enable action by channelling flows and investments of emotional energy. It includes long-lasting, durable interpersonal structures of attachment and emotional solidarity, as well as negatively toned currents of hostility and aggression. Here the "nodes," so to speak, in the networks are not symbols (as in the cultural context), or positions (as in the societal), but rather "objects," as that term is understood by psychoanalytic "object relations" theorists: that is to say, actual persons, aspects of persons, or fantasized substitutes for persons. As Freud argues in his monograph on Group Psychology, in place of the "father" one might also find a leader, the nation, or some sort of abstract ideal or set of principles. (Freud's "sociogram," in fact, of the bonds or transactions linking leaders to their followers -- and of the bonds of identification among followers themselves [see Figure 2] -- corresponds precisely to the network-analytic notion of "structural equivalence," and illustrates clearly the relational nature of social psychological structures as we envision them. 34 )
While networks of shared affectual commitments and flows of emotional energy have been less well studied than conceptual and especially societal networks, several important efforts in this vein are of considerable interest. For example, both Philip Slater and Lewis Coser have explored the psychoanalytic notion that group solidarity rests in part upon sublimated or "aim-inhibited" (i.e., not overtly sexual) libidinal ties of collective identification among group members; they also assume that individuals cannot make large emotional investments (cathexes) in more than a relatively small number of objects. 35 More specifically, Slater has analyzed various forms of emotional or "libidinal withdrawal" from groups, while Coser has examined how a number of "greedy institutions" -- including political organizations -- attempt to prevent this. In fact, political parties and social movements are often involved in a contentious tug-of-war with other institutions or networks (including kith and kin) for the inherently limited emotional energies of their participants. 36 Slater's concept of "libidinal withdrawal" emphasizes precisely how individuals or dyads may emotionally disinvest from groups, with their sometimes onerous demands, risks, and responsibilities. He notes, for example, that "an intimate dyadic relationship always threatens to short-circuit the libidinal network of the community and drain off its source of sustenance." 37
Randall Collins, while theorizing from a distinctly anti-psychoanalytic standpoint, also provides an ambitious account of intersubjective, social psychological formations: "What holds a society together," he argues, "-- the `glue' of solidarity -- and what mobilizes conflict -- the energy of mobilized groups -- are emotions; so is what operates to uphold stratification." 38 Collins envisions, in fact, an emergent "market" of "interaction rituals" yielding variable quantities of "emotional energy"; in this way, he opens up possibilities for "mapping" the structure of emotional ties across the broader social psychological environment, in parallel fashion to the mapping of "conceptual networks" and societal and institutional structures in the other two relational contexts of action. No less than the other examples, his work illustrates how we can conceptualize the third context of action as fundamentally transpersonal in nature, rather than as an environment of merely individual psychological dynamics. 39
Potential applications for a social-psychologically oriented approach can be discerned in a wide range of fields, including not only revolutions and social movements (perhaps most strikingly those of a nationalist or racist character), but also the sociology of families and organizations. Often, students of these phenomena focus upon the patterns of societal interaction (and interests) underlying them, or else upon their cultural and discursive aspects, while ignoring their sometimes powerful emotional and psychical (often less than fully conscious) bases. 40 Contemporary analysts of collective action, for instance, almost totally neglect social psychology in general, and the sociology of emotions in particular. 41 Yet, in our view, some of the most important ingredients of collective action, including normative commitments, "injustice frames," groups solidarities, and collective identities, have important emotional aspects which themselves are organized around analytically autonomous "logics." (Lynn Hunt even speaks in her book on The Family Romance of the French Revolution of "the collective, unconscious images of familial order that underlie revolutionary politics." 42 ) Social movements, moreover, are generally engaged in the business of articulating, channelling, managing, and even creating certain collective emotional states among their participants, including outrage at perceived injustices, hatred (or, alternatively, compassion) for enemies, and love and empathy for fellow activists, leaders, and the movements' presumed constituencies. Accounts of revolutions and social movements that neglect these dynamics ignore an important causal component as well as a crucial subjective dimension of collective action.
In addition to these three "structuring" contexts of action, our framework also points to the moment of intentionality at the core of all empirical social action; such a notion reminds us, in fact, that action is never completely determined or structured by the relational contexts within which it is embedded. Hence a fourth element in our theoretical framework, namely, human agency. Drawing upon recent work by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische 43 , we distinguish carefully between human agency and "empirical social action": while the former is present in all actual empirical instances of action, it must be understood as an element theoretically quite distinct from the latter. We concur with Jeffrey Alexander, in fact, that the "identification of actor and agency" renders one "guilty of [the fallacy of] misplaced concreteness. Rather than replacing or reinterpreting the familiar dichotomy between actors and structures, [this] identification . . . actually reproduces it in another form. . . . [A]ctors per se are much more than, and [simultaneously] much less than, `agents' [alone]." 44 Human agency itself we define as the engagement by social actors of their different contexts of action, an engagement that both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. For us, agency is precisely that analytical element that "breathes life" into, modifies, and sometimes challenges transpersonal (cultural, societal, and/or social psychological) networks in the course of empirical social action. 45
We contend that human agency is usefully conceptualized as a "chordal triad" consisting of three principal tones or components, any one of which might be accentuated within a given field of empirical action. 46 The first of these components, which we term the iterational moment of agency, refers to the selective reactivation of past patterns of thought and action, as routinely incorporated in practical activity, thereby giving stability and order to social universes and helping to sustain identities, interactions, and institutions over time -- including, paradoxically, those associated with transformative social movements. The second dimension, the projective, encompasses the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to the actors' hopes, fears, and desires for the future. And finally, the practical-evaluative element entails the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the emerging demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations. 47
We believe that this conceptual framework is useful for situating agency in explanations of historical process without exaggerating or romanticizing its importance by theoretical fiat. While our approach certainly aspires to take human agency into account, just as critics of the "structuralism" of recent works in historical analysis have demanded, it also aims to avoid some of the problems that characterize these demands, including the conflation of agency with culture, motivations (and social psychology), and empirical action itself. Moreover, our disaggregation of agency into its three constituent aspects (or orientations) is clearly of special relevance to scholars of revolutions and social movements. The iterational moment of agency, for example, comes to the fore whenever social actors dynamically reproduce the longstanding cultural schemata and institutional constraints that oppress them. It stands out as well whenever relatively stable patterns of interaction developed in active response to earlier historical situations go on to shape the emotional and cultural resources that actors draw upon in times of social and political upheaval. 48 Studies of the "radicalism of tradition" are especially relevant in this particular context. 49
Even more relevant to the study of revolutions and collective action is the future-oriented moment of projectivity. Despite its rich philosophical legacy, this concept of "projects" has been largely ignored within the empirical tradition of North American sociology; and yet we believe that it needs to be rescued from the subjectivist ghetto and put to use as a key element in explanations of social reproduction and change. The projective imagination, as expressed in collective ideals and aspirations, and sometimes codified in formal ideologies and doctrines, has a constitutive and not just an epiphenomenal role in a wide variety of collective formations, including utopian and millenarian movements, religious cults, and revolutionary organizations. Michael Walzer, perhaps the preeminent analyst of revolutions as fundamentally agentic processes, even defines revolutions as "conscious attempts to establish a new moral and material world and to impose, or evoke, radically new patterns of day-to-day conduct." Revolution, he concludes, "is a project." 50
Practical evaluation, too, assumes major significance in certain key historical junctures. The classic case in point here is Leon Trotsky's assessment of the pivotal role that Lenin played in the making of the Russian Revolution. More recently, Timothy Garton Ash has analyzed the decisive and yet improvisational manner in which leaders of the "Velvet Revolution" such as Vaclav Havel orchestrated and channelled events in Czechoslovakia during the crucial months of 1989. 51 And Nikki Keddie herself emphasizes, as we have seen, the fateful consequences of the Shah of Iran's choices and judgments before and during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. In less dramatic moments as well, practical evaluation plays a crucial role. As James Scott points out, for example, oppressed groups and individuals often express their dissent from "official" or "public transcripts" through "rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes, and theater of the powerless"; such tactics of resistance, all of which require the philosophical legacareful exercise of practical judgment, allow the powerless to "insinuate a critique of power while hiding behind an^Uymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct." 52
IV
The theoretical framework outlined above is, to be sure, but a set of analytical distinctions that have to be developed much further through extensive empirical investigation. Even so, it already carries with it a number of significant implications, both analytical and normative. Analytically, its key payoff is to have laid out a wide array of theoretical possibilities -- to have opened up new questions and prevented the conflation of old ones, and thereby to have avoided the foreclosure of otherwise promising research options. Surely, an encompassing frame of reference remains crucial for sharpening the causal statements that analysts of revolutions and collective action generate, and for broadening the range of causal mechanisms that their research identifies. Our analytical framework allows, in fact, for more powerful conjunctural arguments to be generated regarding historical causation, and contributes to the trend of recent decades toward ever more comprehensive -- and systematic -- strategies of historical analysis. 53
Empirical research within our framework needs, of course, to link together more systematically than we have done our various analytical categories: to inquire, for example, into the empirical "fits" or connections among the three types of relational contexts of action, or to ask which specific configurations conduce to which of the three moments of human agency that we have delineated. (Analysts of revolutions and collective action are particularly interested in how and why agency may become projective and transformative -- and perhaps radically transformative -- of certain structural contexts of action.) Only an ongoing and vital dialogue of theory with empirical research -- a "dialectical method" of the sort that Theda Skocpol advocates, one "combining `inductive' and `deductive' reasoning" 54 -- will ultimately answer such crucial questions. In many instances, of course, empirical researchers may lack the data necessary to examine systematically more than one or two of our relational contexts or agentic orientations. Moreover, the very nature of their research interests may lead them to devote more attention to certain aspects of our analytical framework than to others. These valid issues are no reason, however, to abandon a robust theoretical schema. On the contrary, even one-sided analyses of, for example, a state-centered, class-analytic, or culturalist nature will be clearer and more precise to the extent that they are self-consciously situated within a broader theoretical frame of reference. When not so situated, such analyses will risk mistaking the proverbial forest for (at best) a few trees.
On a normative level as well, our framework of analysis holds important implications for students of revolutions and collective action. It suggests that the effects or outcomes of transformative historical processes will potentially be found in all three of our relational contexts of action: in the cultural and social psychological environments no less than in the societal. Revolutionary movements, for example, will potentially reconfigure not only networks of economic and political relationships (including the broader class structure and the state), 55 but also patterns of relationships among symbols within cultural structures (and patterns of relationships among multiple cultural structures) as well as more emotional, psychical bonds of identification and idealization among individuals, groups, and leaders. A normatively desirable outcome of historical transformations, then, will entail democratization in all three of these structural contexts of action; the most promising changes in social structure and politics, that is, will meet with discouraging setbacks in the long run if not also accompanied by complementary changes in cultural discourse and in shared emotional commitments.
The study of revolutions, social movements, and collective action has undoubtedly made great strides in the past quarter century. The debates and controversies that currently characterize these fields are surely signs of health, not morbidity. Predictably, the introjection of new issues, new concepts, and new approaches into these established fields of scholarship will provoke controversy and contention -- and we can no doubt expect more books with titles such as Debating Revolutions. However, such books just as surely indicate a need for the work of theoretical synthesis, for the elaboration of frameworks such as the one sketched above -- frameworks capable of integrating the older and more recent concerns of historical analysts and moving us decisively into a new "fourth" generation of scholarship on revolutions and collective action.
FIGURE 1: THE RELATIONAL CONTEXTS OF ACTION (AND AGENCY)
FIGURE 2: FREUD ON GROUP PSYCHOLOGY
Notes
Note 1: World Politics 32 (1980), 425-453. Back.
Note 2: The "first generation" of "natural historians" of revolution, according to Goldstone, was largely descriptive and atheoretical: "[U]sing this approach alone left many basic questions unanswered. Chief among these was the question of causes. Why did revolutions arise? What were the sources of opposition to the old regime?" Jack A. Goldstone, "The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions," in Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, edited by Jack A. goldstone (New York, 1994), 4. Back.
Note 3: John Foran, "Theories of Revolution Revisited: Toward a Fourth Generation?" Sociological Theory 11 (1993), 1. An abbreviated version of this essay appears in the volume under review. Back.
Note 4: See, e.g., Steven M. Buechler, "Beyond Resource Mobilization? Emerging Trends in Social Movement Theory," Sociological Quarterly 34 (1993), 217-235. Back.
Note 5: Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Debating Revolutions (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 6: These exchanges address the possibility of understanding and predicting revolutions, the explanation and interpretation of revolutions, and controversies over the recent collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in particular. (The book is divided into three long sections that take up each of these issues in turn.) All of the contributions to the volume, with the exception of Keddie's short introduction, originally appeared in the journal that Keddie edits, Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science. Back.
Note 7: Randall Collins, "Maturation of the State-Centered Theory of Revolution and Ideology," Sociological Theory 11 (1993), 127. Back.
Note 8: Perhaps the most impressive recent work of theoretical synthesis in the collective-action field is Sidney Tarrow's Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge, 1994). Tarrow's approach, however, says less about culture than we would like, and very little at all about agency or social psychology (see below). Back.
Note 9: Several other contributors to the volume intervene in this debate, notably Timur Kuran. See also the "Symposium on Prediction in the Social Sciences," American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995), 1520-1626 (with contributions by Michael Hechter, Kuran, Randall Collins, and Charles Tilly). Back.
Note 10: Goldstone, "Predicting Revolutions: Why We Could (and Should) Have Foreseen the Revolutions of 1989-1991 in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe," in Debating Revolutions, 45. Back.
Note 11: Tilly, "The Bourgeois Gentilshommes of Revolutionary Theory," in Debating Revolutions, 136-141. Back.
Note 12: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991. Back.
Note 13: Timur Kuran's contribution to this debate suggests that revolutions cannot be predicted for a rather different reason, namely, "preference falsification." Many people, in other words, publicly pretend that they support governments that they privately despise, especially when it is risky to speak their minds. As a result, a society "may come to the brink of a massive social explosion with everyone continuing to believe that it is quite stable." Kuran, "Why Revolutions Are Better Understood Than Predicted: The Essential Role of Preference Falsification: Comment on Keddie," in Debating Revolutions, 31. Back.
Note 14: Keddie, "Can Revolutions Be Predicted; Can Their Causes Be Understood?" in Debating Revolutions, 11. Keddie also discusses the "contradiction" in Iran between autocracy and rapid socioeconomic change, although she immediately (and correctly) notes that this tension has been found in many other societies that have not experienced revolutions. Back.
Note 15: See Jeffrey C. Alexander's important work, Action and Its Environments (New York, 1988), which follows in this specific respect upon writings by Parsons and Sorokin. We differ from Parsons, however, in not prioritizing these contexts in any sort of hierarchy, "cybernetic" or otherwise, and certainly in not regarding them as "action systems" per se. Back.
Note 16: Translated by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York, 1953). Back.
Note 17: Margaret R. Somers, "What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation," Sociological Theory 13 (1995), 135. Back.
Note 18: Muriel Atkin, "The Islamic Revolution That Overthrew the Soviet State," in Debating Revolutions, 296-313. Back.
Note 19: Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1980). Back.
Note 20: Wasserstrom complains that Goldstone's approach "ends up dangerously close to being simply a new way of marginalizing cultural concerns." Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Bringing Culture Back In and Other Caveats: A Critique of Jack Goldstone's Recent Essays on Revolution," in Debating Revolutions, 170. Back.
Note 21: Cambridge, 1988. Back.
Note 22: For a broader consideration of Durkheim's contemporary relevance, see Mustafa Emirbayer, "Useful Durkheim," unpublished manuscript. Back.
Note 23: In regard to social psychology: cultural explanations are often one-sidedly cognitive in nature, despite the fact that identities, solidarities, and normative commitments have also a profoundly affectual and emotional dimension (see below). Back.
Note 24: Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, NJ, 1992). Back.
Note 25: Archer observes: "The intimacy of their interconnection denies even relative autonomy to the components involved. And in the absence of any degree of autonomy it becomes impossible to examine their interplay." Archer, Culture and Agency (Cambridge, 1988), 77, 80. Strictly speaking, Archer means by "central conflation" an elision of the "Cultural System" with that of "Socio-Cultural Interaction." Back.
Note 26: This statement applies to the analytical (and not primarily to the empirical) contributions of these approaches. In many substantive works, civil and associational networks do play a crucial (albeit undertheorized) role alongside economic and political (state) structures. Back.
Note 27: This approach has proven especially helpful for scholars of prodemocracy movements. See, e.g., Margaret R. Somers, "Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy," American Sociological Review 58 (1993), 587-620, and Craig Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994). Back.
Note 28: Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1992), ix. It should be noted that "civil society," by this definition, does not mean precisely the same thing as "the social" or "the lifeworld," but rather, entails only "a particular angle of looking at [that broader social] world from the point of view of conscious association building and associational life." Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, x. Back.
Note 29: Mustafa Emirbayer and Mimi Sheller, "Publics in History: A Programmatic Statement," unpublished manuscript. The rest of this paragraph summarizes core arguments from this manuscript. See also Mimi Sheller, "Democracy after Slavery: Post-Emancipation Publics in Haiti and Jamaica," Ph.D. dissertation in progress, Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research. Back.
Note 30: Here we draw upon -- and rework -- categories of analysis first presented in Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), 3-37, and subsequently elaborated in Jeff Goodwin, "State-Centered Approaches to Social Revolutions: Strengths and Limitations of a Theoretical Tradition," forthcoming in Theorising Revolutions, edited by John Foran (London). Back.
Note 31: Much of the recent work on the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe falls within this category. For a more state-centered analysis of the revolutions of 1989, see Jeff Goodwin, "Old Regimes and Revolutions in the Second and Third Worlds: A Comparative Perspective," Social Science History 18 (1994), 575-604. Back.
Note 32: While similar to the civil autonomy perspective, this strategy of analysis remains analytically distinct; actors in civil society, after all, may have very different aims than economic elites and/or state officials and yet lack the capacity to actually implement their agendas. Civil autonomy, in other words, does not necessarily imply civil (or public) capacity, or vice versa. Back.
Note 33: See, e.g., Tarrow, Power in Movement. Back.
Note 34: Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York, 1959 [1921]), 26-27. On the concept of structural equivalence, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, "Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency," American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994), 1411-54. Back.
Note 35: See, respectively, Philip Slater, "On Social Regression," American Sociological Review 28 (1963), 339-364, and Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York, 1974). Back.
Note 36: See, e.g., Jeff Goodwin, "The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement: Affect and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion," paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Pittsburgh, PA, August 1992. Back.
Note 37: Slater, "On Social Regression," 348. Back.
Note 38: Randall Collins, "Stratification, Emotional Energy, and the Transient Emotions," in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, edited by Theodore D. Kemper (Albany, NY, 1990), 27-28. Back.
Note 39: This last point indicates another way in which we differ from Parsons, Sorokin, and Alexander, all of whom speak in terms of a threefold distinction between "culture, society, and [individual] personality" (see also note 14). Back.
Note 40: "Descriptions of nationalist movements," Thomas J. Scheff points out, "note the passion, indeed the very pages crackle with it. But these descriptions do little to conceptualize, analyze, or interpret it." Scheff, "Emotions and Identity: A Theory of Ethnic Nationalism," in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, edited by Craig Calhoun (Oxford, 1994), 282. Scheff calls for a closer examination of "the relational and emotional aspects of ethnic nationalism that most current theories leave out" (282). Back.
Note 41: Exceptions include Thomas J. Scheff, "Emotions and Identity"; Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, CO, 1994); and Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, "Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture: The Culture of the Women's Movement," in Social Movements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis, 1995), 163-187. Back.
Note 42: Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), xiii. Back.
Note 43: "What Is Agency?," Working Paper No. 206 (1995), Center for Studies of Social Change (CSSC), New School for Social Research. Back.
Note 44: Jeffrey C. Alexander, "Some Remarks on `Agency' in Recent Sociological Theory," Perspectives (Theory Section Newsletter, American Sociological Association), 1-2. Back.
Note 45: We ground this capacity for human agency in the structures and processes of the human self, conceived of itself (in relational terms) as an "internal conversation" possessing analytic autonomy vis-a-vis transpersonal interactions. While transpersonal contexts of action surely do both constrain and enable this dialogical activity, which unfolds in perpetual interaction and engagement with the social universe, such contexts cannot themselves serve as the point of origin of agentic possibilities. (Such a notion extends the network-analytic idea of "self-similarity" into the level of the individual self.) See White, Identity and Control, and Norbert Wiley, The Semiotic Self (Chicago, 1994), 15, 47, 210, 228. Back.
Note 46: This also is a core suggestion from the aforementioned paper by Emirbayer and Mische. Back.
Note 47: Disaggregating agency in this way allows us to relativize -- and thereby to go beyond -- the "practical actor" model of action (action as largely habitual, repetitive, and taken-for-granted) that informs much contemporary sociological work, from Bourdieu's writings to structuration theory to network analysis. In our approach, the iterational moment of agency (the reactivation of past patterns of interaction) is just one of several alternative possible agentic orientations. By emphasizing variation and change in the temporal constitution of agency, in fact, we seek to conceptualize actors' relations to their contexts (or at least to some of their contexts, some of the time) as also potentially entailing a creative, future- and present-oriented, solving of problems. Back.
Note 48: See Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review 51 (1986), 273-86. Back.
Note 49: See Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1982). Back.
Note 50: Michael Walzer, "A Theory of Revolutions," in Radical Principles (New York, 1980), 202-03; see also Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1965). In our view, however, Walzer emphasizes too one-sidedly the agentic nature of revolutionary transformations; for an effective criticism on this score, see Theda Skocpol, "Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell," in Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge, 1994), 201-02. Back.
Note 51: See Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman (New York, 1980 [1932]), and Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of `89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York, 1990). Back.
Note 52: James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), xiii. See also Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985). Back.
Note 53: See, e.g., the conjunctural analyses of Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America (Princeton, NJ, 1992), and John Foran, "A Theory of Third World Social Revolutions: Iran, Nicaragua, and E1 Salvador Compared," Critical Sociology 19 (1992), 3-27. One of the key methodological texts in this regard is Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987). Back.
Note 54: Theda Skocpol, "Analyzing Causal Configurations in History: A Rejoinder to Nichols," Comparative Social Research 9 (1986), 190. Back.
Note 55: Many contemporary analysts of civil society also contend that certain "self-limiting" forms of collective action -- for example, those in Eastern Europe in 1989 -- seek above all to transform civil society itself, rather than the modern economy or administrative state. See Cohen and Arato, Civil Society. Back.
