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Political Identities
Center for Studies of Social Change
May, 1995
Illustrations
Section of Lancashire around Preston, 1831
The Catholic Association, 1835, by R. Cruikshank (British Museum, Prints and Drawings 14766)
If William Cobbett acted the proper British patriot during his Canadian military service of 1784-1791 and played tory loyalist during his Philadelphia exile of 1792-1800, he soon thereafter turned toward a radical critique of Britain's ruling class. During the surge of working-class action and mobilization for political reform that followed the Napoleonic Wars' ending in 1815, his Political Register and other writings transmitted radical messages across Britain. In a vivid dramatization of his claimed political genealogy, Cobbett carried Thomas Paine's bones from America to England on his return from another American exile in 1819. He advised popular Princess Caroline in her futile bid for coronation with her estranged husband George IV in 1820-21, then continued to write eloquently for parliamentary reform and for justice in the countryside through the next decade. During the tumultuous British election campaign of Maylune 1826, Cobbett plunged even more deeply into national politics: he stood for parliament in the borough of Preston, Lancashire.
After having been a hotbed of working-class mobilization between 1815 and 1820, in 1826 Lancashire was experiencing its fifth straight year of intensifying strikes, accelerating attacks on industrial machinery, and swelling workers' demands for political reform. Handloom weavers were trying desperately to maintain their slipping position by means of attacks on power looms in cotton mills. In this time of mounting class conflict, Cobbett's radical temper appealed to industrial workers as well as to the agricultural laborers who formed the particular object of his sympathy and a substantial body of his supporters (Dyck 1 992, 1993).
Preston, a major cotton-textile town, maintained one of England's most generous suffrage provisions. In addition to the usual landlords, rentiers, professionals, merchants, and manufacturers, a number of workers actually voted there. As a center of Irish immigration, Preston also housed many Catholic electors - a significant fact when a massive new mobilization on behalf of Catholic political rights had begun in Ireland and British reformers were lining up in favor of those rights, which tories generally opposed. Cobbett arrived in Preston committed to both radical reform and Catholic Emancipation: not only manhood suffrage and frequent parliamentary sessions but also full eligibility of Catholics for non religious public office.
Far more than legal electors, however, thronged the hustings in Cobbett's support; he attracted a large following of disfranchised workers, both male and female. They sported Cobben's colors: light green and white in this election, since green was the independent color, and his independent opponent had already preempted plain green. His supporters met him outside of town, paraded with a band in his honor, carried flags nobly depicting their hero as well as a series of political motifs, displayed hefty green-leaved branches, and cheered his long speeches. (Those green branches may merely have shown partisan colors, but they also recalled a tradition of liberty trees that ran back to the American and French Revolutions.) During the house-to-house canvass of early June, Cobbett and his four sons became the toast of working-class Preston.
Section of Lancashire around Preston, 1831
Once the polling began on 10 June, nevertheless, Cobbett's life grew more difficult. Cobbett had entered the Preston race against whig E.G. Stanley and independent John Wood. They had agreed not to require of Preston's Catholic voters the oath of supremacy, which involved a public repudiation of papal authority. Then Robert Barrie (navy captain and resident commissioner in Kingston, Ontario) entered for the tories, with the apparent intent of scaring off Cobbett's supporters by demanding the oath.
Preston's mayor Nicholas Grimshaw and his election officials collaborated with Barrie and against Cobbett not only by insisting on the Anglican oath but also by physically blocking his electors from the polls (Spater 1 982:11, 458463). Preston's electors customarily voted in tallies, standard-sized groups of voters who proceeded to poll for their candidate, then give way to an equal-sized group of supporters for another candidate until the inability of one side to supply its next tally signaled the election's outcome. Tallies enormously slowed down an election's progress, but they reduced violent jostling for places in the electoral queue and provided opportunities for the demonstration of a candidate's mass support, complete with banners, ribbons, and colors. By means of challenges, of harassment, and of delays that discouraged faint-hearted voters, authorities could use the tally system against threatening candidates.
That happened at Preston in 1826. Mayor Grimshaw's forces not only instituted the tally system and deliberately slowed it down - the entire poll finally consumed fifteen days - but also built segregated channels to the hustings for each of the candidate's electors. "One of the worst examples of slow voting," reports Frank O'Gorman,
came at Preston in 1 826, when William Cobbett was a candidate. Day after day he justifiably complained that the slow progress of the poll threatened to disfranchise half of the Preston electorate and to damage his own prospects. . . Only when mob violence threatened to get out of hand did the mayor agree to speed up the poll, in this case by abandoning the use of tallies (O'Gorman 1989:1 35-136).
Mob violence? In response to complaints from mayor Grimshaw about intimidation of electors, troops from the King's Dragoon Guards and Foot Guards occupied the city on 1 6 June. Cobbett accused the mayor of calling in troops for the express purpose "of terrifying my voters, and preventing them from exercising their rights" (Spater 1 982: II, 462). Obliquely, the military concurred: on orders from regional commanding general Sir John Byng, who "disapproves very much of the Troops being allowed to remain, without the existence of an actual riot", captain Charles Hall soon moved his forces out of town (HO 40120 [Public Record Office, Kew, Home Office Papers, series 40, box 20]).
They did not, however, go far or long. After billeting a short distance away, they came back a few days later. Major Eckersley, Manchester commander of dragoons, wrote under secretary Henry Hobhouse at the Home Office on 22 June about the return of troops to Preston:
The Mayor of Preston reports, under date of last evening, that in consequence of the most serious outrages which had been committed by a Mob, armed with Bludgeons, at one of the Entrances of the Poll Booth for the Election now holding in that Borough, preventing the access of Voters to the Hustings, Captain Barrie, one of the Candidates had protested against the admission of any more Voters, until free access was allowed to every Voter; and that being in vain tried to force a free access by means of the Civil Power, except to such persons as the Mob chose to admit, he had been under the necessity of calling upon the Troop of Cavalry, stationed at Kirkham, to place itself at Broughton, four miles from Preston, on the road to Garstang, this morning by eight o'clock, to remain there until the close of the Election on Monday next, unless circumstances should arise which might justify him or the Magistrates in bringing it into Preston (HO 40/20).
Cobbett's people had fought to reach the polls despite the mayor's interposition, and the many special constables Grimshaw had recruited (the "Civil Power" of Eckersley's dispatch) could not contain them. The "bludgeons" Eckersley mentioned consisted of Cobbett's supporters' electoral staves cut into fours; until dragoons drove them away, Cobbett's forces used their cudgels to keep supporters of Barrie and Stanley out of the channel that Grimshaw had assigned to Cobbett's electors. Eventually Cobbett himself, despairing of election as the authorities turned back his voters by the dozen, opened his channel to Wood's electors (Cobbett 1829: Letter I). Both sides used force to influence the outcome. Cobbett's side lost.
Despite his electoral defeat, Cobbett later exulted in recollections of the Preston campaign. In his Political Register he boasted:
I went to the North a total stranger as to person. I had no friends. Yet, on my first entrance into Preston, I was met and accompanied by, at least, ten thousand people, and was received with marks of attention and respect surpassing those ever shown to any other man . . . calumniators of mine began to comfort themselves with the thought that I was a 'Poor Old Man'; and that I could not possibly last long. It was an 'old man', recollected, who could travel five hundred miles, make speeches of half an hour long twice a day for a month; put down the saucy, the rich, the tyrannical; that could be jostled out of his majority at an election; and that could return towards his home through forty miles of huzzas from the lips of a hundred and fifty thousand people (Cobbett 1933: 202).
At sixty-three, Cobbett found such a reception a vigorous vindication of his long radical career.
Government spies among the region's workers, to be sure, reported the situation differently. The worker-spy who signed his frequent reports George Bradbury, George Bradley, and G_B_ portrayed northern radicalism as a conspiracy abetted at a distance by Cobbett. In a letter from Walsall dated 19 June he reported that:
An Electioneering Procession from M[ansiojn House to G[uil]d Hall, 1 781 [Sir Watkin Lewes, MP for CiW of London], by Nixon (British Museum, Prints and Drawings 5852)
I was invited to Preston to assist in the return of W. Cobbet to Parliament and to Consider of any Measures along with others of the Party alluded to in my Communication of the 27th of May to further the ultimate ends of these Men whose work is to get a Voice in Parliament for the purpose of spreading principles subversive of the national faith, There principle object was it not for the Six Acts [repressive legislation passed in 1819] to call Meetings at all places at one time where they can spread their principles under the specious pretex of Equal Representation in the House of Commons. . . the secret idea is to carry by force of arms those [wild?] measures which have devastated every Country where they have gained the Ascendency - and in 1819 secret instructions were given to prepare every Man his own Picke head and to stick it in the ground below the Reach of the Plough - and Nearly all were in Lancashire and Yorkshire of that party prepared for any Chance which might offer. I began a Reformer and soon became a principle leader when I found on being admitted to Confidence their object was Republican Government to be effected by force or otherwise as Circumstances offer (HO 40/20).
As summer wore on, Bradbury/Bradley warned increasingly of the possibility of armed insurrection - a threat that no doubt justified his government pay, but that also represented the current talk of some determined radicals and recalled a series of regional working-class rebellions between 1816 and 1820.
British politics of the 1820s deserves attention not only for the exploits of such heroic radicals as William Cobbett but also for the great transformations of popular political life that were occurring. In the course of struggles over parliamentary reform, workers' rights, and Catholic Emancipation, British people were fashioning forms of political participation that marked public life for another century. They were installing public meetings, demonstrations, mass associations, petition campaigns, firm-by4irm strikes, and related forms of claim-making as the standard repertoire in Great Britain.
That momentous transition strongly affected Britain's popular politics, including the identities people assumed as they made collective claims. It therefore permits some general observations concerning political identities wherever and whenever they appear. For all their enormous variation in form and content:
- political identities are always, everywhere relational and collective
- they therefore alter as political networks, opportunities, and strategies shift
- the validation of political identities depends on contingent performances to which other parties' acceptance or rejection of the asserted relation is crucial
- that validation both constrains and facilitates collective action by those who share the identity
- deep differences separate political identities embedded in routine social life from those that appear chiefly in public life
These propositions break with two very different but common ways of understanding political identities: 1) as straightforward activation of durable personal traits, whether individual or collective, 2) as malleable features of individual consciousness. The first view appears incessantly in interest-based accounts of political participation, which generally depend on some version of methodological individualism. The second view recurs in analyses of political commitment as a process of self-realization, and correlates closely with an assumption of phenomenological individualism, the doctrine that personal consciousness is the primary - or, at a sollipsistic extreme, the only - social reality. As will soon become obvious, my view denies neither personal traits nor individual psyches, but places relations among actors at the center of social processes.
What does "relational and collective" mean? A political identity is an actor's experience of a shared social relation in which at least one of the parties - including third parties - is an individual or organization controlling concentrated means of coercion. (If the coercion-controlling organization in question enjoys some routine jurisdiction over all persons within a delimited territory, we call it a government; to the extent that it lacks rivals and superiors within its territory, we call it a state.) Political identities usually double with shared public representations of both relation and experience. Thus in Preston of May-June 1826 Cobbett's supporters as such shared relations not only to their hero but also to competing candidates, Mayor Grimshaw, the borough of Preston, the British state, and its ever-ready dragoons. They represented that shared identity by wearing colors, bearing staves, marching, attending meetings, drinking toasts, and jeering Cobbett's opponents.
Well before 1826, British elections provided occasions for the assertion of political identities by electors and non-electors alike. In parallel with civic festivals and public executions, elections permitted ordinary people to fill the streets, voice their preferences, criticize authorities, and identify themselves collectively by means of symbols, shouts, songs, or dress (Epstein 1 994, Laqueur 1 989, Linebaugh 1 992, O'Gorman 1 992). That candidates often spent lavishly on food, drink, cockades, and other gifts for non-electors (including families of electors) does not gainsay the political interest of ordinary people in British parliamentary elections. Ordinary people and local leaders had complementary interests: In addition to treats, plebeian participants in elections gained affirmations of solidarity, claims to patronage, and protected opportunities to voice their preferences. On the other side, as often happens in public rituals, the capacity of a candidate to bring out orderly, committed crowds in his support confirmed or denied his standing within the community and thereby affected his subsequent credibility as patron or broker even when it had little influence over an election's outcome (cf. Benford & Hunt 1992, Marston 1989, Paige & Paige 1981, Schneider 1995, Trexler 1981).
Procession to the Hustings After a Successful Canvass, 1 784 [Duchess of Devonshire and other supporters of Charles James Fox], by Rowlandson (British Museum, Prints and Drawings 6564)
British election activities, then, asserted, displayed, or confirmed political identities: candidate, official, elector, partisan, keeper of the peace. Most of these identities, furthermore, correlated weakly or nully with the identities of routine social life: wife, son, neighbor, debtor, parishioner, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. Such routine identities did often figure in local conflicts: parents and children fought, neighbors massed to tear down houses of ill repute, debtors attacked creditors, parishioners demanded changes in church government, silk weavers collectively resisted wage cuts imposed by their masters, and so on. As a generation of feminists have insisted, available public political identities rested on strong implicit assumptions about gender differences in political capacity. But only contingently did these routine identities play significant, direct parts in electoral proceedings, as when Catholics lined up against Anglicans in disputes over suffrage, or weavers who saw their legal standing threatened gathered en masse to assert their rights. Instead, elections then confined relevant identities to officials, constables, troops, candidates, supporters, electors, spectators, and few others. Such identities were relational and collective: individuals possessed them only as a function of their relations to others and in company with others.
We must therefore distinguish carefully between identities that appear chiefly or exclusively in public life and those that are embedded in routine social existence. The first category typically includes candidate, supporter, party member, and election official, while the second covers the range of kinship, friendship, work, and neighborhood. Of course the distinction is relative in two senses. First, some identities pivot explicitly and importantly between the spheres; Mayor Grimshaw of Preston remained mayor before, during, and after the 1826 election, just as Captain Hall's dragoons had chosen careers that moved them incessantly into and out of the public political sphere. Second, ties of kinship, friendship, gender, work, and neighborhood clearly underlie public political identities; Cobbett chose to stand for parliament from Preston rather than some town with highly restricted suffrage precisely in the hope of inducing bloc voting from the city's less wealthy electors. Nevertheless, relations between public and routinely-embedded identities were becoming increasingly distant and contingent. Electoral positions as special constable, political supporter, election official, or even candidate spilled over little or not at all into the relations of workers, masters, kinfolk, neighbors, or fellow members of the local market.
As the Preston election illustrates, relevant political identities were undergoing a momentous transition during the 1 820s. Although organizers of political associations (both clandestine and public) had been working for a decade to weave national coalitions of reformers and radicals, neither candidates nor local supporters presented themselves in their guise as associational activists. If some continued to insist on local connections in good eighteenth-century style, by then candidates increasingly aligned themselves with nationally-available categories: whig, tory, reformer, other. Despite recurrent displays of colors and symbols, however, their supporters (electors or not) still did not declare themselves publicly as party members but as local candidates' supporters. In two-seat elections, the standard distinctions among plumpers (those who cast just one vote, for their favorite), splitters (those who divided between two candidates of different tendencies), and straights (those who followed a party line) reveal the weak state of partisanship as a political identity (O'Gorman 1 982, 1984, 1989; Phillips 1982, 1990, 1992).
Yet in Preston and over the country as a whole available political identities were changing emphatically. National parties were consolidating, political unions and similar reform (or, for that matter, anti-reform) organizations had been proliferating since 181 7, workers' associations had enjoyed a precarious legal existence since 1 824 after decades of underground ebb and flow, a Catholic Association was beginning to mobilize masses in Ireland and to gain a substantial following in Great Britain, public meetings to promote political causes (often organized, secretly or otherwise, by special-purpose associations) were multiplying, drives to prepare mass petitions for parliament were becoming more common, and the combination of meetings, marches, pamphleteering, symbol-mongering, and lobbying we now recognize as the apparatus of social movements was acquiring uneasy legality.
For more than a century British authorities had generally repressed ordinary people who undertook such activities on the ground that they were usurping parliamentary privileges, that they were establishing subversive organizations, or that they were directly disturbing public order. But now, through just such struggles as we have seen unfolding in Preston, authorities were reluctantly conceding the rights of ordinary people who refrained from overt violence, openly seditious talk, or explicitly illegal programs (for example, the republicanism of which Bradbury/Bradley accused Cobbett and his cohorts) to assemble, to associate, to identify themselves collectively, to exhort each other, to state their views autonomously and publicly. Thus parliament and the courts simultaneously validated new political identities and claimed their own prior right to do such validating.
Much was at stake in the validation of political identities, for once accepted they both constrained and facilitated collective action. Identities as candidates, electors, supporters, or officials imposed significant constraints on their holders, who found themselves bound by the laws and customs of electoral campaigns. Thus candidates had no choice but to endure celebratory entries into town, give repeated speeches on the same theme, flatter local constituencies, treat supporters lavishly and, in the event of victory, submit to being paraded in a briIIiantly decorated chair, a sort of throne. But the same identities facilitated collective action by justifying assemblies, marches, cheers, epithets, and other expressions of opinion that outside of elections would have run the risk of severe repression. Indeed, post-electoral speeches generally marked the end of license by explicitly calling for members of the community to forget their recently-expressed differences and work together.
The increasing differentiation of a public political sphere with its distinctive identities correlated with significant changes in the forms of collective claim-making. For intermittent years spread from 1 758 to 1834, my research group has prepared a large catalog of British 1tcontentious gatherings": occasions on which people outside the government gathered in publicly-accessible places and made collective claims on others, claims which if realized would affect the others' interests (TiIly 1 993, 1 995). During the eighteenth century, we may group the bulk of such British events as follows:
The Belle Alliance, or the Female Reformers of Blackburn, 1819, by G. Cruikshank (British Museum, Prints and Drawings 1 3257)
claim-making within authorized public assemblies (e.g. Lord Mayor's Day): taking of positions by means of cheers, jeers, attacks, and displays of symbols; attacks on supporters of electoral candidates; parading and chairing of candidates; taking sides at public executions; attacks or professions of support for pilloried prisoners; salutation or deprecation of public figures (e.g. royalty) at theater; collective response to lines and characters in plays or other entertainments; breaking up of theaters at unsatisfactory performances
celebrations and other popularly-initiated gatherings: collective cheering, jeering, or stoning of public figures or their conveyances; popularly-initiated public celebrations of major events (e.g. John Wilkes' elections of the 1 760s), with cheering, drinking, display of partisan symbols, fireworks, etc., sometimes with forced participation of reluctant persons; forced illuminations, including attacks on windows of householders who fail to illuminate; faction fights (e.g. Irish vs. English, rival groups of military)
attacks on popularly-designated offenses and offenders: Rough Music; ridicule and/or destruction of symbols, effigies, and/or property of public figures and moral offenders; verbal and physical attacks on malefactors seen in public places; pulling down and/or sacking of. dangerous or offensive houses, including workhouses and brothels; smashing of shops and bars whose proprietors are accused of unfair dealing or of violating public morality; collective seizures of food, often coupled with sacking the merchant's premises and/or public sale of the food below current market price; blockage or diversion of food shipments; destruction of tollgates; collective invasions of enclosed land, often including destruction of fences or hedges
workers' sanctions over members of their trades: turnouts by workers in multiple shops of a local trade; workers' marches to public authorities in trade disputes; donkeying, or otherwise humiliating, workers who violated collective agreements; destroying goods (e.g. silk in looms and/or the looms themselves) of workers or masters who violate collective agreements
attacks on coercive authorities: liberation of prisoners; resistance to police intervention in gatherings and entertainments; resistance to press gangs; fights between hunters and gamekeepers; battles between smugglers and royal officers; forcible opposition to evictions; military mutinies
In summary, we might call such claim-making events parochial, particular, and bifurcated: parochial because chiefly limited in scope to a single locality, particular because the precise routines, participants, and symbols varied significantly from group to group, place to place, and issue to issue, bifurcated because they divided between events in which local people a) took direct action on local objects as the occasion required and b) appealed to patrons or intermediaries for intercession with powerful outsiders. Parochial, particular, bifurcated claim-making events generally emerged from routine local gatherings for work, marketing, recreation, or authorized rituals rather than from deliberately-convened and preplanned assemblies of interested parties.
Such events contrasted with the emerging nineteenth-century forms of claim-making, which we can characterize as cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous: cosmopolitan because their scope so regularly exceeded a single locality, indeed often extended to a national or even international scale; modular because standard forms served for a wide variety of claims, claimants, and localities; autonomous because the claimants took major initiatives in determining the time and place of their action. Public meetings, petition drives, firm-by-firm strikes, demonstrations, street marches, and other still4amiliar forms of collective action constituted this emerging repertoire.
These newer forms of action not only frequently made claims on extralocal authorities and entailed coordination with claim-making groups in other localities but also offered strong assertions about the actors and the constituencies they represented - claims that they were worthy, unified, numerous, and committed, therefore deserving of serious political attention. By the 1 820s, these cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous means of claim-making were rapidly displacing authorized celebrations, attacks on stigmatized offenders, and mass destruction of barriers. Here is one sign of the shift that was going on: during the 1 750s and 1 760s, 3 percent of the events in our catalog consist of preplanned public meetings outside of government auspices; by the 1830s, the figure rises to 24 percent.
The numbers matter less here than a salient contrast: the predominant eighteenth-century forms of claim-making flowed directly from routine local activities such as markets or work, and drew on the everyday identities embedded in those activities. The predominant nineteenth-century forms broke with routine activities and identities, calling people away to meetings, demonstrations, and other concerted actions in which they appeared not as spinners, neighbors, or tenants of particular landlords but as citizens, partisans, association members, or workers in general. They frequently shared those identities with many people outside their own localities. Even their geographies differed, on balance, from that of everyday life: seats of authority, meeting halls, and major thoroughfares drew disproportionate shares of the action.
No need to exaggerate the novelty or the extent of the change from eighteenth to nineteenth century. During Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions and no doubt before, local people had reached out in coordinated claim-making across the country. During the 1 830s agricultural laborers still smashed threshing machines, while workers who caught an informer in their local pub often drubbed him and drove him out of town. Nevertheless, between the 1 750s and the 1 830s the net shift in forms of claim-making went much farther and changed local politics much more definitively than any previous transition of the sort. Britain's ordinary people entered and recreated the national political sphere as never before.
The Catholic Association, 1835, by R. Cruikshank (British Museum, Prints and Drawings 14766)
As familiar and inevitable as the transformation seems in retrospect, it has a puzzling side. People abandoned forms of direct action that had long brought results within their own fields for other forms that depended on extensive organization, that only worked cumulatively and indirectly, that hardly ever achieved their stated ends in a single outing. Social-movement tactics of meeting, marching, demonstrating, and self-identifying seem ineffectual as compared with the destruction of threshing machines and the forceful expulsion of pariahs. Why should anyone exchange direct for indirect action?
The change occurred in part because authorities acquired increasingly effective means of repression such as organized police forces, in part because the organizational bases of the older performances disintegrated, in part because national affairs (where the older forms of direct action had rarely made much difference) became increasingly crucial to ordinary people's interests. But something else was happening as well: indirect, cumulative, cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous forms of action not only made specific claims on extralocal authorities but also asserted political identities on a larger than local scale. They asserted the existence of valid, weighty political claimants to participation in the national polity. They declared: we exist, and have a right to exist. We have strength, coherence, and determination. National politics must take us into account.
Britain's creation of mass national politics had distinct historical properties that set off nineteenth-century Britain as a peculiar combination of aristocratic power and popular democracy. Yet the transformation of political identities that occurred in Britain deserves close attention for its general implications. For not only in Great Britain but in general 1) political identities are relational and collective, 2) they therefore alter as political networks, opportunities, and strategies shift, 3) the validation of political identities depends on contingent performances to which other parties' acceptance or rejection of the asserted relation is crucial, 4) their validation both constrains and facilitates collective action by those who share the identity, and 5) deep differences separate political identities embedded in routine social life from those that appear chiefly in public life.
These principles have enormously wide application. Because authorities and analysts alike have drawn stark lines between institutionalized and exceptional politics - between collective action and collective behavior, between elections and social movements, between moments of calm and moments of madness, between routine and revolutionary action -neither has seen the incessant interplay among standard political means, challenges, and innovations. Let us retrieve the old metaphor of the polity for a set of political identities that afford their holders routine access to some government. Then we can think of identity-validation as an entry into such a polity, the constitution of a valid member. Each polity has a history; its existing membership and the processes by which they gained entry strongly constrain succeeding challenges and entries.
Each new challenge and entry entails innovation in two senses. First, promoters of a new identity constitute themselves and call attention to their worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment by performances that are recognizable to existing members of the polity, but sufficiently novel to dramatize the new candidate's distinctive qualities to potential adherents and allies. Second, the success of an actor in gaining recognition, hence entry into the polity, alters the rules for the next round of challenges. Thus the radicals and Catholics who were challenging in Britain during the 1 820s establish the mass-membership association as a legitimate basis for political claim-making after centuries during which only churches had enjoyed a semblance of such rights, and those only within much more stringent limits than came to prevail in the 1830s.
Students of what they called New Social Movements of the 1 960s and thereafter - especially movements for peace, women's rights, gay rights, and environmental protection - have often stressed the identity-affirming activities of those movements, in supposed contrast to the narrower interest orientations of preceding movements for suffrage or workers' rights. Their analysis combines a proper critique of narrow interest-group interpretations with a misunderstanding of earlier social movements (Calhoun 1 993b). Identity-affirmation has always played a crucial part in social movements, indeed provided one of their major rationales. Once we understand that the identities in question were relational and collective, constituted claims for recognition by public authorities, the contradiction between "interest" and "identity" interpretations disappears.
The establishment of identities results from political mobilization and struggle as well as action by authorities, but it also affects subsequent political processes. Anthony Marx (1 995) offers the important comparison of racial categories in South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. After the Boer War, the white South African regime established a set of racial categories that corresponded only grossly to the much more differentiated populations in the country but became facts of life strongly affecting the fates of putative members of different categories. During Reconstruction and its Jim Crow aftermath, both individual states and -the federal government of the United States built legal systems that redefined racial categories and attached differential advantage to them. Brazil, arguably sustaining as much social and economic inequality by race as the United States, avoided legalizing racial distinctions to anything like the degree of South Africa and U.S.A. In the short and medium runs, the difference surely worked to the advantage of Brazil's black populations. But over the long run stringent racial categories provided bases for political mobilization and legal claims for redress in South Africa and the United States, while in Brazil the very absence of legalized racial categories, statistics, and agencies inhibited black collective action. Clearly the legal validation of political identities works as both facility and constraint.
National processes of identity-assertion have direct counterparts at an international scale. Nationalism provides the most obvious case in point (see Brubaker 1993). Nationalism in general asserts two main ideas: 1) the world's population divides, and ought to divide, into historically-formed, connected, coherent, and relatively homogeneous nations; 2) nations should correspond to states, and vice versa. As it has prevailed over the last two centuries, nationalism therefore takes two related forms: state-led and state-seeking. State-led nationalism involves the attempt by those who control a given state to homogenize its population culturally, to enforce a preferred understanding of its population's history, and to give obligations to the state priority over all other obligations. State-seeking nationalism consists of efforts by ostensible representatives of populations that currently lack states of their own to establish the historical distinctness, coherence, connectedness, and determination of their followers, thereby claiming the right to political autonomy. The parallels with identity-affirming activities of social movements are dramatic.
Other fascinating parallels suggest themselves. We could follow the analogy into industrial relations, where the legalization of strikes simultaneously facilitated some workers' claim-making vis a vis their employers, confirmed "strikers" and "union members" as political identities, and separated the strike from a whole series of sometimes effective tactics - for example window-breaking, community-wide marches, and attacks on non-striking workers -- that workers had previously employed. We could examine how relevant identities change in the course of what Sidney Tarrow calls protest cycles (Tarrow 1 994). We could ask how international institutions form and acquire recognition (Wendt 1994). We could explore further the widespread nineteenth-century creation of political identities at a national scale, which played a crucial part in the development of strong citizenship and extensive democracy both in Britain and elsewhere. The point would remain the same: for all their apparent hardness and durability, political identities undergo incessant challenge and alteration as a consequence and constituent element of political struggle.
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