Collective Movements, Activated Opinion, and the Politics of the Extraordinary 259
distinct psychosocial dynamic and Emile Durkheim’s (1964/1893) view of collective behavior as anomic and irrational. Factors such as anonymity, contagion, and conformity were seen as root causes of collective “disturbances” such as mobs, riots, and revolts. This view of group behavior was compelling to a generation of social scientists in the mid-twentieth century still recoiling from the rise of fascism and other demagogically driven totalitarian and nationalist movements. For these scholars, mass behavior was viewed with suspicion and skepticism, and collectivities acting together were imbued with animated, often disparaging, psychological attributes such as irrationality, hysteria, primal urges, and exaggerated impulses. Not all renditions of “classical” collective behavior theories took a derogative view of mass behavior. Stripped of value judgments, these works at their core presumed that collective action resulted from underlying stresses and ruptures in the existing social and economic order—whether described in terms of symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1951; Turner and Killian 1972), structural functionalism (Smelser 1963), or relative deprivation (Davies 1962; Gurr 1970). Smelser’s (1963) “value-added schema” model, for instance, posited four key factors: (1) underlying structural conditions that bolstered the legitimacy of collective behavior; (2) structural strains, such as economic deprivation; (3) psychological precipitants, such as mass hysteria, collective delusions, or “folk devils”; and (4) a weak or strong apparatus of social control, which ultimately defined whether movements would be short lived or deep rooted. Such “breakdown” theories often fared quite well in characterizing common elements found in collective action. They more often failed, however, as an explanation of why such action happened at certain moments, places, and with certain groups and not at other moments, places, and with other groups. Appeals to structural breakdowns, importantly, fail to tell us why individuals often vary so markedly in their response to common underlying conditions— for the same objective circumstances, why do some people demand that their governments do better while others remain quiescent? Pointing to underlying structural breakdowns, furthermore, is not helpful in specifying the contexts and conditions under which groundswells for change can be championed. Political regimes, macroeconomic conditions, and social demographics are often unbending constraints, at least over the short-term contexts in which much progress might be achieved by demanding that our governments be more responsive to the will of their people.
Movements as Mobilizing Resources These breakdown theories eventually fell out of favor in large part as a result of seeming indiscriminate as a predictive theory of when, where, and among whom collective action would transpire. In their place has arisen resource mobilization theory. This evolution from structural breakdowns to