Abstract
A social theorist who transposed the architecture of today’s movements of social discontent onto the entire modern era could invoke familiar blueprints. Begin with only a few: gadgetry and markets degrade interpersonal habits of the heart. Technology lays down new rules of the game for collective life and social bargaining. Entrepreneurs have little need for compromise with displaced toilers. Adamant protesters try to shield communal institutions from privatization. Radical critics are marginalized in outdated economic niches and therefore have no prospect of steering an ever-changing capitalist order. Then flash backwards: exactly these truisms drive Craig Calhoun’s newly elegant historical synthesis of the originary take-off of European and American social movements in the early nineteenth century. Is this merely a reading of the past from the constrictions of the present?
Calhoun’s major contribution with The Roots of Radicalism, a collection of his essays, is a universal model of the community preconditions for radical social movements. “Traditional” communities, those based on peasant and artisanal labor regulated by communal moral authority, offer their members both distinctive means to coordinate action as well as an uncompromising interest to mobilize against elites sponsoring economic change. Such a community solves the problems of “collective action” by committing members to intimate, life-long relations with their fellows and by making it more certain that individuals will take risks in unison. It leads craft traditionalists to support uncompromising, therefore de facto revolutionary agendas because they have no alternative to the destruction of their cultural universe and selfhood. Furthermore, capitalist industrialists cannot make the concessions necessary for cooperative modes of production to survive. By contrast, among “modern” industrial workers the improvement of self and family depends less upon interpersonally sustained tradition. Industrial workers are not pushed into insurrection. They can advance their interests by moderate calculation and by negotiating for distributive gains inside the capitalist social order. Thus does Calhoun conclude that without input from reactionary radicals in tightly-integrated communities, no revolution worthy of the name can initially shake the powers that be, whatever the direction in which the course of upheaval finally leads.
Calhoun’s universally generalizable vignette of traditional community is analytically compelling and subtly parsed. He uses it to range from the era of early industrial unrest in Britain, to the interaction between radicalism and the bourgeois public sphere, until moving to the Paris of 1848. In acknowledging the ideological contrasts between Cobbett, Paine, and others, Calhoun nonetheless confirms the family similarity that his concept of “radicalism” introduces. Radicals in each instance are defined by how they manage the problem of not fitting into the emergent socio-cultural regime and therefore of inventively grounding completely uncompromising alternatives for the so-called common people.
Yet one must take it on faith that the sources Calhoun footnotes—secondary literature on French compagnonnage, English rural producers, and Parisian workshops—validate his abstractions of community mechanisms and individual pressures. Calhoun seems to qualify “strong” radical insurgencies so as to selectively shunt the Paris Commune, the Iranian Revolution, and much else into the shadows. It appears questionable whether the divide between communal-artisanal and capitalist-industrial ways of life are quite so empirically clear-cut or theoretically irreconcilable. Was it inescapable necessity or was it brutal ideology that led large employers on their side to reject compromise? In a globalized economy, will it be progressive concessions that continue to pacify industrial workers in Europe and North America?
Yet this volume dances so nimbly between grand social theory and sobering comparative-historical detail, it will long provide essential orientation for any course in social movements. Calhoun is especially effective at showing how state-centric and “resource mobilization” approaches to social movements incline us to collapse nineteenth-century experiments in popular instruction and organization into tools for instrumental power conflicts. He offers primary material to reveal the prominence of efforts to remake family, religious worship, and civil participation. Students will find it instructive to read Calhoun’s historicist debunking of the conceit that identity politics or coalitions for autonomous self-expression are products of the recent past. His category of “reactionary radicalism” forces all to rethink the current association of populism with either progressive leftism or rightwing ressentiment.
Calhoun has opened a tantalizing door for archival researchers to contrast multiform nineteenth- and twenty-first-century ethical movements, including feminisms, co-ops, spirituality, and associations for aesthetic cultivation. In so doing he reminds us of the analytic primacy of studying “fields” of contemporaneous social movements as historic wholes. With a similar enthusiasm for forgotten cultures, it is important that German researchers have assiduously documented how, even in the notoriously bureaucratic unions of early twentieth-century German socialism, workers jointly pursued singing, literary debate, and preservation of local folklore.
If, as Calhoun astutely explains, the misleadingly “natural”-looking survival of tradition depends on contingent personal performances in daily life, one may ask if the same holds for the machineries of global capitalism. They appear as barely inflectable structures in this volume. By contrast, the prophetic E.P. Thompson was more attuned to master contingencies. He emphasized an unrealized cultural confluence that would have cast a different fate for industrializing communities. We are still burdened, Thompson wrote, with the lost opportunity for elite Romantics and Radical craftsmen to have converged in opposing the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. The resulting literary victory of a cooperative rather than of a capitalist political economy might have proven hegemonic. Returning to Thompson’s counterfactual method for macro-theorizing such potentials might let us use Calhoun’s kaleidoscope of cultural movements to shatter deterministic economic chronologies of modernity.