The generation of the Freedom Riders

The courageous Catherine Burks-Brooks passed in early July in Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of 83. The New York Times ran an extensive and moving obituary for her this weekend (link), and the piece is important reading in today's world of "forgetting" of our recent history of racist violence in the United States. Burks-Brooks and her fellow Freedom Riders risked their lives to bring Jim Crow racism and oppression to an end. Violent organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, abetted by segregationist public officials, did everything in their power to prevent change in the segregated south. And yet the Freedom Riders continued.

Burks-Brooks was an inspiring example in 1961 when, as a senior at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University, she joined with hundreds of other courageous young people in defying the Jim Crow South's stubborn refusal to comply with the 1946 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial segregation on interstate buses and trains (link). With leadership and support from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, nonviolent but determined groups of students boarded buses in defiance of racial segregation of seating. The violence that met these Freedom Riders was brutal and unchecked. 

And yet these young people persisted, and as a result of their courage and persistence the Kennedy administration finally asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce the law of the land. 

It is vital to recall that the struggle for justice and equality was not waged on "social media", and it was not simply a question of safely demonstrating in the streets. Rather, it was an organized resistance to injustice that exposed these young Americans to violence, jail, and occasional murder. Only three years later civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were brutally and viciously murdered in Mississippi. This atrocious crime occurred only months after the Mississippi murders of Medgar Evers, Clifton Walker, Henry Dee, and Charles Moore, and two years before the murder of Vernon Dahmer. Burks-Brooks herself was jailed several times and spent nearly a month in a brutal Mississippi state prison. The stakes were incredibly high, and these young people had the courage to rise to the task. 

It is a very sad fact that the most cherished goals of these young heroes from sixty years ago are still in doubt: full racial equality, and full rights of democratic participation and voting. The continuing effort in southern states to limit voting rights and to gerrymander districts to reduce the impact of African-American voters; the effort by politicians in states like Florida and Texas to tell "happy stories" about the history of slavery and racism in the region; the persisting disparities that exist across racial groups (of all incomes) with regard to health, education, employment, and property ownership -- all of these facts show that the work that brave young activists like Catherine Burks-Brooks and her contemporaries is not finished. And the threats and violence that she and others faced with equanimity should remind us that resisting injustice is never easy, never safe -- and yet permanently important for ourselves and future generations.

Governor DeSantis, how do you propose to address the wide gap in health system performance scores between black and white Floridians (link)? Are you satisfied that "Mortality amenable to health care (per 100,000 population)" for black Floridians (137) is 67% higher than that for white Floridians (82)? Do your job, Governor, and stop lying about the history of racism and slavery in the United States!

Regulatory failure in freight rail traffic

On any given day some 7,000 freight trains are in motion around the United States, with perhaps 70,000 individual freight cars and intermodal units in transit daily (link). (Here is the US DOT Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) website, which provides a fair amount of information about the industry.) Freight rail is big business, with record profits over the past several years. And it is occasionally an industry prone to accidents, failures, and disasters. Most recently was the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train, resulting in the release of a large amount of vinyl chloride, a flammable and toxic chemical, near the town of Palestine, Ohio. The full extent of this catastrophe is not yet known.

Derailments, crashes, fires, and explosions make the news. But there is a more insidious process at work as well: the relentless effort by the large freight rail companies to increase profits by increasing the volume of freight and reducing costs. And -- as is true in many other risky business operations -- reducing costs has worrisome consequences for safety (link). Reducing personnel is one way of reducing costs, and crew size on freight trains has been reduced substantially. There were only two crew members on the Palestine, Ohio train (engineer and conductor) that derailed, and the industry wants to preserve the freedom to reduce the cabin crew to a single engineer (link). Increasing the number of cars -- and therefore the length of individual trains -- is another way of reducing costs for a ton-mile of transportation; and sure enough, trains are now traveling around the country that are substantially more than a mile long. Another strategy for cost "containment" is the strategy of tightening operations in and around large rail yards, streamlining the process of re-mixing cars into trains with different destinations. And the tighter the schedules become, the more tightly-linked the system becomes. So a disruption in St. Louis can lead to congestion in Pittsburgh.

The railroad companies and the Association of American Railroads make the case that the rail safety safety record has improved significantly over recent years; link. And it is of course true that there is a business case for maintaining safe operations. However, it is plain that voluntary efforts at maintaining public safety are insufficient when they conflict directly with other business priorities.

Rail operations and business management plainly involve risks for the public; so government regulation of the industry is crucial. But the economic power of railroads -- today as well as in the 1880s -- allows the companies, their associations, and their lobbyists to block sensible regulations that plainly serve the interests of the public (plainly, at least, to neutral observers). Because railroads are largely a form of interstate commerce, states and local authorities have little or no ability to regulate safety. Instead, this authority is assigned to the Congress and the Department of Transportation Federal Railroad Administration. And yet the hazards created by railroads are inherently local, and local and state authorities have almost no jurisdiction.

Consider the photo above. It is a freight train stopped across an unguarded rural rail crossing in Michigan. The train will sit across the road for an extended period of time, from ten minutes to an hour. And the relatively few people who use the road to get to work, to take children to school, to go shopping or bowling (yes, we have bowling alleys in Michigan) -- these people will simply have to wait, or to take a circuitous route around the obstruction. Fortunately in this local instance in Michigan the blockages are relatively short and there are other routes that drivers can take.

But turn now to York, Alabama, as reported in the July 15, 2023 New York Times (link). Peter Eavis, Mark Walker, and Niraj Chokshi describe a chronic problem in this small town on a rail line owned by Norfolk Southern. "Freight trains frequently stop and block the roads of York, Ala., sometimes for hours. Emergency services and health care workers can't get in, and those trapped inside can't get out." "On a sweltering election day in June 2022, a train blockage lasted more than 10 hours, forcing many people, some old and ill, to shelter in an arts center." And the problem is getting worse, as freight trains become longer and longer, with more frequent (and longer) periods in which a train blocks a crossing.

The article makes the point that state and local laws aimed at regulating these blockages have been regularly overturned by the courts, and efforts to introduce Federal remedies have failed. "Congressional proposals to address the issue have failed to overcome opposition from the rail industry." The article indicates that the lobbying efforts of the rail companies and their industry associations are highly effective in shaping legislation and regulation that affects the industry. They report that the rail companies and the AAR have spent $454 million in lobbying over the past twenty years, including campaign contributions to key legislators. They also make the point that the extent of the problem of extended blockages of rail crossings is poorly documented, since there are more than 200,000 rail crossings and and only a low level of reporting of individual blockages. Long freight trains are part of the problem, because trains longer than a mile exceed the length of many sidings that were previously used to manage train traffic without blocking crossings.

This is a familiar problem -- the problem of industry capture of regulatory agencies through the use of their financial and political resources. The industry wants to have the freedom to organize operations as they see fit; and their first goal is to maintain and increase profits. The public needs regulatory agencies that depend on neutral expert assessment and rule-setting that protects the safety of the families who are affected by the industry; and yet -- as Charles Perrow argued in "Cracks in the Regulatory State", all too often the regulatory process defers to the business interests of the industry (link). He writes:

Almost every major industrial accident in recent times has involved either regulatory failure or the deregulation demanded by business and industry. For more examples, see Perrow (2011). It is hard to make the case that the industries involved have failed to innovate because of federal regulation; in particular, I know of no innovations in the safety area that were stifled by regulation. Instead, we have a deregulated state and deregulated capitalism, and rising environmental problems accompanied by growing income and wealth inequality. (210).

Blocked crossings are an inconvenience of everyday life for many people. But they can also lead to life-threatening situations when ambulances and fire vehicles cannot gain access to scenes of emergency. Leaving the problem of blocked crossings to the railroad companies -- rather than a sensible set of FRA rules and penalties -- is surely a prescription for a worsening problem over time. As Willie Lake, the mayor of York, put the point in the New York Times article: "They have no incentive" to make substantial changes in their operations to substantially improve the blocked-crossing problem. The FRA needs to provide clear and sensible regulations that give the companies the incentives needed to address the problem.

(The Washington Post ran an extensive story in May on blocked rail crossings, with examples from Leggett, Texas; link. The National Academy of Science is conducting a study of the safety implications of freight trains longer than 7,500 feet (link).)

Trump, Hitler, and the politics of legality

Christopher Browning is a noted and respected historian of the Nazi period and the Holocaust (link). His October 2022 article in the Atlantic on "the politics of legality" during Hitler's march to power is an extremely serious warning to all of us who care about our democracy in the United States (link). It is a brilliant and sobering analysis -- all the way down to the role played in Hitler's rise by "The Big Lie". Highly relevant to the situation of far-right extremism and MAGA in the US today is this shift of Hitler's strategy described by Browning:

Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch was that he needed to pursue revolution through “the politics of legality” rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy. As Hitler’s associate Joseph Goebbels said, the Nazis would come to the Reichstag, or Parliament, as wolves to the sheep pen. By 1929, the press empire of Alfred Hugenberg had embraced and even financed Hitler as a right-wing spokesperson, giving him nationwide exposure and recognition.

Hitler's "legal" seizure of power began with the irregular appointment of Hitler as chancellor in 1933. This office (with the support of President von Hindenburg) gave Hitler the powers he needed to legally suppress (and ultimately to violently eliminate) all opposition. (The term "legal revolution" derives from Karl Dietrich Bracher's account of the period; link.)

In short order, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were suspended. An extrajudicial power to arrest and detain people without trial voided normal due process, and this provided a legal basis for the Nazi concentration-camp system. In addition, non-Nazi state governments were deposed, and full legislative powers were vested in the chancellor instead of the Reichstag—in effect allowing rule by fiat. That enabled Hitler to disband labor unions, purge the civil service, and outlaw, one by one, opposing political parties. Within five months, Germany was a one-party dictatorship and a police state.

Browning did not envision a Hitler-like seizure of power in the United States, even as recently as fall 2022. Rather, he suggested that an authoritarian future for the US might take the form of an "illiberal democracy" along the lines of Orbán's Hungary. But given the disclosures offered in the New York Times and the Washington Post this week, Browning's prognosis seems woefully optimistic. Real anti-democratic extremists seem to be in control of the MAGA agenda, including pro-authoritarian firebrands like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.

Consider the New York Times analysis of the plans Donald Trump and his supporters have made for a possible Trump victory in 2024. The key goals of this "putsch" faction are summarized in the opening paragraphs of the Times article by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman (link).

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

This is a plan for MAGA dictatorship, sweeping aside all checks and balances within the Federal government. Given the rulings made in the recent past by Federal courts and the Supreme Court, citizens can have little confidence that the courts will intervene to preserve democracy. Like the extreme right in late-stage Weimar politics, MAGA activists and policy theorists work to demonize their opponents as socialists and enemies of the people. Here are Trump's words at a recent political rally in Michigan:

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”

This is fascist language.

The extremist policy advocates and MAGA think-tanks described in the Times article make their plans under an openly authoritarian legal theory: the unitary executive.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

Such a theory would give the strong-man president -- a Trump or a DeSantis, for example -- unconstrained power to carry out his agenda.

In the Washington Post during the same week Philip Bump adds to the Times analysis by analyzing worrisome shifts in public opinion about the value and efficacy of democratic institutions (link). After analyzing recent public-opinion results conducted by Associated Press-NORC indicating that only about 50% of adults believe that "democracy is working somewhat or extremely well", Bump highlights the substantial differences that exist between Republicans and Democrats on this and related questions. The clear indication is that Republican voters are turning away from traditional commitments to democratic institutions -- including the idea that elected officials are only in office to serve as stewards for the interests of the whole of US society. Bump writes:

What Trump proposes, though, is a collapse of the idea of a democratic government with temporary stewards, an extension of his own misunderstanding of the position he once held to a wide array of federal departments. If polling is any indicator, much or most of his party wouldn’t object.

These signals need to be a source of real alarm for anyone who cares about our constitutional democracy. There is a powerful anti-democratic movement that is determined to fundamentally destroy our democratic institutions and traditions, and it is gaining wide support among its followers. The stakes in the 2024 presidential election could not be higher.

The air traffic control system and ethno-cognition

Diane Vaughan's recent Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk is an important contribution to the literature on safety in complex socio-technical systems. The book is an ethnographic study of the workspaces and the men and women who manage the flow of aircraft throughout US airspace. Her ethnographic work for this study was extensive and detailed. She is interested in arriving at a representation of air traffic control arrangements as a system, and she pays ample attention to the legal and regulatory arrangements embodied in the Federal Aviation Administration as the administrator of this system. As an organizational sociologist, she understands full well that "institutions matter" -- the institutions and organizations that have been created and reformed over time have specific characteristics that influence the behavior of the actors who work within the system, and influence in turn the effectiveness and safety of the system. But her central finding is that it is the situated actors who do their work in control towers and flight centers who are critical to the resilience and safety of the system. And what is most important about their characteristics of work is the embodied social cognition that they have achieved through training and experience. She uses the term "ethno-cognition" to refer to the extended system of concrete and embodied knowledge that is distributed across the corps of controllers in air traffic control centers and towers across the country.

Vaughan emphasizes the importance of “situated action” in the workings of a complex socio-technological system: “the dynamic between the system’s institutional environment, the organization as a socio-technical system, and the controllers’ material practices, interpretive work, and the meanings the work has for them” (p. 11). She sees this intellectual frame as a bridge between the concrete activities in a control tower and the meso-level arrangements and material infrastructure within which the work proceeds. This is where "micro" meets macro and meso in the air traffic control system.

The key point here is that the skilled air traffic controller is not just the master of an explicit set of protocols and procedures. He or she has gained a set of cognitive skills that are “embodied” rather than formally represented as a system of formal rules and facts. “Collectively, controllers’ cultural system of knowledge is a set of embodied repertoires – cognitive, physical, emotional, and material practices – that are learned and drawn upon to craft action from moment to moment in response to changing conditions. In constructing the act, structure, culture, and agency combine” (p. 122). Vaughan's own process of learning through this extended immersion sounds a great deal like Michael Polanyi’s description in Personal Knowledge of the acquisition of “tacit knowledge” by a beginning radiologist; she learned to “see” the sky in the way that a trained controller saw it. The controllers have mastered a huge set of tacit repertoires that permit them to understand and control the rapidly changing air spaces around them.

A special strength of the book is the detailed attention Vaughan gives to the historicity and contingency of institutions and organizations. Vaughan’s approach is deliberately “multi-level”, including government agencies, institutions, organizations, and individuals in their workplaces. Vaughan takes full account of the fact that institutions change over time as a result of the actions of a variety of actors, and changes in the institutional settings have consequences for the workings of embedded technological systems. She points out, moreover, that these changes are almost always “patch-work” changes, involving incremental efforts to fit new technologies or team practices into existing organizational forms.  “Incrementally, problem-solving people and organizations inside the air traffic control system have developed strategies of resilience, reliability, and redundancy that provided perennial dynamic flexibility to the parts of the system structure, and they have improvised tools of repair to adjust innovations to local conditions, contributing to system persistence” (p. 9). Institutions and organizations change largely through processes of "social hacking" and adjustment, rather than wholesale redesign, and she finds that the small number of instances of efforts to fully redesign the system have failed.

Particularly valuable in Vaughan’s narrative is her fluid integration of processes and factors at the macro, meso, and micro levels. High-level features like economic pressures on airlines, budget constraints within the Federal government (e.g. delaying implementation of long-range radar in the air traffic control system; 83), and military imperatives on the movements of aircraft (83); meso-level features like the regulatory system for air traffic safety as it emerged and evolved; and micro-level features like the architecture of the workspaces of controllers over time and the practices and problem-solving abilities that were embodied in their work – all these levels are represented in almost every page of the book. And Vaughan points out that all of these processes have the potential of creating unanticipated system dysfunctions beyond their direct effects. Even the facts of the diffusion of high-speed commercial jets and the rise in military staffing demands during the Vietnam War had important and unanticipated system consequences for the air traffic control system.

Vaughan refers frequently to the causal role that “history” plays in complex technology systems like the air traffic control system. But she avoids the error of reification of “history” by carefully paraphrasing what this claim means to her: “History has a causal effect on the present only through the agency of multiple heterogeneous social actors and actions originating in different institutional and organizational locations and temporalities that intersect with a developing system and through its life course in unanticipated ways…. Causal explanations of historical events, institutions, and outcomes are best understood by storylike explanations that capture the sequential unfolding of events in and over time, revealing the interaction of structures and social actions that drive change” (p. 42). This clarification correctly disaggregates the causal powers of “history” into the actors, institutions, and processes whose influences over time have contributed to the current workings of the socio-technical system. Further, it provides a useful contribution to the literature on institutional change with its granular level of detail concerning the “career” of the air traffic control system over several decades. (Here she draws on the work of sociologists like Andrew Abbott on the role of temporality in social explanations.)

One illustration of Vaughan’s attention to historical details occurs in her account of the extended process of invention, design, test, and publicity undertaken by the Wright brothers. This narrative illustrates the multi-level influences that contributed to the establishment of a paradigm of heavier-than-air flight in the early decades of the twentieth century – individual innovation, networks of transmission of ideas, institutional context, and the authority and reputation of the magazine Scientific American (pp. 49-63). And, like Thomas Hughes' historical account of the development of electric power in the United States in Networks of Power, her account is fully attentive to the contingency and path-dependency of these processes. This material makes a genuine contribution to science and technology studies and to recent work in the history of technology. 

Vaughan sounds a cautionary note about the safety and resilience of the air traffic system, and its (usually) excellent record of preventing mid-air and on-ground collisions among aircraft. She has argued persuasively throughout the book that these features of safety and resilience depend crucially on the well-trained and experienced controllers who observe and control the airspace. But she notes as well the perennial desire of both private businesses and government agencies to squeeze costs and "waste" out of complex processes. In the context of the air traffic control system, this has meant trying to reduce the number of controllers through "streamlined" processes and more extensive technologies. Her reaction to these impulses is clearly a negative one: reducing staff in air traffic control towers is a very good way of making unlikely events like mid-air collisions incrementally more likely; and that fact translates into an increasing likelihood of loss of life (and the business and government losses associated with major disasters). We should not look at reasonable staffing levels in control towers as a "wasteful" organizational practice.

(Here is an earlier post on "Expert Knowledge" that is relevant to Vaughan's findings; link.)

Life and memory in Lviv

The tragic death of Victoria Amelina in Kramatorsk, Ukraine on June 27 in a Russian missile attack against civilian targets makes me think of her writings about Ukraine. Here is a good example -- "Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened" (link), published in Arrowsmith. Amelina refers to Timothy Snyder's use of the phrase "bloodlands" to refer to both the geography and the history of atrocity, genocide, and murder that unfolded over two decades across Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and the USSR, and that has now resumed in Ukraine. Here is a moving obituary in the Guardian (link).

Here are several sentences from "Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened" about Lviv:

My hometown is located right in the middle of the “bloodlands” — in western Ukraine. Lviv was founded in 1256 by Danylo, King of Ruthenia. However, the German-speaking world might remember it as Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Poles recall the same city as Lwów. During the too-long life of the Soviet Union, Lviv grew Russified: many of its new citizens called it L’vov.

My grandparents moved there in the 50s and 70s, leaving behind their own family stories about the deadly 30s and 40s in central and eastern Ukraine, which had been the epicenter of the genocidal famine. By the time they settled in Lviv, almost none of the city’s prewar inhabitants remained. Only a handful of natives might have offered a first-person account of what the city had been like before the war. In 1939, Lviv was home to about 110,000 Jews, comprising fully a third of its population. By 1945, fewer than a thousand survivors remained.

The Soviet system never commemorated the Holocaust. One reason for this is that once you define and identify one genocide, you can recognize other genocidal crimes. The Soviet empire didn’t want us to learn our history. Decades of Soviet education and censorship ensured that even after the USSR collapsed, many in Lviv failed to realize the striking proximity of the Holocaust.

It is piercingly sad to read these lines by such a talented young woman about her hometown in Lviv, and to know that she died in Kramatorsk, some 1,200 kilometers to the east, under atrocious missile attack by the Russian state. The tragedies of Ukraine seem never to end.

The city of Lviv exemplifies the turmoil of life in Poland and Ukraine over the course of the past century. Lviv, Lemberg, Lwów, L’vov -- each iteration represented a cultural and political shift of identities, and often a movement of families and peoples as well. And with the Holocaust, the killing of the vast majority of the Jews of Lviv changed the city from an important center of Jewish life into an emptiness. (Here is a historical overview of Jewish Lviv; link.)

Timothy Snyder's 2003 book, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 is important reading today. Here is a vignette of the many transformations of a single town in Galicia, Kolomya (Ukraine) -- roughly 200 kilometers from Lviv:

When the statue of Lenin in the Galician town of Kolomya was dismantled, its pedestal was seen to be constructed from Jewish tombstones. Kolomya, today, is a town in southwestern Ukraine. In 1939-41 and 1945-91 it was a town in southwestern Soviet Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944 a town in the Nazi Generalgouvernement, before the Second World War a town in Poland's Stanislawow slawow province, before the First World War a town in Austrian Galicia, before 1772 a town in the Polish Kingdom's Ruthenian province. Until the Final Solution of 1941-42, Kolomya was, whatever its rulers, a Jewish town. The absence of Jews, in Kolomya as throughout Eastern Europe, coincided for forty years with the presence of communist rule. (Kindle Locations 115-119)

The passage is significant for several reasons. The historical fact of the use by the Soviet regime of Jewish tombstones to provide the foundation for a statue of Lenin is entirely revealing about the persistent anti-semitism of the Soviet regime throughout its history. The demographic and cultural transformation of Kolomya following from the physical destruction of Kolomya's Jewish population was a permanent change in its history -- like the same circumstances in countless towns and cities in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. Kiev, Lviv, Berdichev, Miropol -- all fundamentally transformed by the murder of Ukraine's Jews. This is the fundamental tragedy captured in Vasily Grossman's 1943 essay "Ukraine without Jews" (link):

There is a long list of Ukrainian towns and villages where I found myself while working as a special correspondent for the paper Red Star. I was in Satrobel’sk, Svatov, Muntsisk, Tsapuika, Voroshilovgrad, Krasnodon, Ostro, Iasotin, Borispol, Baturin... I was in hundreds of villages, farms, settlements, and fishing outposts on the shores of the Desna and Dnieper, in steppe farms encircled by pastures, in solitary little tar houses existing in a constant shadow of huge pine forests, and in beautiful hamlets whose thatched roofs are hidden beneath canopies of fruit trees.

If one was to gather into a single place all of the stories and images that I witnessed during those days and months in Ukraine, it would amount to a horrifying book about colossal injustice: forced labour and secret beatings, children deported to Germany, burnt houses and looted warehouses, evictions onto squares and streets, pits where those suspected of having sympathy for or connections with partisans were shot, humiliations and mockery, vulgar cursing and bribes, drunken and erratic behaviour, and the bestial depravity of reckless, criminal people in whose hands rested the fate, life, integrity and property of many millions of Ukrainian people for two long years. There is no home in a single Ukrainian town or village where you will not hear bitter and evil words about the Germans, no home where tears have not flowed during these past two years; no home where people do not curse German fascism; no home without an orphan or widow. These tears and curses flow like streams to an immense river of collective grief and fury; day and night, its troubles and pain roar beneath a Ukrainian sky that has been darkened by the smoke of raging fires.

....

And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered. ("Ukraine without Jews")

Victoria Amelina sought to document the tragedy and atrocity that have once again engulfed Ukraine. The atrocious and lawless war of aggression initiated by the Russian Federation and its tyrant, Vladimir Putin rivals the crimes of Stalin and Hitler against the people of Ukraine. Once again innocent Ukrainian men, women, and children are being murdered, their cities and lives destroyed, and a new chapters of crimes against humanity are being written.

Victoria Amelina, your life ended too soon, and your courage is inspiring.

Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences

The third meeting of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences (ANPOSS) took place in Bangkok last week (link). It was a highly stimulating success. Organizers Chaiyan Rajchagool, Kanit (Mitinunwong) Sirichan, Yukti Mukdawijitra, and others put enormous effort into carrying it off, and host institutions Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University provided excellent coordination and facilities. But best were the papers and discussions that took place among scholars from many countries during the several days of the conference and associated meals. There was also a full day of papers delivered in Thai — evidence of real interest in the questions raised by the social sciences. 

For me the most stimulating and rewarding feature of the conference was its genuinely intercultural and international character. It was hugely interesting to discuss subjects of social change, methodology, or ontology with scholars from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, or China. And the very different historical, political, and cultural experiences of those different Asian zones of academic life inevitably stimulated new and different questions.

The experience of being in Thailand was itself a powerful one. The omnipresence of Buddhism as a cultural current is unmistakeable. But so is the level of inequality and poverty that Thailand still experiences. Talented young people are stymied by a lack of opportunity in education and employment. The legacy of social conflict during the time of the Red Shirt movement is still unresolved. And environmental degradation in Bangkok continues to outpace measures taken to improve water quality and pollution.

The profound problems the world faces today inevitably have to do with behavior, institutions, and the legacy of earlier disasters. So it is pressingly important for philosophers to make productive contributions to the efforts of political scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, public health experts, and economists to figure out how our many civilizations can bend the curve away from the catastrophes that are looming on the horizon — climate collapse, environmental degradation, rising human poverty and misery, authoritarian political regimes, and war. Collaborations like ANPOSS can make a genuine difference. And if philosophy is of any enduring importance, it needs to be focused on making a practical difference in the world.

Thanks, then, to the philosophers and social science colleagues who are making such strong efforts to facilitate productive international discussions about the nature and impact of the social sciences!

Eric Hobsbawm's history of the Historians' Group

photo: Hobsbawm at work

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. This was a group of leading British historians who were members of the British Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1978 Hobsbawm wrote a historical memoir of the group recalling the important post-war decade of 1946-1956, and Verso Press has now republished the essay online (link). The essay is worth reading attentively, since some of the most insightful British historians of the generation were represented in this group.

The primary interest of Hobsbawm's memoir, for me anyway, is the deep paradox it seems to reveal. The Communist Party was not well known for its toleration of independent thinking and criticism. Political officials in the USSR, in Comintern, and in the European national Communist parties were committed to maintaining the party line on ideology and history. The Historians' Group and its members were directly affiliated with the CPGB. And yet some of Britain's most important social historians were members of the Historians' Group. Especially notable were Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Raphael Samuel, Rodney Hilton, Max Morris, J. B. Jefferys, and Edmund Dell. (A number of these historians broke with the CPGB after 1956.) Almost all of these individuals are serious and respected historians in the first rank of twentieth-century social history, including especially Hobsbawm, Hill, E.P. Thompson, Dobb, and Hilton. So the question arises: to what extent did the dogmatism and party discipline associated with the Communist Party since its origins influence or constrain the historical research of these historians? How could the conduct of independent, truthful history survive in the context of a "party line" maintained with rigorous discipline by party hacks? How, if at all, did British Marxist historians escape the fate of Lysenko? 

The paradox is clearly visible in Hobsbawm's memoir. Hobsbawm is insistent that the CP members of the Historians' Group were loyal and committed communists: "We were as loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any, if only because we felt that Marxism implied membership of the Party." And yet he is equally insistent that he and his colleagues maintained their independence and commitment to truthful historical inquiry when it came to their professional work:

Second, there was no 'party line' on most of British history, and what there was in the USSR was largely unknown to us, except for the complex discussions on 'merchant capital' which accompanied the criticism of M. N. Pokrovsky there. Thus we were hardly aware that the 'Asiatic Mode of Production' had been actively discouraged in the USSR since the early 1930s, though we noted its absence from Stalin's Short History. Such accepted interpretations as existed came mainly from ourselves— Hill's 1940 essay, Dobb's Studies, etc.—and were therefore much more open to free debate than if they had carried the by-line of Stalin or Zhdanov....

This is not to imply that these historians pursued their research in a fundamentally disinterested or politically neutral way. Rather, they shared a broad commitment to a progressive and labor-oriented perspective on British history. And these were the commitments of a (lower-case) marxist interpretation of social history that was not subordinate to the ideological dictates of the CP:

Third, the major task we and the Party set ourselves was to criticise non-Marxist history and its reactionary implications, where possible contrasting it with older, politically more radical interpretations. This widened rather than narrowed our horizons. Both we and the Party saw ourselves not as a sect of true believers, holding up the light amid the surrounding darkness, but ideally as leaders of a broad progressive movement such as we had experienced in the 1930s.... Therefore, communist historians—in this instance deliberately not acting as a Party group—consistently attempted to build bridges between Marxists and non-Marxists with whom they shared some common interests and sympathies. 

So Hobsbawm believed that it was indeed possible to be both Communist as well as independent-minded and original. He writes of Dobb's research: "Dobb's Studies which gave us our framework, were novel precisely because they did not just restate or reconstruct the views of 'the Marxist classics', but because they embodied the findings of post-Marx economic history in a Marxist analysis." And: "A third advantage of our Marxism—we owe it largely to Hill and to the very marked interest of several of our members, not least A. L. Morton himself, in literature—was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These points are offered to support the idea that the historical research of the historians of this group was not dogmatic or Party-dictated. And Hobsbawm suggests that this underlying independence of mind led to a willingness to sharply criticize the Party and its leaders after the debacle of 1956 in Hungary. 

But pointed questions are called for. How did historians in this group react to credible reports of a deliberate Stalinist campaign of starvation during collectivization in Ukraine in 1932-33, the Holodomor? Malcolm Muggeridge, a left journalist with a wide reputation, had reported on this atrocity in the Guardian in 1933 (link). And what about Stalin's Terror in 1936-1938, resulting in mass executions, torture, and the Gulag for "traitors and enemies of the state"? How did these British historians react to these reports? And what about the 1937 show trials and executions of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov, along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent persons? These facts too were available to interested readers outside the USSR; the Moscow trials are the subject of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, published in 1941. Did the historians of the Historians' Group simply close their eyes to these travesties? And where does historical integrity go when one closes his eyes? 

Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and many ex-communist intellectuals have expressed the impossible contradictions contained in the idea of "a committed Communist pursuing an independent and truth-committed inquiry" (link, link, link). One commitment or the other must yield. And eventually E. P. Thompson came to recognize the same point; in 1956 he wrote a denunciation of the leadership of the British Communist Party (link), and he left the Communist Party in the same year following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. 

Hobsbawm's own career shows that Hobsbawm himself did not confront honestly the horrific realities of Stalinist Communism, or the dictatorships of the satellite countries. David Herman raises the question of Hobsbawm's reactions to events like those mentioned here in his review of Richard Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (link). The picture Herman paints is appalling. Here is a summary assessment directly relevant to my interest here:

However, the notable areas of silence -- about Jewishness and the crimes of Communism especially -- are, ultimately, devastating. Can you trust a history of modern Europe which is seriously misleading about the French and Russian Revolutions, which barely touches on the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution, which has so little to say about women and peasants, religion and nationalism, America and Africa?

And what, finally, can we say about Hobsbawm's view of Soviet Communism? In a review called "The piety and provincialism of Eric Hobsbawm", the political philosopher, John Gray, wrote that Hobsbawm's writings on the 20th century are "highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism." Tony Judt wrote that, "Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age." Thanks to Richard Evans's labours it is hard to dispute these judgments. (199-200)

Surely these silences are the mark of an apologist for the crimes of Stalinism -- including, as Herman mentions, the crimes of deadly anti-semitism in the workers' paradise. Contrary to Hobsbawm, there was indeed a party line on the most fundamental issues: the Party's behavior was to be defended at all costs and at all times. The Terror, the Gulag, the Doctors' Plot -- all were to be ignored.

Koestler's protagonist Rubashov in Darkness at Noon reflects on the reasons why the old Bolsheviks would have made the absurd confessions they offered during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s:

The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats -- and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.  They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves.  There was no way back for them.  Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game.  The public expected no swan-songs of them.  They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night....

This is the subordination of self to party that was demanded by the Communist Party; and it is still hard to see how a committed member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s could escape the logic of his or her commitment. Personal integrity as an intellectual was not part of the bargain. So the puzzle remains: how could a Hobsbawm or Thompson profess both intellectual independence and commitment to the truth in the histories they write, while also accepting a commitment to do whatever is judged necessary by Party officials to further the cause of the Revolution?

Regrettably, there is a clear history in the twentieth century of intellectuals choosing political ideology over intellectual honesty. Recall Sartre's explanation of his silence about the Gulag and the Soviet Communist Party, quoted in Anne Applebaum's Gulag: 

“As we were not members of the Party,” he once wrote, “it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrels over the nature of the system, provided no events of sociological significance occurred.” On another occasion, he told Albert Camus that “Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.” (18)

So much better is the independence of mind demonstrated by an Orwell, a Koestler, a Camus, or a Muggeridge in their willingness to recognize clearly the atrocious realities of Stalinism.

(Here is an earlier post on the journal created by the Historians' Group, Past & Present; link. And here are several earlier posts about post-war Marxist historians; link, link, link.) 

Aldon Morris on the Civil Rights movement

 

Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984) is a highly valuable treatment of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s through early 1960s. The book is a work of history and sociology, and it is deeply informed by the sociology of social movements. (It is significant that Morris and Doug McAdam were fellow graduate students in sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook. McAdam's dissertation and its 1982 published version, Political Process, are cited in the book. It is also interesting that sociologist Charles Perrow was one of Morris's graduate advisors at Stony Brook. Perrow's emphasis on how organizations work seems to have been a useful influence for Morris.)

Here is how Morris formulates the theoretical perspective that underlies his treatment of the US civil rights movement. It is a perspective on mass mobilization and social movements that gives full attention to the ordinary human beings who were the subject of racial oppression; and it emphasizes the essential role played in mobilization by effective local and regional organizations.

In the present inquiry an indigenous perspective is used to study how the modern civil rights movement actually worked. The assumption is that mass protest is a product of the organizing efforts of activists functioning through a well-developed indigenous base. A well-developed indigenous base includes the institutions, organizations, leaders, communication networks, money, and organized masses within a dominated group. Such a base also encompasses cultural elements -- music, oratory, and so on -- of a dominated group that play a direct role in the organization and mobilization of protest.... A central concern of the indigenous perspective is to examine the ways in which organizers transform indigenous resources into power resources and marshals them in conflict situations to accomplish political ends. (xii)

As this passage makes clear, Morris places organizations and an energized mass population of black Southerners at the center of his analysis. He provides information about the SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, HFS, SCEF, and FOR -- the strategies and levers of power available to each of them, and the complicated relationships that existed among them. (Full names and dates of the organizations are provided below.)

And, significantly, Morris goes into a reasonable amount of detail describing the strategies of protest organizations and their mass followers in different locations: Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, Shreveport, Greensboro, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia. The Birmingham experience is described in particular detail. This use of multiple case studies is important, because it establishes that Morris is not aiming merely to provide an explanatory template of mobilization; instead, he wants to use the research tools of the historian to see how mobilization unfolded in specific times and places. And this means documenting the organizations, leaders, and strategies that were present in different places.

One relative blindspot in Origins is its inclination to be urban-centered. The bulk of the protests and activism described in the book take place in cities across the South. But the struggle for racial equality -- including especially voting rights -- had an important reality in the rural South. Morris refers briefly to the circumstances of rural black people in the Jim Crow South that made mass mobilization extremely difficult in rural locations: 

The rural setting was hardly ideal for organized, sustained collective action by blacks. In the rural milieu blacks experienced grinding poverty that closely tied them to the land and to the white man. Whites usually arranged the economy so that blacks always owed them money and were forever dependent on them for food and shelter. Outnumbered, defenseless, and with no hope of protection from the law, blacks usually avoided overt conflict with whites simply to stay alive. On the rural plantations, furthermore, blacks seldom experienced themselves as a tightly knit, cohesive group, because they were widely dispersed across the countryside. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier described rural black communities as follows (78):

"The cabins are scattered in the open country so that the development of village communities has been impossible. Consequently, communication between rural families as well as the development of rural institutions has been limited by the wide dispersion of the population."

However, some of the most difficult developments in the struggle for equality in the South took place in rural counties (for example, Lowndes County, Alabama). This is especially true in the struggle for the right to vote, and the persistent campaigns of voter registration organized by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were a highly important step in the progress of the movement. Here is how Hasan Kwame Jeffries describes Lowndes County in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt:

Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the political process.  There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in the overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. (Introduction)

Origins gives almost no attention to these rural voter registration drives, but they were an important part of the history of the movement. Bob Moses is mentioned once, but no detail is offered for the nuts and bolts of mobilization under these special circumstances. (It is true that much of that activism occurred after the end of Morris's narrative, which is confined to 1953-1963. The SNCC Freedom Summer initiative took place in 1964.)

The special strengths of Morris's book are its detailed focus on the workings of the major civil rights organizations during this crucial period of US history; his emphasis on the essential role played in the movement by masses of highly committed ordinary people in supporting mass meetings, boycotts, demonstrations, marches, and strikes; and the strategic and facilitating role played by the Black church in almost all of these episodes of contention. The book also does an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how the struggle for equality played out somewhat differently in different locations. Different local organizations, different leaders, and different circumstances for ordinary local people led to a fascinating degree of local variation. This use of detailed cases throughout the book offsets the inclination to subsume "struggles for Civil Rights in the South" under a single template of homogeneous processes and outcomes. There were deep similarities, of course, in the experience of the Jim Crow regime across the whole region; but there were also important local differences in the way that struggles for equality were constructed and carried out. Morris also documents the ways in which experiences in one city influenced strategies and outcomes in other cities -- for example, the successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge was influential on leaders and organizations in Montgomery when the struggle to reform the bus system came to a head in Montgomery.

Is Origins chiefly a theoretical exercise, illustrating a sociological theory of social movements? Or is it a work of historical research, making use of sociological ideas but fundamentally dependent on reaching an understanding of what the facts were about successes and failures in different parts of the South? In my view, this is what differentiates Morris's book from McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Morris's book is seriously committed to uncovering the important historical details, whereas McAdam's book is an exposition of "latest thinking" on the sociology of social movements, with illustrations drawn from the history of the Civil Rights movement. McAdam's book is historical sociology; Morris's book is sociologically informed history. Both approaches are valuable. But ideally, interested readers would read both books, and keep track of both theoretical insights about mechanisms and important but contingent features of the historical experience of places as diverse as Nashville and Baton Rouge. Each work is a perfect companion to the other for anyone interested in understanding better the course of the movement for racial equality in the United States.

And for the reader in 2023, Morris's account of the full-scale effort by southern legislatures, governors, and business groups to destroy the NAACP (26-39) and to refuse compliance with Federal court mandates is disturbingly familiar from today's headlines. Today's southern governors and legislatures are highly focused on reducing voting rights for African-Americans (gerrymandering, long lines for voting, voter ID rules, limitations on absentee ballots ...). And the war on "critical race theory" and the 1619 project sounds very much like the organized resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

-----

Here is a list of the primary organizations that Morris discusses:

Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC, 1957)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910)

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942)

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960)

Highlander Folk School (HFS, 1932)

Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF, 1938)

Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR, 1915) 

Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA, 1955)

Inter Civic Council  (ICC, 1956)

Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, 1956)

How "micro" does the sociology of social movements need to go?

Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 is recognized as a leading sociological study of the US Civil Rights movement. With the addition of the new introduction to the 1999 edition, the book provides a cutting-edge treatment of the movement from the point of view of the field of contentious politics. McAdam offers three broad families of social mechanisms intended to account for the success of mobilization of groups with a grievance about the status quo:

Increasingly, one finds scholars from various countries and nominally different theoretical traditions emphasizing the importance of the same three broad sets of factors in analyzing the origins of collective action. These three factors are: 1) the political opportunities and constraints confronting a given challenger; 2) the forms of organization (informal as well as formal) available to insurgents as sites for initial mobilization; and 3) the collective processes of interpretation, attribution and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action. (viii)

And McAdam holds that these three factors help to account for the dramatic rise in Civil Rights activism, protest, and strategic choices of the movement across the South in the 1950s into the early 1960s. He asks the key question: “What led normally accepting African-Americans both in Montgomery and throughout the South to risk their livelihoods and their lives in support of civil rights?”. This is the theoretically central issue of mobilization: what factors facilitate mass mobilization around a set of interests or grievances?

Given the diversity of local situations in cities, towns, and farms across the South, we can speculate that the answer to this question will be different in different locales. But significantly, McAdam provides very little "micro-sociology" of the development of engagement on the part of ordinary African-American people making their lives in various places. He writes about the significance of churches, colleges, and the NAACP as "the organizational base of the movement" (125), but he goes into little detail about the activities and resources associated with these institutions and organizations. He writes:

Representing the most organized segments of the southern black population, the churches, colleges, and local NAACP chapters possessed the resources needed to generate and sustain an organized campaign of social insurgency. (128)

But how did these organizations actually act during the critical period; how were their actions different in different settings; and how did this influence rising activism on the part of ordinary people? What were the local processes that led to local mobilizations? His answer is a general one:

On one level, then, the importance of the churches, schools, and NAACP chapters in the generation of insurgency can be attributed to their role as established interactional networks facilitating the "bloc recruitment" of movement participants. That is, by building the movement out of established institutions, insurgent leaders were able to recruit en masse along existing lines of interaction, thereby sparing themselves the much more difficult task of developing a membership from scratch. (129)

This is a general formulation of a social mechanism. But it is not a specific and factual account of "recruitment" in a particular time and place -- for example, Montgomery prior to the bus boycott. Rather, McAdam emphasizes the idea that ordinary people saw it as their church-created duty to participate in protest. McAdam treats the church, colleges, and local chapters of the NAACP chiefly as "network" sites, where potential participants in the activist movement were located, where they further developed their claims and commitments, and where they encouraged each other in protest.

The general hypotheses provided within the current literature of contentious politics is valuable enough. But we would like to know more about variation: were the dynamics of the Black church different in Montgomery and Little Rock? Were local NAACP chapters different in their behavior or engagement, and did these differences result in differences in level and kind of activism in their surrounding communities?

Social historians of the Civil Rights movement go into much more granular detail about the movement. In greater or lesser detail, the social historians provide readers with insight into specific episodes of mobilization, conflict, and adjustment. They provide us with relatively detailed case studies of these episodes, with a reasonable amount of detail about background circumstances, existing organizations, the leadership available to the black community, instigating events, and the level of grievance and activism present in the population. For example, Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement provides substantial detail about the individuals, leaders, and organizations that played important roles in the mobilization of support for movement goals in a variety of locations; Hasan Kwame Jeffries' excellent book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt describes the origins of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization among black rural "tenant farmers"; and Lance Hill's Deacons for Defense does similar work in his analysis of the mobilization of rural African-American people in organized self-defense. A detailed history of particular episodes -- the Montgomery bus boycott, voter registration drives in rural Mississippi, 1960 (link) -- would give the reader of McAdam's book a much more substantial understanding of the mechanisms and processes through which activism and insurgency worked out through ordinary people and local institutions. But there is very little of this kind of detail in McAdam's treatment of the Civil Rights movement. For all its emphasis on the need for accounts of the specific mechanisms through which mobilization, coordination, and protest occurred, not very much concrete detail is provided in the study. The level of aggregation at which McAdam's analysis proceeds is "the South"; whereas we might imagine that the real nuts and bolts of the movement took place in places as diverse as Selma, Little Rock, Montgomery, and the cotton fields and hamlets of Lowndes County.

This really is the point of the discussion here. McAdam's book functions largely to lay out "theories of the middle range" about the factors that facilitate or inhibit mobilization around shared grievances, and he illustrates these theories with examples from the history of civil rights activism in the South during the time period. The central interest of the book is theoretical and explanatory, and it is illuminating. But we can imagine a different kind of study that would incorporate much more attention to the specifics of the processes and events of mobilization in various places across the South. Such a study would result in a book consisting of a handful of moderately detailed case studies, along with sociological commentary on the events and processes that are uncovered in these various episodes. 

It is suggestive that Dynamics of Contention, co-authored in 2001 by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, takes just such an approach -- sociological theorizing embedded within detailed exposition of important case studies of contention. And given the emphasis that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly give in the 2001 book on contingency and variation across cases, we might argue that McAdam's study of the Civil Rights movement is couched at too high a level of generalization after all. It would be more instructive if it provided a more granular account of a number of episodes of mobilization, including successes and failures. (This is the reason for returning to Alain Touraine's research on the Polish Solidarity movement (post): Touraine's team did in fact engage in a granular and disaggregated study of the many strands of organization and activism that contributed ultimately to the national Solidarity movement.)

Touraine's method of "sociological intervention" applied to contentious politics

Alain Touraine has been one of the most prolific sociologists in France for at least six decades. Of particular interest to me is his study of the Solidarity Movement in Poland in 1980-1981. In research reported in Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980-81 Touraine (along with François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki) undertook to understand the occurrence, rise, and consolidation of the Solidarity Movement at that moment in Polish history. (An earlier post provides some discussion of this work; link.) This research is a contribution to the sociology of contentious politics, and it is especially noteworthy for the methodology that the research teams pursued.

The Solidarity Movement was a remarkable instance of broad popular mobilization within a Communist dictatorship. As students of contention are common to point out, grievances and discontent are to be found almost everywhere; but organized protest, struggle, and resistance are rare. Successful concerted collective resistance is the exception rather than the rule. So the key scientific problem is to try to discover how this successful mass mobilization came about, and that means conducting investigations to -- 

• identify the diverse motivations and grievances that individual workers experienced in the late 1970s;
• identify the social mechanisms that allowed groups of workers to articulate their grievances and goals together; 
• identify the processes of aggregation through which diverse "insurgent" groups in many locations came together into national and sub-national groups; and 
• observe the processes through which various groups and leaders arrived at collective strategic and tactical plans through which to attempt to achieve their goals in the face of the armed power of the authoritarian state that Poland possessed at that time. 

Or in short, how, why, and through what mechanisms did mobilization and protest emerge?

The approach that Touraine's group took in attempting to discover answers to these questions was a deliberately granular approach. Rather than focusing on high-level statements of grievances, exhortations, and proposed plans of actions by nationally recognized leaders, the Touraine group recognized that this movement took shape through activist participants at the factory and local levels, and that the ideas, grievances, and mental frameworks about possible reforms that would ultimately become the "Solidarity Manifesto" took shape through conversations and debates at the local levels. Accordingly, the research teams gave significant weight to the processes of thought-change that were underway in six industrial centers: Gdansk, Katowice, Warsaw, Szezecin, Wroclaw, and Lodz. 

Solidarity was not simply a social and political force which modified the course of Polish history. It was, and is, a movement, a collective will, and its significance goes far beyond the results it has obtained. When the dominated protest and seek liberation, their hopes are never entirely realised: the shadows cast by history remain. But great upsurges like Solidarity bring with them at least the certainty that the behaviour of the dominated is never totally determined by the dominant forces. (5)

The research also paid attention, of course, to the leadership conversations and debates that were occurring within the national movement. But the heart of their analysis derives from the "sociological interventions" at the level of the regional groups of activist workers. Touraine writes, 

Because a social movement challenges a situation, it is always the bearer of normative values and orientations. Rather than enclosing the group in a reflexion upon itself, the technique involves opening it up so that it can experiences, in conditions which one might describe as experimental, the practices of the social group or movement to which it sees itself as belonging. (7)

This method resembles the use of focus groups to sort out attitudes, beliefs, and values within a target population; but it is more than that. It is critical and constructive, in the sense that it seeks to elicit from participants the more articulated versions of their beliefs, goals, and grievances. And Touraine suggests that this method is especially relevant for treatment of a social movement, because the ideas and values of participants in a social movement are themselves in a process of change and articulation. The method involves several "discussion leaders" who work to elicit ideas from the group; articulate those ideas in writing; and come back for further discussion and debate in a subsequent meeting. Here is how Marcin Frybes describes the method of "sociological intervention" (link).

The sociological intervention consists in organizing meetings of groups (composed of eight to fifteen people) in order to discuss a specific issue (which had been proposed and formalized by the sociologists). The group of intervention is not a real group of militants. It brings together individuals who share either the same commitment or the same kind of experience, but who, if it is possible, do not know other members of the group. The Sociological Intervention involves having the same group meet in a neutral area on several (ten or more) occasions in order for them to be able to propose some analytical schemas representing the historical dynamics and the different components of the action (the logic of the action and the levels of the action). During every sociological intervention, the sessions (which take 2 or 3 hours) could be open or closed. (72)

There are two noteworthy aspects of this method. 

First is the localism that it supports. It is entirely possible that the articulations of grievance, goal, and values that emerge from Gdansk will be different from those that emerge from Warsaw. And this is a sociologically important fact; a social movement is not homogeneous across regions and workplaces. 

The second is the interactiveness that the method implies between researcher and "subject". Touraine's view appears to be that the results of these "interventions" come closer to a truthful reflection of the political perceptions and values of the participants than would a survey instrument or a traditional focus group. It is analogous to an in-depth conversation with a group of men and women on the subject of gender equality -- superficial views may be expressed to start, and then more considered and reflective views emerge. But the critic might argue that the investigators have injected their own frameworks into the conversation in ways that lead to a less authentic representation of the political consciousness of the workers of Gdansk or Warsaw. (Frybes refers to subsequent criticisms along these lines; 77.) But Touraine justifies the validity of this method in these terms:

This work of self-analysis does, however, have its limits. Every actor is an ideologist, in the sense that he produces a representation of the situation in which he finds himself, and that that representation corresponds to his own interests. No actor can become a disinterested analyst. The researcher must therefore intervene more directly. But at this point a double difficulty arises. On the one hand, if he adopts the attitude of a remote and objective observer, he cannot reach the very thing which he seeks to understanding: the coldness of objectivity will hold him back from the heat of the social movement. Conversely, if he identifies with the actors' struggle, he ceases to be an analyst and becomes nothing more than a doctrinaire ideologist; in this case, his role becomes entirely negative. The method's response to this difficulty is to say that the researcher must identify not with the actors' struggle in itself, but with the highest possible meaning of that struggle, which is nothing other than the social movement. (7)

The method is defended, that is, because it helps to elucidate the process of the formation of the collective will that eventually characterized the movement. And this implies that Touraine believes the active and critical nature of the research -- the open-ended discussions with the various groups, and the effort to formulate these ideas in writing -- illuminates the processes through which the agency of workers and other participants in a social movement find their ground in the processes of contention in which they are involved.