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New Social Movements "New Social Movements"of the Early NineteenthCentury CRAIG CALHOUN SOMETIMEAFTER I968, analysts and participants began to speak of "new social movements" that worked outside formal institu- tional channels and emphasized lifestyle, ethical, or "identity" concerns ratherthan narrowlyeconomic goals. A variety of ex- amples informed the conceptualization.Alberto Melucci (I988: 247), for instance, cited feminism, the ecology movement or "greens," the peace movement, and the youth movement.Others added the gay movement, the animal rights movement, and the antiabortionand prochoice movements. These movements were allegedly new in issues, tactics, and constituencies. Above all, they were new by contrastto the labor movement,which was the paradigmatic"old" social movement,and to Marxismand social- ism, which assertedthat class was the centralissue in politics and that a single political economic transformationwould solve the whole rangeof social ills. They were new even by comparisonwith conventional liberalism with its assumptionof fixed individual Craig Calhounis Professorof Sociology and History at the Universityof North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Earlierversions of this paper were presentedin 1991 to the Social Science History Association, the Departmentof Sociology at the University of Oslo, and the Programin ComparativeStudy of Social Trans- formationsat the Universityof Michigan. The authoris gratefulfor comments from members of each audience and also for research assistance from Cindy Hahamovitch. Social Science History 17:3 (Fall I993) Copyright? I993 by the Social Science History Association. ccc oi45-5532/93/$I.50. 386 SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY identities and interests. The new social movements thus chal- lenged the conventionaldivision of politics into left and right and broadenedthe definitionof politics to includeissues thathad been consideredoutside the domainof political action (Scott 1990). These new social movements(NSMs) grewpartly from the New Left and related studentmovements of the I96os. The conceptu- alization of their novelty was part of the movementsthemselves as well as of the academic analyses that (primarilyin Europe) took debateon these movementsas an occasion to reformor reject Marxist theory and social democraticpolitics. The emphasis on novelty was extendedto claims of epochalchange when the NSMs were taken as signs of postindustrialor postmoder society. In this paper,however, I arguethat the historicalclaim implicitin the idea of new social movements(as in the ideas of postmodernism andpostindustrialism) is specious. I explorethe majordistinguish- ing characteristicsattributed to NSMs in the recent literatureand show that these fit very well the many movementsthat flourished in the late eighteenth and especially early nineteenthcenturies. My point is not just negative, however;I do not suggest that we abandonthe notion thatNSMs are distinctiveto the late twentieth century. Abandoningthe false historicalclaim enables us to understand better the whole modem historyof social movements. This is so in three senses. First, as Tarrow(I989) has suggested, many of the characteristicsdescribed in the flourishingmovements of the I96os and after may stem from the newness of each movement ratherthan from novel featuresof the whole wave of movements. In other words, all movementsin theirnascent period-including the labor movement and social democracy-tend to fit certain aspects of the NSM model. Second, we are better preparedto analyze all social movementsif we pay attentionto the inherent plurality of their forms, contents, social bases, and meaning to participantsand do not attemptto graspthem in terms of a single model definedby laboror revolutionarymovements, or a single set of instrumentalquestions about mobilization. Within any historical period, at least in the modem era, we can identifya whole field of social movementsshaped by their relationshipsto each other and appealingto different,though overlapping, potential participants. Of the variousmovements in such a field, we can fruitfullyask the kinds of questions pioneeredby new social movement theory- New Social Movements 387 about identity politics, the possibility of thinkingof movements as ends in themselves, and so forth-and not just those of re- source mobilizationor Marxism. Third, if we abandonboth the developmentalismthat treats early nineteenth-centurymovements as either precursorsto the laterconsolidation of labor and social- ism or else as historicalsidetracks, and the oppositerefusal to look for macrohistoricalpatterns, we can begin to explorewhat factors determinewhether (in specific settings)periods are characterized by proliferationor consolidationor expansionor contractionin the social movementfield as a whole. Social movement fields include many differentkinds of move- ments; this diversity and the interrelationshipsamong different movements are obscured by overly narrowdefinitions of social movements. Tilly, for example, approachesmovements in terms of an analysis of collective action with "five big components: interest, organization, mobilization, opportunity,and collective action itself" (I978: 7); this leaves out self-understandingand emphasizes instrumentalpursuits. Similarly, Tarrow,Tilly, and others have built the idea of conflict and opposition to "estab- lished authorities"into their approachesto social movements- as part of "protest"in Tarrow's(I988) case and "contention"in Tilly's (1978, 1986).1 This focuses their attention on movements with strong economic and political agendasand away from more "cultural"ones. Touraine'sdefinition goes nearlyto the opposite extreme: social movements are normativelyoriented interactions between adversarieswith conflictinginterpretations and opposed models of a shared cultural field; in his view NSMs contended with other groups in civil society ratherthan with the state (I98I: 31-32).2 This is a helpful corrective, but we should not prejudge the questionof orientationto the state. Forone thing, this is a two- way street. Statesare institutionallyorganized in ways thatprovide recognition for some identities and arenasfor some conflicts and freeze others out. States themselvesthus shape the orientationsof NSMs as well as the field of social movementsmore generally. The key point is that it is misleadingto compartmentalizereli- gious movements, for example, apartfrom more stereotypically social or political ones. Religious movements may have politi- cal and economic agendas-particularly when politics is not seen as exclusively a matterof relationsto the state. More basically, as E. P. Thompson (I968) showed clearly, religious and labor 388 SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY movementscan influenceeach other, compete for adherents,and complementeach other in the lives of some participants;in short, they can be part of the same social movement field.3 Part of the problem is that much of the traditionalanalysis of social movements (and collective action more generally)has ignored or explicitly set aside questions of culture or the interpretationof meaning. This tends to deflect attentionaway from those move- ments concernedlargely with values, norms, language,identities, and collective understandings-includingthose of movementpar- ticipantsthemselves-and towardthose that focus instrumentally on changing political or economic institutions.Social movement analystshave also often avoidedaddressing emotions, perhapsfor fear of associationwith discreditedaccounts of mass psychology. For present purposes, it is better to see social movementsas in- cluding all attemptsto influencepatterns of culture, social action, and relationshipsin ways thatdepend on the participationof large numbers of people in concerted and self-organized (as distinct from state-directedor institutionallymandated) collective action. Both the wide rangeof recent social movementsand the litera- ture labeling them NSMs encouragesuch a broaderview. Rather than dismissing NSM theory because of its historical misrepre- sentation, we should see the importanceof the issues it raises for understandingsocial movementsgenerally. "Identity politics" and similar concerns were never quite so much absent from the field of social movementactivity-even in the heydaysof liberalparty politics or organizedtrade union struggle-as they were obscured from conventionalacademic observation. Particularly after I848, just as socialism became more "scientific,"so social scientistslost sight of the traditionsof directaction, fluid and shiftingcollective identities, and communitarianand otherattempts to overcomethe means/ends divisionof moreinstrumental movement organization (Calhoun 1989). The secularism of academics particularlyand post-Enlightenmentintellectuals generally may have made collec- tive actionbased on religiousand othermore spiritualorientations appear of a differentorder from the "real" social movement of trade-union-basedsocialism or from liberal democracy.Nation- alism was often treated as a regressive deviation rather than a moder form of social movement and identity formation.Early feminism attractedrelatively little scholarly attentionuntil later feminism promptedits rediscovery. New Social Movements 389 In short, one kind of movement-formally organized, in- strumentalaction aimed at economic or institutionallypolitical goals-was relativelynew and ascendantthrough much of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and has often been mis- identified as simply a progressivetendency, the rationalfuture of politics, or even insurgentpolitics. This patternwas
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