Protest, Agitation, Social movements, Collective action, Revolution

The Ladder: From Dissent to Revolution

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• Every episode of collective dissatisfaction does not automatically qualify as a “social movement” or a “revolution” — sociology treats these as points on a single ascending ladder of organisation, continuity, and ambition, and the difference between rungs is what most examination questions on this topic are actually testing.
• Dissent is the starting point: ideas or activities that diverge from what currently prevails in a society, expressed as disagreement rather than as organised action.
  • The struggle against untouchability in India, for instance, began the moment those who suffered it started openly voicing disagreement with the practice — before any organised resistance existed.
• Collective action is any action taken by a number of people in pursuit of a shared interest — a single strike, a boycott, a demonstration — and it can be brief, spontaneous, and entirely unorganised.
• Protest is dissent made public: a social process of opposition to a person, group, or the wider social order, which may operate at the individual or collective level, and may use action or deliberate inaction (a boycott, a fast, a candle-light vigil) as its instrument.
  • It is typically a reaction to something that has already happened, and it seeks to reform rather than replace the existing structure — an organised, conscious, collective attempt to bring about or resist change through non-institutional means. Over time, an unsuccessful protest either disappears or crystallises into something more sustained.
• Agitation is sustained, purposive protest directed at a specific and limited demand — strikes, mass leave, rasta roko and rail roko, picketing.
  • Where protest is centred on registering opposition, agitation is centred on achieving a concrete purpose: dissatisfaction, not just dissent, is what drives it. It is organised enough to be sustained but its goal is bounded, so it dissolves once the demand is met or decisively defeated — unlike a social movement, which is marked by durable organisation.
• A social movement adds four things that protest and agitation lack: continuity over time, an organisational structure, an ideology that both diagnoses the problem and prescribes a remedy, and a collective identity binding scattered participants into a “we.”
• Revolution sits at the top of the ladder: it does not seek to change a policy, a leader, or a single institution but to overturn the social and political order itself, and it succeeds only by seizing state power.
• Both protest and agitation can institutionalise over time into a full social movement, and a social movement can, in turn, become the vehicle for a revolution — but nothing about the ladder is automatic. Most protests never become movements, and most movements never become revolutions.
• The same substantive demand, moreover, can occupy different rungs of this ladder depending entirely on the surrounding political context: a campaign for LGBT rights functions as ordinary reformist agitation within a liberal-democratic system that can absorb the demand through existing institutions, while an identical demand can amount to a direct, existential challenge to the prevailing order in a context where the ruling value system treats it as non-negotiable.

Social Movement: Meaning and Defining Features

• Lorenz von Stein, a German sociologist, introduced the term “social movement” in 1850, in his book History of the French Social Movement from 1789 to the Present.
• M.S.A. Rao defines a social movement as sustained collective mobilisation, through either informal or formal organisation, generally oriented towards bringing about change in the existing system — and he treats ideology as an essential component of that mobilisation, not an optional add-on.
• Turner and Killian define it as “a collectivity acting with some continuity to promote or resist change in the society or group of which it is a part,” while Toch describes it more simply as an effort by a large number of people to solve, collectively, a problem they feel they share in common.
• Charles Tilly treats social movements as a major vehicle for ordinary people’s sustained participation in public politics, built from three elements: continuing campaigns of claim-making, a repertoire of contention (discussed below), and public displays of WUNC — worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.
• Doug McAdam and David Snow distil a social movement into five necessary elements: collective action; an orientation towards change; some degree of organisation; some degree of temporal continuity; and action that may be institutional or non-institutional in form.
• What distinguishes a social movement from other collectivities:
  • From a crowd: a movement is a sustained collectivity, not a quick, spontaneous grouping that disperses once the triggering event has passed.
  • From an institutionalised movement such as a trade union or a cooperative society: these function under a fixed set of rules, with membership not open to all and a defined hierarchy — a structure necessary for any institutionalised body, but one a social movement, especially in its early phase, deliberately lacks, because a fixed hierarchy would foreclose the very innovation in organisational form that a fledgling movement needs.
  • A social movement therefore runs on two features operating together — sustained action and spontaneity — and it is this combination, not either alone, that separates it from both a crowd and an institution.
• A movement can be built as much to resist change as to promote it — the movement to preserve the practice of sati in colonial Bengal is the standard example of collective action organised around defending an existing practice rather than changing one.
• Structural elements of a social movement — the components any account of a movement’s “structure” needs to name: a stated objective or goal; an ideology that supplies the objective’s justification; a programme, or concrete plan of action; a strategy and set of tactics for carrying that programme out; leadership to give it direction; and an organisation, however loose or informal, through which cadre, resources, and decisions flow.

Historical Emergence of Social Movements

• Several structural processes made the social movement, as a recurring form, possible in the first place — none of these caused any specific movement, but together they explain why movements became a routine feature of modern society rather than a rare event.
• Urbanisation concentrated large numbers of people with similar interests in one place, making it far easier for them to find each other and organise; the earliest social movements accordingly appeared in cities.
• Industrialisation gathered large masses of wage workers into the same factories and towns, which is why so many early movements were built around the economic grievances of the working class.
• Universalisation of education, and especially the spread of universities, brought together large numbers of people capable of articulating and spreading a shared critique of existing arrangements.
• Improvements in communication technology — from printed pamphlets circulating in eighteenth-century coffeehouses to newspapers, radio, and now the internet — steadily lowered the cost of coordinating and sustaining a movement across distance.
• The spread of democratic rights — free speech, free assembly, the right to organise — made forming and running a movement legally and practically easier; movements occur under authoritarian conditions too, but far less easily, and in different forms.

Touraine’s Three Functions of Social Movements

• Alain Touraine argues that social movements perform three functions for society, beyond whatever specific goal any one of them pursues.
  • Mediation: a movement gives the individual a channel to connect to the larger society — a chance to participate, express an opinion, and play an active role in social change rather than remain a passive bystander to it.
  • Pressure: a movement stimulates the formation of organised groups that then work systematically to see that their demands are actually translated into policy or practice.
  • Clarification of collective consciousness: a movement generates and circulates ideas that spread through society at large, so that a group’s consciousness of itself, and of its situation, arises and grows sharper over time.
• For Touraine, this last function runs deepest: a movement is society’s way of acting upon itself, the mechanism — what he calls historicity — through which a society debates and shapes its own future rather than simply drifting into it.

Prerequisites for the Origin of a Social Movement

• No single condition is sufficient by itself; a movement requires a chain of conditions to fall into place together.
  • An objective condition of strain or deprivation — a real gap between what people have and what some comparison standard suggests they should have.
  • The perception of that condition as unjust and remediable, rather than as natural or inevitable — this is the properly ideological step, and the one most theories of movement origin treat as decisive, since an objectively deprived population that fatalistically accepts its situation will not mobilise.
  • A generalised belief, or frame, that identifies a cause, a culprit, and a cure for the problem (see Smelser and the framing perspective, below).
  • Leadership capable of articulating the grievance and the remedy in terms that travel beyond those immediately aggrieved.
  • An organisation able to sustain mobilisation beyond the first flush of anger or excitement.
  • Resources — money, networks, meeting places, media access — without which even a well-led, well-framed grievance cannot be converted into sustained action.
  • A collective identity binding scattered individuals into a self-conscious “we” rather than leaving them as isolated sufferers.
  • A political opportunity: the surrounding system must be open enough that action seems likely to work, yet closed enough that action feels necessary. This is a genuine paradox worth stating directly — movements and revolutions alike are rare both under maximal repression, where the risks of acting are too high, and under maximal openness, where grievances can already be addressed through ordinary channels.
• Neil Smelser adds a further, concrete requirement: an initiating or precipitating event — a specific, identifiable incident that triggers the chain reaction converting a diffuse condition into an actual movement.
  • The American Civil Rights movement crystallised around Rosa Parks’s arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat — though this was not a spontaneous, isolated act but one prepared by activist groundwork already in place behind the scenes.
  • Poland’s Solidarity movement, which eventually helped bring down Eastern Europe’s communist regimes, developed after trade union activist Anna Walentynowicz was dismissed from her job.
  • South Africa’s shack-dwellers’ movement grew out of a road blockade staged in response to a piece of land promised for housing instead being sold off to a private developer.
  • This pattern is sometimes called the “volcanic model”: a movement erupts once a critical mass of people realise, often through one dramatic incident, that others already share their grievance and their desire for change.

Classifying Social Movements

By Orientation to the Existing Order

• Reform movements accept the basic pattern of the existing social order and work to change only some part of it, usually on behalf of a specific distressed or exploited group, using existing institutions such as the press, the courts, or the legislature. They are largely possible only in democratic societies that tolerate criticism, and are rare under authoritarian rule. Examples: the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj‘s campaigns against sati and child marriage, or the trade union movement’s campaigns for worker rights.
• Revolutionary movements seek to overthrow the existing social order altogether and replace it with a fundamentally different one, challenging existing norms wholesale and proposing a new scheme of values — the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions are the standard examples.
• Reactionary (or resistance) movements arise among people dissatisfied with a change already under way, and seek to recapture or reinstate values that are being displaced — the movement to preserve sati, or contemporary religious-fundamentalist movements resisting secular or Western cultural change, are examples.
• Migratory movements occur when a substantial number of people relocate out of discontent with present conditions, or out of a shared hope for a better life elsewhere — the Zionist movement, culminating in the migration of Jews to found Israel, is the standard example.
• Revitalisation movements seek to renew or restore vigour to an existing but strained social system, often by reviving or reinterpreting older cultural symbols to build patriotism, national pride, or collective self-respect, rather than tearing the system down.
• Utopian movements attempt to build a wholly alternative model of social life, often as a small demonstration community rather than a blueprint for the whole society — the Israeli kibbutz movement, and Vinoba Bhave’s Sarvodaya ideal (given organised form in the Bhoodan-Gramdan land-gift movement discussed below), are examples.

The Classical Collective Behaviour Tradition

• Herbert Blumer‘s foundational move was to treat collective behaviour as a distinct category of social process — arising spontaneously rather than reflecting the existing laws, conventions, and institutions of a society. As David Locher puts it, collective behaviour is driven by group dynamics that lead people to act in ways they might consider unthinkable taken purely as individuals.
  • Following Robert Park, Blumer distinguishes a crowd (which expresses one shared emotion, not necessarily a negative one) from a public (which discusses a single issue, and of which there are therefore as many as there are issues), and adds a third category, the mass — defined not by any face-to-face interaction but by the efforts of those using mass media to address a dispersed audience.
  • Blumer classifies social movements themselves into three types: general movements, broad and loosely organised around a wide social value rather than a single demand (the labour or women’s movement in its broadest sense); specific movements, organised around a defined, bounded goal (a campaign for a particular law); and expressive movements, oriented at changing the participant rather than society, as with religious or fashion movements.
• Turner and Killian‘s emergent norm theory directly answers the older “crowd psychology” tradition, which treated crowds as gripped by irrational emotional contagion: crowd behaviour, they argue, is not irrational at all but the working-out of a new norm that emerges to fit an ambiguous situation — a crowd, in other words, is governed by norms just as any other social group is, only the norm itself is being improvised in real time.

David Aberle’s and Jeff Goodwin’s Classifications

• David Aberle classifies movements along two axes — whether the target of change is the individual or the social system, and whether the amount of change sought is partial or total.
  • Alternative movements seek partial change in individuals (family-planning advocacy).
  • Redemptive movements seek total change in individuals (religious-conversion movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous).
  • Reformative movements seek partial change in the social system (the trade union movement).
  • Revolutionary (or transformative) movements seek total change in the social system.
• Jeff Goodwin‘s distinction cuts across revolutionary movements themselves: some are comparatively conservative or reformist in what they actually put in the old order’s place (the American and Mexican revolutions), while others are radical, aiming at a wholesale reconstruction of society (the French, Russian, and various Arab revolutions).

Millenarian Movements

• Millenarian movements deserve separate treatment: they are typically religious or quasi-religious movements built around the belief that a sudden, total, and imminent transformation of the world — a collective salvation or a coming golden age — is at hand, usually to be delivered through a prophetic or messianic figure rather than achieved through incremental political action.
• They combine a revitalisation impulse (restoring a lost golden age) with a revolutionary totality of aspiration (the entire present order is to be swept away), which is why they sit awkwardly across the reform/revolution divide rather than fitting neatly into either category.
• Examples worth citing: the Native American Ghost Dance movement of the late nineteenth century, prophesying the return of the buffalo and the departure of white settlers; the cargo cults of Melanesia, anticipating the arrival of ancestral wealth by ship or aircraft; and, in India, Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan (“the Great Tumult”) among the Munda of Chotanagpur, which fused millenarian prophecy — Birsa as a messianic dharti aba, “father of the earth” — with a very concrete anti-colonial, anti-landlord agitation, alongside the related Tana Bhagat movement among the Oraon, which combined religious reform with resistance to forced labour and land alienation.

Indian Classifications of Social Movements

• M.S.A. Rao classifies Indian movements by the extent of change sought: reform movements, aiming at partial change within the existing system (the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj); transformative movements, aiming to change major areas of the social structure — especially entrenched power relations — without overturning the system as a whole (the Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) movement in Kerala, and the Mahar movement led by Ambedkar in Maharashtra); and revolutionary movements, seeking a radical reorganisation of the entire social order (the Russian and Chinese revolutions).
• Ghanshyam Shah, reviewing the field in Social Movements in India, classifies movements by their participant base — peasant, tribal, Dalit, backward-caste, women’s, and industrial-working-class movements — and makes the sharp critical observation that Indian scholarship on social movements has, on the whole, been long on rich description of individual movements and short on developing a general theory of its own.
• T.K. Oommen‘s study of the Bhoodan-Gramdan movement (Vinoba Bhave’s land-gift and village-gift campaign) reads it through Weber’s lens of charismatic authority: the movement’s initial force flowed from Bhave’s personal charisma, and its subsequent decline traces precisely the pattern of routinisation of charisma Weber describes — as the movement institutionalised into an organisation and bureaucracy, it lost the very personal magnetism that had powered it.
• A.R. Desai‘s Marxist reading of India’s peasant struggles treats them as expressions of underlying class conflict rooted in agrarian relations of production, supplying the standard materialist counterpoint to accounts that read the same movements primarily through the idiom of caste, culture, or religion.

Are Social Movements Primordial in Means but Progressive in Agenda?

• Many Indian social movements mobilise through primordial ties — the ascriptive solidarities of caste, tribe, religion, language, or region that people are born into — even while the substantive goals they pursue are thoroughly progressive: equal citizenship, redistribution, dignity, and an end to discrimination, not a restoration of any traditional order.
• The logic is straightforward in resource-mobilisation terms (see below): a shared caste or tribal identity is a ready-made network of trust, communication, and solidarity, which makes it an efficient, low-cost organisational resource to mobilise around — far cheaper than constructing an entirely new associational identity from scratch.
• The Dalit movement is the clearest illustration: it mobilises explicitly around a shared, ascribed caste position, but its agenda — annihilation of caste hierarchy, constitutional equality, reservation, dignity — is unambiguously modern and forward-looking, not a defence of any inherited status.
• Backward-caste movements (the non-Brahmin movement in colonial Madras, the Mandal-era mobilisation of the 1990s) and several tribal movements follow the same pattern: primordial solidarity as the organisational vehicle, redistributive and citizenship-based demands as the agenda.
• The combination is not costless. Mobilisation built on an ascriptive identity can just as easily harden into an exclusivist, closed identity politics that competes with, rather than allies with, other similarly organised groups — the disintegrative face of collective action discussed later in this article. This is precisely why the same movement can look “primordial in means, progressive in agenda” from one angle and “sectional and polarising” from another, depending on how far it manages to convert a particularistic base into a broader, universal claim.

Dalit Movements and the Politics of a New Identity

• The protest movements of India’s Scheduled Castes have worked simultaneously on three registers, and separating them out is the key to assessing their impact.
  • Legal-constitutional: from Ambedkar’s leadership of the Mahar movement and his role in drafting constitutional safeguards — reservation in legislatures, education, and public employment, and the abolition of untouchability under Article 17 — to later legislation such as the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
  • Political-organisational: the shift from movements led by upper-caste reformers on behalf of Dalits in the colonial period to autonomous Dalit-led political mobilisation, most visibly the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra in the 1970s (explicitly modelled on the Black Panther movement) and, later, the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party, which converted a social movement’s constituency directly into an electoral bloc.
  • Symbolic-cultural: the deliberate rejection of externally imposed labels like “Harijan” in favour of the self-chosen political term “Dalit” (asserting a shared condition of oppression rather than accepting a paternalistic euphemism), alongside the construction of counter-symbols — statues, alternative histories, renamed public spaces — asserting Dalit dignity and historical agency.
• The net effect has been a genuine reconstruction of Dalit identity: from a fragmented set of locally named, ritually defined jatis into a self-conscious, politically organised community claiming citizenship and dignity on its own terms — a clear instance of a movement’s identity-constructing function working alongside its policy-directed, instrumental one.
• The limits are equally real and worth stating plainly: continuing caste atrocities, residual social discrimination even where formal law has changed, and the fragmentation of the wider Dalit political bloc along sub-caste lines all show that legal and electoral gains have not by themselves dissolved the underlying structure of graded inequality that B.R. Ambedkar identified as caste’s distinctive feature.

Theoretical Strands on the Origins of Social Movements

Multiple, largely complementary theoretical traditions try to explain why movements arise. Most of them answer a different part of the same puzzle — why a grievance exists, why grievance turns into action, why some movements succeed and others do not — rather than genuinely competing to be the single correct account.

Psychological Theories: Deprivation, Mass Society, and Maladjustment

• Deprivation theory holds that movements arise among people who feel deprived of some good, service, or comfort, who then organise to improve or defend their position. It faces two serious problems: since almost everyone feels deprived at some level almost all the time, it cannot explain why some deprived groups mobilise while most do not; and the reasoning is often circular, since the movement itself is frequently the only evidence offered that deprivation existed at all.
• Mass society theory, associated with William Kornhauser, argues that movements draw people who feel socially isolated or insignificant within a large, impersonal society, offering them a sense of belonging and empowerment they otherwise lack. Empirical support is thin: Aho‘s 1990 study of an Idaho Christian-patriot movement found that members were not unusually socially detached at all — the actual predictor of joining was simply having a friend or associate already inside the movement, pointing toward network-based recruitment rather than isolation as the real mechanism.
• Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, offers a related “maladjustment” account: movements draw disproportionately on the socially marginal — the poor, the disabled, criminals, the recently pauperised, linguistic minorities — precisely because these are people poorly integrated into the existing order, and therefore most motivated to see it changed.
• Relative deprivation theory sharpens deprivation theory considerably by locating the trigger not in absolute want but in a gap between expectation and actual attainment. Samuel Stouffer‘s original insight was that only the relatively deprived mobilise: the fully satisfied have no reason to, while the absolutely deprived typically lack the resources and power to organise at all.
  • Ted Gurr, in Why Men Rebel (1970), formalises this as the gap between people’s value expectations (what they believe they are entitled to) and their value capabilities (what they think they can actually get) — explaining why rising living standards, not just stagnant misery, can trigger unrest, since expectations tend to rise faster than actual capability.
  • The theory’s decisive weakness: discontent of this kind is close to universal at any given time, while movements remain comparatively rare, so relative deprivation alone cannot explain the timing of a movement, nor say anything about organisation, resources, or opportunity — the questions the next theories were built to answer. Grievance, in other words, is close to a constant; what varies — and what actually decides whether a movement forms — is the capacity to mobilise it.

Neil Smelser’s Value-Added Theory

• Neil Smelser, in Theory of Collective Behavior (1962), proposes that collective episodes — including social movements — result from six determinants combining in a fixed sequence, on the model of a manufacturing process in which each stage adds a necessary ingredient and progressively narrows the range of possible outcomes. This is why the theory is called “value-added,” and why the six determinants must be given in order.
  • Structural conduciveness: the basic social structure must permit the behaviour in question at all — a financial panic, for instance, requires the prior existence of a market.
  • Structural strain: some genuine ambiguity, deprivation, conflict, or discrepancy must exist within that structure.
  • Growth and spread of a generalised belief: the strain must be identified, named, and attributed to a cause — without this step, people feel unease but have no idea what to do about it.
  • Precipitating factors: a specific, dramatic event that confirms and sharpens the generalised belief, turning diffuse unease into a focused response.
  • Mobilisation of participants for action: leadership and organisation actually bring people into coordinated action.
  • Operation of social control: the response of the authorities — whether they suppress, tolerate, or accommodate the episode — can arrest, deflect, or inflame the sequence at any stage, which is why Smelser treats this final determinant as the single most important one in the entire model.
• The standard critique: Smelser treats movements as a species of collective behaviour driven fundamentally by structural strain, placing them closer to a panic or a craze than to organised politics, and because a completed movement can always be retrofitted to the six stages after the fact, the sequence is difficult to falsify.

Marxist Theory of Social Movements

• Marxist theory reads social movements as expressions of underlying class conflict generated by contradictions in the mode of production: movements are strongest, on this view, where an exploited class becomes conscious of its shared position — moving from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself — and organises to challenge the class that controls the means of production.
• Movements built around industrial labour versus capital in nineteenth-century Europe are the paradigm case, but twentieth-century neo-Marxist scholarship extended the same political-economy lens to movements organised around race, gender, and environmental degradation, treating these too as ultimately rooted in shifting relations of production.
• The obvious limitation, addressed at length in the theory of revolution below, is that class-based mobilisation of the kind Marx predicted has been the exception rather than the rule in the advanced capitalist world, where welfare provisions and rising wages blunted the sharpness of class conflict Marx expected to intensify over time.

Resource Mobilisation Theory

• Resource mobilisation theory, developed by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1977), starts from the opposite premise to deprivation theory: grievances are effectively constant and ubiquitous in any complex society, so they explain almost nothing about when or whether a movement actually forms. What varies — and what the theory treats as the real explanatory variable — is the availability of resources: money, labour, organisational skill, media access, legitimacy, and support from sympathetic elites.
• Movements, on this view, are less an eruption of frustration than a form of rational, strategic, organised politics pursued by social movement organisations (SMOs), which compete with one another for the same pool of resources much as firms compete in a market — the theory’s vocabulary of a “social movement industry” makes the analogy explicit.
• Mancur Olson‘s The Logic of Collective Action supplies the theory’s rational-choice foundation. Since a movement’s eventual benefits — a policy change, a right won — are typically a public good available to everyone in the aggrieved category whether or not they personally contributed, a purely self-interested individual has every incentive to free-ride, letting others bear the cost of organising while still enjoying the outcome. Movements therefore succeed only when they can offer selective incentives, or build interpersonal ties strong enough, to overcome this free-rider problem.
• The standard critiques: the theory overstates how rational and centrally organised movements actually are, has little to say about emotion, moral outrage, or identity as motivating forces in their own right, and its emphasis on financial and organisational resources fits well-funded, professionally staffed campaigns better than genuinely poor people’s movements. India’s Chipko movement, mobilised almost entirely through the unpaid solidarity and physical presence of Himalayan villagers rather than any significant financial base, is the standard counter-example cited against an overly resource-centric reading.

The Political Process (Political Opportunity) Model

• The political process model, developed by Charles Tilly and Doug McAdam, supplies the variable resource mobilisation theory leaves underspecified: the surrounding polity itself.
• The political opportunity structure — how open or closed the political system is, how stable elite alignments are, whether sympathetic elites exist as potential allies, and how willing and able the state is to repress dissent — determines whether a given grievance, resource base, and organisation can actually translate into a viable movement.
• McAdam adds two further ingredients missing from a purely structural account: the movement’s own indigenous organisational strength, and — his most distinctive contribution — cognitive liberation, the collective shift in consciousness by which an aggrieved population comes to see its situation as unjust and changeable, rather than as natural or immovable. This restores the element of consciousness that more mechanical versions of resource mobilisation theory tend to neglect.
• Tilly‘s repertoire of contention names the historically and culturally bounded set of protest forms available to people at a given time and place — an eighteenth-century crowd seized grain or burned effigies; a modern movement petitions, marches, and litigates — and his WUNC display (worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment) describes what a movement must visibly perform in public to be taken seriously as a political actor at all.
• Sidney Tarrow‘s cycles of contention explain why movements cluster into historical waves rather than appearing evenly over time: an early, successful episode of protest demonstrates that the authorities are vulnerable, which lowers the perceived cost of mobilising for every group that follows, triggering a wider cycle of contention.
• Tilly’s own comparative research on collective violence in Western Europe since 1800 produced a sharp finding worth stating directly.

“In the modern European experience repressive forces are themselves the most consistent initiator and performers of collective violence.” — Charles Tilly

• Whether a demonstration turns into a riot, in other words, depends less on the intrinsic character of the protesting crowd than on how the authorities respond to it — and when violent confrontations do occur, the agents of the state, given their access to weapons and military organisation, are typically responsible for the larger share of deaths and injuries, while the protesting group typically does more damage to property than to persons.

Everyday Resistance

• Not all resistance to domination takes the organised, visible form the theories above assume. James Scott, in Weapons of the Weak, studying Malaysian peasants and labourers, documents a whole repertoire of everyday acts of resistance — foot-dragging, deliberate slowness, feigned ignorance, pilferage, sabotage — through which subordinate groups who lack the organisation or the safety to mount open protest nonetheless contest domination in a sustained, if diffuse, way. This is a reminder that the absence of visible collective action does not necessarily mean the absence of resistance.

New Social Movements Theory

• New social movements (NSM) theory — associated with Alberto Melucci, Alain Touraine, Claus Offe, and Jürgen Habermas — was developed to explain a wave of movements that emerged in the West from the 1960s onward (feminism, environmentalism, the peace movement, gay rights) which the older, class-centred theories struggled to accommodate. NSMs are said to differ from the labour movement of the industrial era along four dimensions.
  • Social base: drawn from the new, educated middle class rather than from an economically defined class.
  • Goals: oriented to identity, autonomy, quality of life, and recognition, rather than to the distribution of income.
  • Organisation: decentralised, network-like, and deliberately hostile to fixed hierarchy, in contrast to the trade union’s or the party’s formal bureaucratic structure.
  • Means: cultural and symbolic, directed at civil society and everyday life rather than at capturing state power directly.
• Melucci‘s specific contribution is that a movement’s central, and often invisible, work is the ongoing construction of a shared collective identity — much of this happens in latent networks between the visible, public moments of protest, not only during them — and that movements in complex societies contest the very codes by which reality gets named and categorised.
• Touraine‘s historicity treats a movement as the mechanism through which a society acts upon itself and shapes its own future, discussed above in relation to his three functions.
• Ronald Inglehart‘s theory of post-materialism supplies the generational explanation: generations raised in relative economic security, unlike their parents, prioritise self-expression, autonomy, and belonging over material security, which is why identity- and lifestyle-based movements proliferate once a society crosses a certain threshold of affluence.
• Anthony Giddens offers a parallel, institutional route to a similar conclusion: modernity, in its “high” phase, rests on four institutional dimensions — capitalism, industrialism, surveillance, and military power — and each generates its own characteristic movement: labour movements contest capitalism, ecological movements contest the consequences of industrialism, free-speech/democratic movements contest surveillance, and peace movements contest concentrated military power.
• The critique — and the correction the Indian case demands: the “newness” of NSMs is itself overstated, since the labour movement had strong identity and cultural dimensions too, and nineteenth-century movements were rarely narrowly economic; and the framework travels badly outside the advanced industrial West. Gail Omvedt makes the decisive point for India: movements over land, forest, water, and displacement — farmers’ movements, women’s movements, Dalit movements, environmental movements — are not “post-material” in Inglehart’s sense at all, because they concern sheer survival and livelihood as much as identity or recognition, combining material and identity claims inseparably rather than sequentially.
  • The Narmada Bachao Andolan is the clearest illustration: it is simultaneously a movement against physical displacement and loss of livelihood, an assertion of adivasi identity and rights over ancestral land and forest, and a wholesale critique of a particular, large-dam-centred model of development — the material and the post-material cannot be pulled apart in this case even analytically.

Environmentalism as a New Social Movement

• Environmentalism illustrates both the theory and its Indian correction particularly well.
• The Western environmental movement is conventionally split into two strands: the wilderness (preservationist) movement, concerned chiefly with protecting nature — forests, oceans, wildlife — for its own sake, on the grounds that the non-human world cannot protect itself; and the environmental justice movement, which foregrounds the disproportionate exposure of poor and minority communities to environmental hazards, treating environmental harm as inseparable from social and economic inequality.
• India’s major environmental movements sit much closer to the environmental-justice strand and, in Omvedt’s terms, are irreducibly both material and identity-based at once.
  • The Chipko movement in the Himalayan foothills (1970s), in which villagers — many of them women — physically embraced trees to prevent commercial felling, combined ecological concern with a direct livelihood stake in forest resources.
  • The Narmada Bachao Andolan, discussed above, against large dam construction on the Narmada river.
  • The Silent Valley movement in Kerala, against a hydroelectric project threatening a tropical rainforest — an unusually “wilderness”-type case within the Indian context.

The Framing Perspective: Snow and Benford

• David Snow and Robert Benford‘s framing perspective supplies a piece missing from both the structural theories (which locate the cause in social conditions) and the resource theories (which locate it in organisational capacity): movements do not simply discover a pre-existing grievance, they actively construct it through interpretive work.
  • Diagnostic framing: naming the problem and attributing blame or responsibility for it.
  • Prognostic framing: proposing a solution and a broad strategy for achieving it.
  • Motivational framing: supplying the rationale — the vocabulary of motive — that moves people from agreement to actual participation.
  • Frame alignment is the further, ongoing work of linking a movement’s own frame to the pre-existing beliefs and everyday experience of the people it hopes to recruit.
• This bears directly on whether ideology is an essential component of a social movement: framing theory suggests it is, because ideology is precisely what converts a bare condition into a recognised injustice, an injustice into an actionable claim, and a scattered category of sufferers into a self-conscious collective actor. The honest qualification is that many movements begin from a diffuse, barely articulated grievance and acquire a fully worked-out ideology only later — sometimes imported from outside the original participants entirely — so it is more accurate to say ideology is constitutive of a mature social movement than that it is always present at the movement’s starting point.

M.S.A. Rao’s Three Factors: A Synthesis for the Indian Case

• M.S.A. Rao, surveying Indian movements specifically, distils the causal factors above into three that recur across Indian material.
  • Relative deprivation: people perceive themselves as deprived relative to a reference group or to their own rising expectations, not necessarily in any absolute sense — the Naxalite movement‘s appeal among land-poor and landless peasants in areas of visible surrounding prosperity is Rao’s own example.
  • Structural strain: the prevailing value system and normative structure fail to meet people’s aspirations, generating a tension that a new value system is then sought to resolve; individuals under this kind of strain are also more likely to violate existing social norms in the course of mobilising.
  • Revitalisation: a movement offers not just a protest against what is wrong but a positive alternative — a programme for renewing the strained system, whether through cultivating national pride, organising youth to serve the oppressed, or promoting literacy.

Theories of the Origins of Social Movements at a Glance

Role of Leadership and Ideology in Social Movements

Leadership

• Leaders help clarify the issues at stake and, in doing so, shape the movement’s actual direction rather than simply reflecting a grievance that already had a fixed shape.
• They provide guidance and prevent a movement from collapsing into a desperate, unruly collection of individuals with no shared course of action.
• Leadership is expected to reflect and articulate the views of participants, presenting them to the wider society in an organised, coherent manner.
• How far a movement’s participants actually achieve their stated objectives is determined, in large part, by the quality of leadership the movement is able to produce.
• Many movements form around a charismatic leader, and their later trajectory often reproduces Weber’s pattern of the routinisation of charisma — as seen in T.K. Oommen’s study of the Bhoodan-Gramdan movement above — with personal magnetism gradually giving way to bureaucratic organisation.

Ideology

• Ideology sustains a movement over time, well past the initial burst of collective excitement that may have launched it.
• It helps participants understand their situation, and legitimises the actions they take in response to it.
• It supplies the justification for the movement’s social, political, and moral ideals, and indicates the goals, means, and forms of practical activity appropriate to pursuing them.
• Ideology is what distinguishes a genuine social movement from a mere series of unconnected instances of protest, and leaders themselves operate within — rather than above — the ideological framework a movement develops.
• Whether ideology is strictly essential, in the sense of being present from the very first moment of mobilisation, is a question the framing perspective already answers above: ideology is constitutive of a movement once it matures, but it is frequently the product of mobilisation — worked out as people organise — rather than a fully formed precondition for it.

Sources of Difficulty in Sustaining a Social Movement

• The first difficulty any emerging movement faces is simply spreading the knowledge that it exists, followed immediately by the free-rider problem: convincing people to join rather than let others do the work of organising while still enjoying whatever benefit eventually results (the same logic Olson’s resource-mobilisation critique formalises above).
• Movements built around a charismatic leader typically see two distinct phases of recruitment: an early phase that draws people genuinely committed to the movement’s primary goal, and a later phase — once the movement has already had some success and joining it has become socially fashionable — that draws more casual joiners who are usually the first to leave once the movement suffers a setback.
• A movement’s momentum can also be eroded by outside pressure — opposition from the government, or rivalry with other movements competing for the same base of support and resources.
• Despite this, many movements that appear to have collapsed are later revived, sometimes after several decades, by a hard core of committed activists who never actually disengaged.

Life Cycle of a Social Movement and How Movements End

• Stage one — social unrest: collective tension builds up in society well before any organised action begins.
• Stage two — collective excitement: people come to feel they share a common problem, certain social conditions are identified as its root cause, and the movement gains its first supporters and a guiding ideology; agitation spreads quickly, though this period is usually brief.
• Stage three — formalisation: work is divided between leaders and followers, fundraising is systematised, ideology becomes clearer than before, and a definite strategy and set of tactics — along with a moral justification for the chosen course of action — are worked out. Some movements, particularly migratory ones, can operate without ever reaching a fully formal organisation.
• Stage four — institutionalisation: the movement crystallises into a definite, durable pattern, efficient administrators replace the original agitators, offices and buildings are established, and the movement’s aims become broadly accepted in society. This stage may last indefinitely.
• Stage five — dissolution: only some movements achieve full institutionalisation; others end early, while some dissolve once their central objective has been achieved. In a more recent framing of the same sequence, movements are said to pass through emergence, coalescence, bureaucratisation, and decline, with decline itself taking several distinct forms: outright success, failure, cooptation, repression, or gradual absorption into the cultural mainstream.
• William Gamson‘s systematic study of fifty-three American “challenging groups” active between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries offers a sharper way to classify how a movement’s career can end, crossing two questions — was the group itself accepted as a legitimate actor, and did it win any new substantive advantage — to produce four possible outcomes.
  • Full response: the group is accepted as legitimate and wins new advantages — genuine, complete success.
  • Co-optation: the group or its leadership is accepted and absorbed, but its substantive goals are not actually met.
  • Pre-emption: some concrete gains are granted, but without the authorities ever recognising the group itself as a legitimate spokesperson.
  • Collapse: neither recognition nor any substantive gain is achieved.
• Across all outcomes, social movements play a major part in social change, quickening its pace and leaving a mark on the moral, political, social, and cultural life of a society well beyond whatever specific demand originally triggered them.

Collective Action’s Integrative and Disintegrative Effects on Society

• Lewis Coser, following Georg Simmel, argues that conflict with an out-group tends to increase a group’s internal cohesion and sharpen its sense of its own boundaries — collective action, on this reading, can forge a solidarity that did not previously exist, much as India’s independence movement built a shared sense of nationhood out of a subcontinent of otherwise highly diverse groups by mobilising them jointly against a common colonial adversary.
• Durkheim‘s concept of collective effervescence supplies a complementary mechanism: the simple act of assembling together, quite apart from any specific goal being pursued, generates a shared moral and emotional energy that binds participants to one another and to the cause.
• Safety-valve institutions — licensed channels such as strikes, courts, and formally recognised unions — allow accumulated hostility to be discharged without threatening the basic structure of the relationship within which the conflict occurs.
• Coser’s key qualification decides which of these two directions collective action actually takes: conflict is integrative when it concerns goals, values, or interests that do not contradict the basic assumptions on which the relationship rests, and disintegrative when it strikes at that core consensus itself.
• Movements organised around a rigid, ascriptive identity can harden group boundaries and provoke a rival counter-mobilisation from other similarly organised groups, precisely the tension already noted above in relation to primordial-versus-progressive mobilisation.
• The sharpest analytical payoff here is the distinction between cross-cutting and cumulative (coinciding) cleavages. A society mobilised along cross-cutting cleavages — where allies on one dimension of conflict (say, religion) are opponents on another (say, class) — tends to be stabilised, because no single conflict can cleanly divide the whole society into two camps. A society mobilised along cumulative cleavages — where the same line simultaneously divides people by religion, region, language, and class all at once — is instead pulled sharply apart, since every dimension of grievance reinforces every other rather than cutting across it.

Social Movements in the Digital Era

The Logic of Connective Action

• Bennett and Segerberg‘s concept of connective action describes how digital-era mobilisation departs from the classical “logic of collective action” that resource mobilisation and political process theory both assume — a logic that requires a shared collective identity, a formal organisation, and some resolution of the free-rider problem before sustained action becomes possible.
• Connective action, by contrast, runs on personalised action frames — easily adaptable, easily shared ideas that individuals can each inflect in their own way — rather than a single, unified ideology requiring formal buy-in. Digital platforms then do the organisational work that a formal SMO would otherwise have to do, allowing loosely networked individuals to coordinate at scale without ever forming a conventional membership organisation.
• The Occupy movement’s slogan “We are the 99%” is the paradigm case: a frame simple and personalisable enough that widely different individuals, with widely different specific grievances, could each attach their own meaning to it and share it further.

Hashtag Activism and Indian Examples

• Hashtag activism functions as connective action in practice: a hashtag acts simultaneously as a rallying symbol, an organisational tool, and a mechanism for building a collective identity and sense of solidarity across geographic distance, entirely independent of any formal membership structure.
• India’s 2020–21 farmers’ protest against the three farm laws illustrates resource mobilisation theory itself extending into the digital sphere: alongside the physical, months-long occupation of protest sites around Delhi, farmer unions ran their own newspaper (Trolley Times), organised on-site libraries and schools, and used platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for coordination and framing — with hashtags trending globally and drawing international media, diaspora, and celebrity attention. Media access and communication infrastructure, in other words, are now resources mobilised online quite as much as offline.
• The anti-CAA protests of 2019–20, and the sustained sit-in at Shaheen Bagh in particular, combined the same digital coordination and framing with old-fashioned, weeks-long continuous physical occupation of contested public space — evidence that the digital and the classical repertoire of contention tend to be complements, layered onto one another, rather than substitutes for each other.

Significance and Challenges

• The significance of the digital shift lies chiefly in four things: it lowers the cost of organising, since mobilisation no longer requires a large, resourced formal organisation to exist before it can begin; it allows a movement to build international visibility and solidarity rapidly, drawing global attention as the farmers’ protest did; it gives a movement real-time capacity to frame and counter-frame events directly, rather than depending on legacy media as a gatekeeper; and it lowers the threshold for a first, tentative act of participation — a share, a hashtag — which can act as a gateway into progressively deeper commitment.
• The challenges are equally real. The “slacktivism” or “clicktivism” critique holds that low-cost online participation can substitute for, rather than lead to, costlier offline commitment, producing visibility without durable organisation behind it. Digital movements often lack the sustained organisational structure and leadership the classical definition of a social movement requires, so many flare up and dissipate quickly once the precipitating event leaves the news cycle — a reminder of the distinction, made at the outset of this article, between a passing protest and a genuine movement. Algorithmic curation and echo chambers can fragment a movement’s potential audience rather than help build the kind of unified, visible public Tilly’s WUNC display requires. And states have responded with digital countermeasures of their own — internet shutdowns, platform takedowns, disinformation, and surveillance of organisers — turning the same infrastructure that lowers the cost of mobilising into a fresh instrument of repression, an updated, digital-age version of Smelser’s “operation of social control.”

Revolution

Defining Revolution

• A revolution can be defined as the seizure, often through violence or its credible threat, of political power by the leadership of a mass movement, where that power is then used to launch major processes of social reform.
• John Dunn adds a governing-capability criterion often left out of simpler definitions: whoever takes power must genuinely be more capable of governing the society than those they have displaced; a movement that seizes only the formal trappings of power without the capacity to actually rule effectively has produced chaos or disintegration, not a revolution.
• Revolution involves the threat or actual use of violence, since existing authorities do not, by definition, relinquish power voluntarily.
• Distinguishing revolution from a coup and a rebellion: a coup d’état changes political leadership by force but leaves the underlying structure of power untouched; a rebellion may see subordinate classes revolt, and may even briefly unseat rulers, but does not produce a lasting transformation of the social structure; a revolution requires both the seizure of power and a resulting basic transformation of the social and political order.
• In Hegelian and Marxian terms, a revolution marks the point where accumulated quantitative change tips into qualitative change: the order itself is remade, not merely adjusted. A social movement, even a fully successful one, typically produces change within the existing structure rather than a wholesale transformation of it.
• Revolutions are sometimes further classified by their mode of transformation: limited revolutions, where the state structure changes but the underlying socio-economic order is not drastically altered; revolution from above — Ellen Kay Trimberger’s term for cases such as Meiji Japan and Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, where a ruling elite itself imposes drastic top-down transformation without a genuine mass uprising; gradual, largely peaceful development from below, of the kind India’s own post-independence democratic trajectory is often cited to exemplify, precisely because it proceeded without a single revolutionary rupture; and failed revolutions, where a revolutionary situation (discussed under Tilly, below) arises but never produces a revolutionary outcome.
• Historically, the eighteenth-century American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions established the political vocabulary — liberty, citizenship, equality — that later revolutions, including the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe, would invoke. But most twentieth-century revolutions — Russia, China, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt, Vietnam, Cuba — occurred in agrarian, developing societies rather than in the advanced industrial states classical Marxist theory expected to be revolution’s natural home, an empirical puzzle every subsequent theory of revolution has had to address.

Marx’s Theory of Revolution

• For Marx, revolution is the point of resolution for accumulated contradictions between a society’s developing forces of production and its existing relations of production: as the forces of production keep developing, they increasingly outgrow relations of production designed for an earlier stage, and the class benefiting from the old relations resists change while a new class, whose interests lie with the new relations, pushes for a transformation — a conflict that becomes acute enough to be resolved only through revolutionary change.
• Applied historically: the rise of trade and manufacture within feudal society eventually collided with the feudal lord-serf relationship, and the resulting conflict between the rising capitalist class and the landed aristocracy was resolved through revolution, with the French Revolution of 1789 as Marx’s central example of the capitalist class achieving political dominance.
• Applied prospectively: industrial capitalism’s own contradiction — between socialised production and the private, class-based appropriation of its surplus — was expected to intensify class conflict between the bourgeoisie and an increasingly organised proletariat, until labour movements and working-class political parties eventually overthrew capitalist political power altogether in a coming communist revolution.
• Marx’s own summary phrase for this view is that revolutions are the “locomotives of history.”
• The theory’s empirical refutation is direct and worth stating plainly: the revolutions that actually occurred in the twentieth century took place overwhelmingly in agrarian societies — Russia and China above all — rather than in the advanced industrial economies of Britain and Germany, where Marx’s own theory predicted capitalism’s internal contradictions would be sharpest.

James Davies’s J-Curve Theory

• James Davies (1962) directly challenges an assumption implicit in much popular and Marxist thinking: that constant poverty itself breeds revolt. People who endure prolonged deprivation typically respond with resignation, not rebellion.
• His J-curve thesis holds that revolution is most likely not during unrelieved hardship but after a prolonged period of rising living standards is followed by a sharp, short reversal — people’s expectations, having risen along with actual conditions, keep climbing even as real capabilities suddenly fall, opening an intolerable gap between the two almost overnight (plotted, the trajectory of actual need-satisfaction traces a “J”: a long rise, then a sudden drop, even as expectations keep rising).
• This observation was not new to Davies: Alexis de Tocqueville, writing on the French Revolution, had already noted that revolt is most likely not at the point of maximum oppression but once conditions have already begun to improve.
• The theory usefully explains why revolution tracks rising expectations — fed by ideals of progress and of economic growth — as much as it tracks hardship, and why demands for equality and democratic participation typically accompany and amplify it.
• Charles Tilly‘s objection matters for a complete answer: Davies’s theory explains a psychological precondition for revolt but says nothing about how or why particular groups actually become organised enough to mount an effective political challenge. That transformation of frustration into organised, collective action is exactly what his own political process model was built to explain.

Chalmers Johnson’s Theory of Disequilibrium

• Chalmers Johnson, in Revolutionary Change, treats a society as a system normally in equilibrium between its prevailing values and its actual social environment. Revolution results when this equilibrium breaks down — when values and environment fall out of synchronisation — and the ruling elite fails to resynchronise them, whether through reform or effective repression.
• His most useful specific concept is power deflation: as a regime’s underlying legitimacy drains away, it becomes progressively unable to secure compliance through consent and must substitute an ever-larger dose of sheer coercive force for the same level of obedience — a dynamic that closely parallels Hannah Arendt‘s observation that naked violence tends to appear precisely at the point where legitimate power is already failing, not while it remains intact.

Crane Brinton’s Comparative Anatomy of Revolution

• Crane Brinton, in The Anatomy of Revolution, compares the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions and extracts a recurring descriptive sequence — useful as a pattern rather than as a causal theory, since Brinton describes what tends to happen rather than explaining why it happens.
  • The defection of the intellectuals, who withdraw their support and legitimacy from the old regime before it actually falls.
  • Financial breakdown of the state, typically brought on by war or fiscal mismanagement.
  • The initial rule of the moderates, who take over from the collapsed old regime but prove unable to satisfy the revolution’s more radical demands.
  • The accession of the extremists, who displace the moderates once the moderates’ compromises are seen to have failed.
  • A reign of terror, in which the extremist phase consolidates power through violent suppression of remaining or suspected opposition.
  • Thermidor, the eventual reaction and settling, in which the revolution’s intensity subsides and a more stable, often more conservative, order consolidates.

Theda Skocpol’s Structural Theory of Revolution

• Theda Skocpol, in States and Social Revolutions (1979), offers the most influential structural account, built on a systematic comparison of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.
• First thesis: revolutions are not made, they come — no organised group in any of her three cases deliberately set out to produce the revolution that actually occurred, and the eventual outcomes were intended by none of the participants. This is a direct challenge to any account — voluntarist or Marxist — that explains revolution primarily by revolutionary will, leadership, or ideology.
• Second thesis: the state is an autonomous structure with its own institutional interests — above all in revenue extraction and international standing — rather than simply an instrument of the dominant economic class. Revolutions, on this view, begin not with mass discontent from below but with a crisis of state capacity at the top, typically when military competition with more developed rival states abroad exposes the state to pressure for reform, and a landed upper class at home blocks precisely the fiscal and administrative reforms the state needs to remain competitive.
• Third thesis: the agrarian class structure of a society determines whether a state crisis actually escalates into a full social revolution. Whether or not peasants possess sufficient autonomous village organisation and solidarity to revolt once the state’s coercive grip loosens is what decides whether a political crisis at the top cascades into revolt from below — Skocpol’s explanation for why France and Russia underwent social revolutions while Prussia and Japan, facing broadly comparable external pressures, did not.
• Skocpol’s definitions are precise and worth stating exactly, since the distinctions between them are frequently the actual point of a question.
  • Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures, accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.
  • Political revolutions transform state structures alone, without a corresponding transformation of class structure, and are not necessarily accomplished through class conflict.
  • Rebellions may involve revolt by subordinate classes but do not produce lasting structural change of either kind.
• Skocpol’s critics raise three connected objections.
  • Her account writes agency, ideology, and leadership almost entirely out of the explanation, which strains credibility once one asks whether Lenin’s and Mao’s specific choices made no difference to what their respective revolutions actually became.
  • The theory generalises from just three agrarian bureaucratic empires, and it fits the Iranian Revolution of 1979 poorly — there, an explicitly ideological mass movement toppled a state that had not lost any war and faced no comparable external military pressure, a case that pushed Skocpol herself to later concede considerably more explanatory weight to ideology and organised agency.
  • Her state-centred approach, valuable as a corrective to purely society-centred accounts, is better at explaining why a state collapses than at explaining which ideological direction the successor regime subsequently takes.

Charles Tilly’s Political Process Theory of Revolution

• Charles Tilly, in From Mobilization to Revolution, analyses revolutionary change as a special case of the same collective-action framework he applies to protest more generally, built from four components.
  • Organisation of the group(s) involved, which can range from a spontaneously formed crowd to a tightly disciplined revolutionary cadre — Lenin’s movement in Russia, for instance, began as a small, disciplined group of activists.
  • Mobilisation: the process by which a group acquires the resources — material supplies, political support, weaponry — needed to act collectively; Lenin drew material and moral support from a sympathetic peasantry and urban population.
  • Common interest: a shared perception, among those participating, of the gains and losses at stake — Lenin’s coalition held together because many otherwise different groups shared a common interest in removing the existing government.
  • Opportunity: the contingent, often unpredictable events that open or close the possibility of successful revolutionary action — Tilly points out there was nothing inevitable about Lenin’s success, which depended on a series of contingent factors, including the outcome of specific battles.
• Tilly’s most influential specific concept is multiple sovereignty: a revolutionary situation exists when two or more blocs make simultaneous, incompatible claims to control the same state, each commanding significant backing from some part of the population — a condition that can arise from external war, internal political rupture, or both together.
• His crucial methodological point, and an implicit critique of accounts (including Skocpol’s) that study only successful cases: a revolutionary situation (multiple sovereignty existing) and a revolutionary outcome (an actual transfer of power) are analytically distinct and require separate explanations, since most revolutionary situations in history have not, in fact, produced a revolutionary outcome — a theory that only studies successful cases risks selecting on its own dependent variable.
• Whether a revolutionary situation converts into an outcome, in Tilly’s account, depends on how far the existing authorities retain control over the armed forces, how deep the divisions within the ruling group itself run, and how well organised the contending movement is.

Barrington Moore’s Three Routes to the Modern World

• Barrington Moore, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), gives a class-coalitional account of revolution’s long-run political consequences, tracing three distinct historical routes by which agrarian societies became modern.
  • Bourgeois revolution, in which an independent commercial and industrial class breaks the power of the landed aristocracy, producing capitalist democracy (England, France, the United States).
  • Revolution from above, in which a landed elite itself sponsors industrialisation and modernisation without a genuine bourgeois revolution or a mobilised peasantry, producing fascism (Germany, Japan).
  • Peasant revolution, in which a mobilised peasantry, in the absence of a strong independent bourgeoisie, overthrows the landlord class, producing communism (Russia, China).
• His most quoted formulation states the underlying causal claim directly.

“No bourgeois, no democracy.” — Barrington Moore

• Moore’s framework is also the classic reference point for treating India as a deviant case: India underwent a broad, gradual political and economic modernisation without a revolution corresponding to any of his three routes — usually explained by India’s particular combination of a colonial state, a weak indigenous bourgeoisie, and a peasantry mobilised gradually within a nationalist rather than a purely class-based movement.

Theories of Revolution at a Glance

Social Movement versus Revolution

• What the two share: both are forms of organised collective action pursued through an ideology and an organisational structure, and both depend on the same underlying prerequisites discussed earlier in this article — grievance, consciousness, leadership, organisation, and opportunity.
• Is every revolution preceded by a social movement? Largely yes, in the sense that some organised mass mobilisation — a movement, in the sociological sense — is normally the vehicle through which a revolutionary situation is produced and a revolutionary outcome then pursued. But Skocpol’s structural account is the necessary corrective: the presence of a revolutionary movement is neither sufficient, nor even always the principal cause, of an actual revolution, since her own account locates the decisive causes elsewhere — in state breakdown and agrarian class structure — and treats the eventual outcome as unintended by any of the movement’s own participants. Most social movements, in any case, are not revolutionary in aim, and most avowedly revolutionary movements never produce an actual revolution.