Movements Beyond Marx: Tilly

Tilly provides a nice overview of the major schools of thought on the subject of collective action. He begins with Marxian thought and then explores three other major approaches, those inspired by Weber, Durkheim, and Mill.

Marxian

I won't go in to great length here in that this is familiar to us all. When individuals or institutions act in a concerted fashion in is generally on behalf of particular social classes. According to Tilly, for Marx readiness to act was predicated on two key elements:

ÅE Durability of communications within the class

ÅE The visible presence of a class enemy

(he doesn't have much to say about the role of the intelligentsia in fostering class consciousness, a factor more thoroughly developed by Lenin with his notion of the "vanguard" but certainly viewed by Marx as essential in that the stupefying nature of labor under capitalism had rendered working people unable to recognize their plight and formulate a response). As Tilly succinctly puts it "When Marx's political actors acted, they did so out of common interest, mutual awareness, and internal organization" (13).

Weber (shared beliefs collective action)

We were not assigned the section that deals with the Weberian tradition in greater detail, most likely because a significant chunk of the other readings in this section, those emphasizing the importance of culture--both political and more generally--are examples of this approach. In a nutshell, Weber, working within the German idealist tradition, portrayed collective action as the outgrowth of a commitment to certain systems of belief.

Durkheim (social change disorder)

Please consult the diagram from page 19 that I have attached. Durkheim identifies three distinct types of collective action: routine, restorative, and anomic. Routine is the "safe", in that it is the product of shared belief and serves to renew such belief. The area below the diagonal is a dangerous realm in differentiation exceeds the extent of shared belief. The result is anomic collective action which is as negative as the routine is positive, the former being again the product but also the perpetuator of the undermining of shared beliefs. Restorative action is to be found right along the diagonal and serves to move society back into the "safe" area above the diagonal.

Durkheimian theory predicts that as differentiation accelerates, the incidence of anomic and restorative collective action increase. It also implies that populations newly created or displaced by differentiation will tend to be at the center of collective action and a close association among suicide, crime, violence, and non-routine collective action. Tilly notes that most 20th century analyses of collective action drawn on the Durkheimian framework: "indeed the standard analyses of industrialization, urbanization, deviance, social control, social disorganization, and collective behavior which emerged in the twentieth century all bore the Durkheimian stamp: (18). An example of this is the work of Huntington and others which replace the two axes of the Durkheimian model, differentiation and shared belief with "modernization" and "institutionalization", respectively. Disorder and, ultimately, revolution result when the expansion of political consciousness and the mobilization of new groups proceed at rate that makes it impossible for established political institutions to assimilate them. The greater the rate and extent of social change the more widespread conflict and protest.

Mill (self-interest collective action)

Mill viewed collective action as result of a strictly calculating pursuit of individuals' interest. Individuals acquiesce to political arrangements, thereby sacrificing their interests in the short terms, as a way of ensuring the realization of their goals over the long term. Tilly stresses that contemporary theory of the rationalist bent has shed Mill's exclusive emphasis on the individuals and her relation with the state. Mill ignores the role of groups existing between the individuals and the state as a determinant of political decisions or a means of understanding the behavior of these groups, a silence that Tilly attributes to Mill's fundamental fear of class action and the threat it posed to order and capitalism.

The collective choice school, as Tilly refers to it, focuses on the 1) consequences of alternative decision rules (those which translate individual interests into individual action and which aggregate individual actions into collective action) and 2) the causes and effects of different forms of interest-group politics. Thus this camp draws heavily on Mill (in its rationalist emphasis) but moves beyond him.

Collective choice is portrayed by Tilly as essential a subset of microeconomic theory. Game theory and the extensive writing on public goods are examples of this approach. Some have used the strategy to analyze voting behavior, formal organizations, and power.

Two key examples of work in this area are Coleman's examinations of everything from a simple legislature to patterns of influence in informal groups to paying the cost of a public utility. In all instances he sees the likelihood of a collective action being undertaken as the total interest of individual actors, as conditioned by the value to each individual action, and the of actors over events. He also extended his inquiry to society, in his Asymmetric Society and elsewhere stressing that " an increasing share of collective action, and especially of collective action that changes things, is carried on by, within, or against corporate actors.

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, Loyalty was a helpful complement to Coleman's' in that it improves on a simple analogy with a price system. The latter is inadequate for understanding collective action of other types in that individuals can easily opt not to buy a firm's products, where as in the case of a government system or other collectivities the cost of exit is usually much greater. Hirschman helps clarify the strategic choices for collective action in a world of giant corporate actors.

Olson in the other major thinker operating in this vein. He, as described below, challenges the notion that rationality on the part of individuals will necessarily culminate in collective action. His work has sparked intensive response, in the form of elaboration and critique. Many have brought to light aspects of rationality ignored by Tilly. One of these is the important distinction between the benefits that accrue to average participants and those, often far greater, available to the political entrepreneur who organizes an action.

If collective choice is one legacy of Millian thought, strategic interaction is another. This school tends to take both the interests and organization of actors as given and concentrates tactics and strategy as functions of varying opportunities and information about those opportunities. Boulding's work is a classic example.