Major forms of collective action in western Europe 1500–1975
✍ Scribed by Charles Tilly
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1976
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 562 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0304-2421
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Any effort to sort into a few categories the many different ways Europeans have acted together in pursuit of common grievances or aspirations is bound to do injustice to the richness of human behavior. Yet to categorize is a first step on the way to identifying what there is to explain, and therefore on the way to explaining it. If we compare the continuous forms of collective action which prevailed in sixteenth-century western Europe-the exertion of pressure through craft guilds, the collective appeal to a landlord, and so on-with those of the twentieth century, we see a world of difference. In the twentieth century, we discover elections, political parties, associations, pressure groups, trade unions and many other factions which were practically nonexistent five centuries ago. The contrast between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries appears even more dramatically when we turn to discontinuous forms of action such as the peasant revolt, the tax rebellion, or the mutiny. This paper will sketch a rough classification of discontinuous forms of collective action, place some of the most widespread varieties of European collective action "within the classification, and discuss some of the ways the repertoire of collective actions available to ordinary Europeans has changed since 1500.
The classification stresses the nature of the interaction between other groups and the group whose action we are classifying. More precisely, it depends on the claims the collective actors are asserting in their action: competitive claims, reactive claims or proactive claims.
Competitive actions lay claim to resources also claimed by other groups which the actor defines as rivals, competitors, or at least as participants in the