Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1998  by William G. Roy

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Ever since Marx depicted the French insurgency of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 as the incubator of proletarian revolution, these two events have occupied a center stage in Western ideology and social science. Those of a Marxian persuasion have spotlighted them as a paradigmatic case of the class formation narrative, by which the working class has matured into a self-conscious and historically formidable collectivity. Those hostile to class analysis have similarly used them to prove the irrelevance of the working class and class dynamics to history. In one of the most important books on collective action in the last decade, Roger V. Gould synthesizes the resource mobilization perspective on social movements, with its strong class overtones, and sociology's culturalist turn, with its emphasis on identity and contingency, into a theoretically original and impressively researched account of Paris in 1848 and 1871. His most fundamental claim is that the role of social class is historically contingent. Contrary to the class formation narrative that treats the growth of the working class as a unidirectional process of increasing importance, Gould argues that while class was the social basis of the events in 1848, the Paris Commune had little to do with class. It was, instead, an urban insurrection in which neighborhood was both the structural principle of organization and the main source of identity. Rather than being an abstract principle imposed upon social analysis, class is used as one of several bases of collective action that is salient or not, depending on broader social circumstances. The body of the book analyzes the events in 1848 and 1871, showing how and why class underlay the earlier movements but neighborhood the latter. In 1848, the participants were organized into class-homogeneous collectivities that did seek to overthrow capitalism, but the French Commune was a revolt of city dwellers against the central state in which the collective actors were multi-class neighborhoods.

Gould's model of insurgent collective action welds the relationship among several core concepts. Participation identity, the way people think of themselves and their relationship to others, is both a cause and a result of collective action; identity is reflexively based on and creates meaningful boundaries of interest and affect. Identities are important not only as a means by which people evaluate what they have to gain or lose from collective action, but also as normative obligations to contribute to the collective effort. Ideology, which renders a schematic image of the world in terms of collective actors, is forged more at ground level than by literate elites. Networks, which serve as one of the major pieces of evidence throughout the book, structure the identities and bases of solidarity among participants. Networks are in one sense the raw material for identities - any individual has a wide range of interactions that can potentially be developed into identities; but they are also the result of identities, since people choose to relate or not, depending on pre-existing identities. Finally, interests include both material objects that participants have to gain or lose and issues of collective meaning. Collective action is treated as neither coolly utilitarian nor impulsively symbolic. One of Gould's main points is that identities, networks, and interests are linked together indeterminately. The social categories that map the conflicts and coalitions of collective action are contingent upon both broad historical trends and specific historical events. Class, race, nation, and so forth are not fundamental bases of collective action but elements of a broad repertoire that can be invoked under the right circumstances.

These dynamic concepts are set within two contextual factors, the role of events and formal organization. While Gould hardly ignores the importance of long-term historical processes and trends, he emphasizes the importance of short-term events that frame the issues, structure identities, invoke interests, and mobilize networks for collective action. The events of 1848 were sparked by the abolition of two class-based institutions, inciting the working class to revolt as a collectivity. The Paris Commune was a reaction against the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the national government's abandoning Paris.

The readers of this journal may be especially interested in his treatment of formal organization. The resource mobilization perspective treats organization as the fundamental actor of collective action, and in some accounts, this has been reduced to formal organization. Gould distinguishes between the organizational basis of collective action at the ground level and formal organization. At the ground level, it is networks of solidarity that fortify militancy and often personal sacrifice. Gould treats formal organization as doing less of the concrete, nitty-gritty mobilization emphasized by resource mobilization perspectives than playing the essential role of tying together small-scale insurgencies; it affects the scale more than the mere existence of collective action. Thus, formal organizations are necessary for large-scale collective actions like 1848 and 1871, but only the experience of everyday life sparks them.