For What Do We Cheer? Nietzsche, Moral Stands, and Social Movement Research

Abstract

This article explores moral stances in social movement research. The article first identifies three moral orientations (and their corresponding world views) that have become common since the end of the Cold War. The second section uses Friedrich Nietzsche's praise and criticism of three types of “useful history” to clarify the benefits and costs of each moral orientation. The article closes with thoughts about the relevance of Nietzsche's notion of “free spirits” to morally inspired scholarship about movements.

Notes

¹ For example, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); see also William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959). For criticisms of fearful analyses of movement politics during the middle of the twentieth century, see Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967); and Sandor Halebsky, Mass Society and Political Conflict: Towards a Reconstruction of Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

The author thanks Vanessa Marie Zirakzadeh for inspiring this piece.

² See, for example, Susan C. Stokes, Cultures in Conflict: Social Movements and the State in Peru (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); see also Kathleen M. Blee, Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); and Tina Fetner, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

³ C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956); C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1959).

⁴ Of course, a scholar need not feel ambivalent about his or her pro-movement sympathies. Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon, for example, write “The researcher need not and in fact should not have a detached relation to the movement” (emphasis added). Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon, “Movement-Relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism,” Social Movement Studies 4:3 (2005), p. 190. See also David Croteau, “Which Side Are You On? The Tension between Movement Scholarship and Activism,” in David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Charlotte Ryan (eds), Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 20–40; and Sarah Waters, “Situating Movements Historically: May 1968, Alain Touraine, and New Social Movement Theory,” Mobilization 13:1 (2008), pp. 63–82.

⁵ William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973); see also Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1966); and Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 6th ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968).

⁶ Jean L. Cohen, “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research 52:4 (1985), pp. 663–716; see also Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and James B. Rule, Theories of Civil Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).

⁷ I intentionally use the phrase “more inductive” because a completely inductive study of a topic is difficult, if not impossible. This is partly because humans tend to notice what they are trained to see and to label (and, conversely, often ignore what they have not been trained to observe and categorize). For example, having worked for decades as a social movement researcher, I easily see political-process themes, mass-society themes, and identity-formation themes whenever I read accounts of movements or observe movement activists. Many writers, nonetheless, have suggested that humans can seek observations that fall outside what we have learned to expect. That sort of Sisyphean effort to see reality apart from earlier expectations (a struggle that can never be fully successful) is the goal of the next section of the article. For a convenient introduction to the philosophic paradoxes and psychological challenges of reasoning that is neither inductive nor deductive but “abductive,” see Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge, 2011).

⁸ See, for example, McAdam, Political Process; see also Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Mass Politics in the Modern State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Joe Foweraker and Todd Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997); Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004); Roger Karapin, Protest Politics in Germany: Movements on the Left and Right Since the 1960s (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); and Brian Grodsky, Social Movements and the New State: The Fate of Pro-Democracy Organizations When Democracy is Won (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

⁹ See, for instance, Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1975); see also Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1989); Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991); Dale A. Hathaway, Can Workers Have a Voice? The Politics of Deindustrialization in Pittsburgh (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Robin D. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London, UK: Verso, 2004); and Temma Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

¹⁰ In the United States, Saul Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1946) is a seminal work in this tradition. Hannah Arendt's On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965) also has inspired many political scientists who study social movements as a potential source of cultural transformation; see also Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Wini Breines, The Great Refusal: Community and Organization in the New Left (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1982); Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); Begoña Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris, Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ziad W. Munson, The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Edward J. McCaughan, Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). In Europe, a major source of inspiration for a cultural transformation strand in social movement research is Rosa Luxemburg's Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions, published in 1906 and currently available in numerous English translations. See Albert Soboul, The Sans Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972); see also Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972); Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

¹¹ Luther P. Gerlach, “Movements of Revolutionary Change: Some Structural Characteristics,” American Behavioral Scientist 14:6 (1971), pp. 812–836.

¹² See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980); see also Breines, Great Refusal; Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

¹³ See, for example, McAdam, Political Process, pp. 33–59. For reflections on the relative weakness of macroeconomic analysis in contemporary social movement research, see Richard Flacks, “The Question of Relevance in Social Movement Studies,” in Croteau, Hoynes, and Ryan (eds), Rhyming Hope and History, pp. 14–17.

¹⁴ See, for example, Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, “Trouble in Paradigms,” in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (eds), Rethinking Social Movements: People, Passions, and Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 75–93.

¹⁵ Tilly, Social Movements, p. 152. Italicized in the original text.

¹⁶ See, for example, Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements.

¹⁷ For examples of this profound distrust of conventional political processes, see Wallerstein, Modern World-System III; see also Hathaway, Can Workers Have a Voice?; and Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (New York: Rowen & Littlefield, 2008).

¹⁸ See, for example, Morris, Civil Rights Movement; see also Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness; and Goodwyn, Populist Moment.

¹⁹ Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 246–247.

²⁰ Polletta, Endless Meeting, p. 230.

²¹ McAdam, Political Process, p. 47.

²² See, for example, Goodwyn, Populist Moment; see also Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1979); and Aretxaga, Shattering Silence.

²³ Nietzsche considers scientific historians who, in the name of objectivity, collect information without an interest in transforming the world to be “wandering encyclopedias,” full of esoteric but useless knowledge: “if they are men, they are only men to a physiologist.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), pp. 22–25, 28–33, 37–49.

²⁴ Ibid., 12–14.

²⁵ Ibid., 17–19.

²⁶ Ibid., 20–21.

²⁷ Ibid., 19–20.

²⁸ Ibid., 14–17.

²⁹ Ibid., 21–22.

³⁰ Ibid., 21.

³¹ Ibid., 12.

³² Slavoj Žižek, “Invisible Ideology: Political Violence between Fiction and Fantasy,” Journal of Political Ideologies 1:1 (1996), pp. 15–32; see also Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).

³³ For more on the relevance of Nietzsche's analysis of suffering and vengeance for understanding political activism in modern liberal welfare-warfare states, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 52–76.

³⁴ Nietzsche, Use and Abuse, p. 17.

³⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 84.

³⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 212.

³⁷ Ibid., 211–212, 215–216, 220.

³⁸ Ibid., 222.

³⁹ Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 448–467; see also Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 191–223; S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

⁴⁰ For more on the impact of graduate-student training for the moral outlooks of political scientists, see Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in Andre Schiffrin (ed.), The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 195–231; and Ira Katznelson, “The Subtle Politics of Developing Emergency: Political Science as Liberal Guardianship,” in Schiffrin (ed.), The Cold War and the University, pp. 233–258.

⁴¹ Nietzsche, Genealogy, pp. 11–31; see also Nietzsche, Human, pp. 46–47.

⁴² Nietzsche, Human, p. 8.

⁴³ Ibid., 5–8, 138–140, 266–268.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 9.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 6–7, 8–9.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 140–142, 170–171.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 142.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 170.