On the methological approaches to
historical studying of social movements
Maryna Sakalova
The study of
social movements has always been an important subject of historical research.
Meanwhile historians rarely gave substantive definitions of social movements
and preferred to define it through enumeration of related phenomena. The notion
of social movement emerged in the 18th century and was first used by A.de
Sen–Simount (1760—1825) to characterize protest movements of his
time. Later on the notion was theorized and introduced into social sciences
discourse by L.Stein (1815—1890), K. Marx (1815—1883) and M. Weber
(1864—1920). In the framework of Marxist theory the notion of social
movement has lost its importance and has been eliminated by class struggle
— political movement paradigm. This approach dominated and in many cases
still dominates in the historical studies of social movements. As a result the
notion of social movement included political parties activities, class struggle
and cultural and literature movements. In some cases social movement was
defined as a system of political parties which expressed economical political
and cultural interest of social classes.
In the end of the
1980ies historians tried to theorize the history of social movements in terms
of modern political science theories. Social movements have been thought of as
organized collective efforts by relatively powerless groups of people who use
extra institutional means to promote or resist change in society. The sociology
of social movements includes, among other things, the study of the conditions
under which movements arise (and decline), the reasons for people’s
involvement in them, the strategies and tactics pursued by social movement
organizations (and their opponents), and the impact they have on society.
Because social movements emerged in the eighteenth century, exist in many
societies, and encompass a variety of political perspectives, the number and
types of social movements is vast and in this situation classification,
categorization and periodisation of social movements have become an urgent need
for historical science. Thus historians may use movement typologies based on
amount of change (associated with Neil Smelser) and on amount of change and
level of change (associated with David Aberle).
Along with this
more or less traditional taxonomies there are other alternatives, i.e. analysis
of social movements by levels (individuals (micro-level)), social movement
organizations — SMO (meso–level), social movement industry —
SMI (meso–level), political opportunity structure (factors external to
the movements — macro–level); by temporal issues (antecendents,
emergence, peak mobilization, decline and abeyance).
The article
describes in what way mentioned above and other classification schemes
based on various theoretical approaches can be used for the analysis of the
history of social movements in Imperial Russia (and Belarus as a part of it).