Two Interpretations of Contemporary Social Change

Alain Touraine

1. Decline or Transformation of Social Movements?

Social movements cannot be identified with campaigns for institutional reforms. But they can be understood as countercultural or "alternative" forms of collective action or as a protest movements, directed against forms of social organization more than against cultural values. These two types of collective action—more "cultural" or more "social"—are present in the seventies and eighties. Both the future and the very nature of what I referred to some ten years ago as the "new social movements" appear to be uncertain. Those who study social movements have taken two views about the future of these movement. The first view sees the end of social movements inasmuch as they are defined as organized collective actions aimed at transforming the social order. According to these observers, our era is characterized by movements that depend on try to expand individual freedom and that oppose the state's power. The social and political space, in German, the "Öffentlichkeit," is becoming a no-man's-land between a more and more individualistic private life that expects society to be permissive and international relations that are dominated by the confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers and by the resistance of Islam and other communitarian movements to Westernization. Social movements, especially the most important one, the labor movement, are melting down because our democratic regimes are able to answer social demands with institutional reforms and because these social movements have often been transformed into instruments of power and repression rather than of protest.

The second view holds that we are living in a period of transition between the decline of the labor movement and the formation of new social movements that belong to postindustrial society. In this society,

industrialized production and the diffusion of symbolic and cultural goods take the central role that belongs to "productive forces" in industrial society. This period of transition is in many ways similar to the first half of the nineteenth century when social problems, such as poverty and proletarianization, were more visible than were the still fragmentary and repressed social movements.

These two interpretation appear to be entirely opposed to each other; they are not, however, mutually exclusive. Here again, a comparison with the nineteenth century is useful. For liberals, reason and interest were going to displace tradition and privilege. They believed that an open economy and a liberal society would permit a better use of material and human resources and enhance freedom of expression and the circulation of ideas. Such opinions were not rejected by those who identified industrialization with the development of a new economic domination and the class struggle. Marx spoke of the revolutionary action of the bourgeoisie, and most socialist thinkers believed as much in progress as they did in class struggle; they expected the development of productive forces to overcome, both naturally and through purposeful action, the domination of private interests.

These two analyses of social movements are challenges by the liberal-conservative view of a completely open, constantly changing society that no longer has any nature, essence, or center, a society that is nothing but a number of loosely connected changes. Critical sociologist, however, discover conflicts not only in production but in all aspects of social life and see new social movements that challenge social organization as a whole and propose alternative forms of social, economic, and cultural life.

These two images may seem to be so opposed as to be mutually exclusive. The social sciences are confronted with the opposition of these two interpretation of contemporary social changes. The optimistic liberal interpretation seems to be prevailing today or at least is more relevant in a period of new technological developments, milder economic difficulties, and the absence of a major crisis involving the two superpowers. For this reason, I consider the optimistic view first before examining the Idea of new social movements because the existence of such movements has always been depended only by a minority and attacked on one side by liberals and on the other by Marxist structuralists, who discern nothing but the logic of domination and the reproduction of social inequalities in social processes.

2. The End of Society

The main impact of the idea of modernization, in both its positivist and its liberal version, came from its assumption that all social structures and systems of social control are crumbling. Modern societies can no longer be

defined by principles, values, and norms but instead are defined by change, the triumph of instrumental rationality, and the destruction of all absolute principles. Positivists believed that these evolutionary changes would lead to a scientific society governed by political engineers. Liberals predicted that society would be transformed into a market in which all goods and services would be priced according to their utility.

But this confidence in reason and change could not exclude a deep-seated anxiety: how would it be possible to introduce order into change, that is, to maintain the unity of society, the continuity of law, and the possibility of education in a society that would be like a stream in whose waters one cannot step twice?

Beyond the diversity of its thinkers and schools, sociology is a general interpretation of modern society: its central purpose is to understand the interdependence of order and movement. We must be clear on what classical sociological thought was if we want to understand the importance and the novelty of neomodernist thought, which challenges the solutions that were elaborated by classical sociology during the period of Western industrialization. What we call classical sociology was actually a limited moment in the history of social thought, a moment from which we are probably departing, that was built around the central notion of society.

Modernity can be defined as a process of growing differentiation of economic, political, and cultural subsystems. But the concept of society gained a central importance during the long period that corresponded to a limited development of modernity, when economy, politics, and culture were still closely interrelated. In merchant societies, the state was intervening into economic life to protect roads and ports, to check weights and measures, and to ensure the reliability of currencies. European national states eliminated the power of feudal landlords, private wars, and all obstacles to the circulation of people and goods. They imposed the realm of law over their territories. Of course the state was not only a maker of laws and a judge. It was an absolute power and a maker of wars as well. But the idea of the national state and a direct correspondence between a nation and the state gained ground, first in England and France, then in Sweden. Finally, it triumphed with the American and French revolutions and the Rousseauian ideal of the people's sovereignty.

Before the Renaissance, social thought was the comparative history of civilizations, that is, religions. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries it became political philosophy. Society meant the polity for Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Tocqueville was more the last of these great political philosophers that the first sociologist. These political philosophers opposed the social to the nonsocial as order to chaos.

The idea of the national state as a unifying principle was then, at a

higher level of modernization, replaced by the idea of capitalism, because the central agent of social change was no longer the national state but the bourgeoisie. The concept of capitalism is not a purely economic one because it identifies the economic structure with the process of global change. This identification supposes the existence of strong links between "civil society" and the state, between economy and politics. The idea of society finally appeared as a combination of the national state and capitalism. Thus the idea of society, like the earlier idea of the national state, is an effort to link what the process of modernization tends to separate: economics activity, political and military power, and cultural values.

Durkheim among the great classical sociologists has the most anguished awareness of the decomposition of social order and of the necessity to give the idea of society a central role, both in sociological analysis and in the reconstruction of social order. Parsons, in contrast, was more optimistic and gave us a triumphal image of society. He identified society with rationality without sharing Weber's and Durkeim's preoccupation with the consequences of modernization.

The idea of society is to a large extent a myth. It tries to overcome the growing separation of the main elements of social life by introducing a central principle of social organization. This sociologism is criticized by those who observe that modern societies are built on power, exploitation. and was as much as on rationality, law, and science. I am not, however, directly interested in these well-known criticisms. My central preoccupation is with the consequences of contemporary hypermodernization, a development that appears to destroy all unifying myths that try to bring together individualistic culture, constantly changing economic activities, and a state that is more and more directly defined by its political, military, and economic competition with other state. The importance of the idea of society is that contemporary hypermodernization appears to destroy it, and it is doing so as rapidly as industrialization destroyed the idea of the national state and led to the notion of society.

The main characteristic of contemporary modern society is the extreme separation between the state and social life, a separation that can no longer be overcome by another unifying myth. This separation is felt very intensely in Europe, the continent where the first national states were created. The economies and cultures of European nations have become transnational; their citizens use a higher and higher proportion of foreign products and, even more important, they are subordinated to the nuclear superpowers. The separation between the state and social life was felt less intensely in the United States during the years immediately after World War II, which explains the broad influence of Parsons's sociology. But from the 1960s on, American citizens became conscious of

the separation between state and society. But unlike European countries, their own state had acquired imperial influence, had become a nuclear superpower, and thus could no longer be reduced to a political institution like congress or municipal bodies.

At the same time that military power and international strategy are separating themselves more and more from internal policies, mass consumption is overcoming the barriers of social and economic stratification. Although some sociologist maintain old-fashioned ideas in this area, socioeconomic status clearly has decreasing predictive power in explaining consumption patterns and political choices. Often it is more useful to consider upwardly or downwardly mobile groups or ethnic subcultures than socioeconomic strata in explaining social behavior.

These observations are sufficient to describe the analysis of those who believe in the waning of social movements. Their central idea is that social movements have existed only inasmuch as they were at the same time political movements. They believe that only action against state power gives unity and a central importance to protest movements, which otherwise tend to be diverse and limited. Peasant movements in seventeenth-century France became important only because they opposed state taxes in addition to the domination of the landlords. If it had not been unified by political action, especially by that of the socialist parties, whose main purpose was not to transform working conditions but to conquer political power, what we call the labor movement would have been only a series of limited protest movements. The predominant role of political action in the labor movements is demonstrated by the fact that socialist parties have played their most important role in countries where unions were relatively weak and where purely political problems were more central than social problems, for example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. The idea of socialism as a global social movements has been more actively developed in these countries than in Great Britain or the United States. This observation leads many to conclude that a social movement is actually a mixture of social protest and political action. This mixture often leads to contradictions, as demonstrated in the Soviet Union during the first years after the revolution.

Following the logic of this analysis, if political action and social protest now tend to be more and more separated, social movements must disappear. Liberals, when they go beyond a superficial apology for technological progress and abundance, defend an idea that is as powerful as the ideas of progress and rationalization that were introduced by their predecessors. This idea is the triumph of individualism, that is, the separation between individual needs and aims and state problems. Individualism destroys not only the public space, from institutions to socialization agencies, but also the very possibility of social movements. On one side, liberals

say, we see the presence of individuals, with their sexuality and violence as well as their need for security and their efforts to climb up the social ladder. On the other side is the state, which is first of all a military power and which is often able to absorb social life and manipulate it, as in communist countries, or to identify itself with nationalist and religious forces, as in many Third World countries. Protest movements appear against the state. They range from the dissidents and the refuseniks in the Soviet Unions to the mass movement in the United States opposing the Vietnam war and include movements opposing the permanent threat of nuclear war. But these antistate movements cannot be identified as social movements.

This hyperliberal view is highly original and creative. It has been reinforced by the necessity to find a way out of structuralist pessimism. If social domination is complete, if the whole of social organization functions as a system of social control that maintains inequality, privileges, and power, if social movements are impossible and social actors illusory, and if nothing exists but integration, manipulation, expulsion, and stigmatization, then the only possible exit is individualism. This was Barthe's and Foucault's answer at the end of their lives and it is also the "California" answer. It is an aesthetism, the search for pleasure, friendship, and voluntary groups, and it is directly inspired by ancient Greece. According to this view, the real objective of the new social movements is to get rid of society, not to transform it. The new social movements are very far from the social movements that struggled for political freedom and social justice, that is, the social ideas corresponding to the unifying myth of the past. The new social movements recognize as their central value the autonomy of individuals and groups. They try to express this autonomy by withdrawal, sectarian behavior, or terrorism. No longer do social movements seek to control the main cultural resources and models of society through conflicts in which enemies are defined by a process of social domination. This liberal criticism of the so-called new social movements is much more interesting than the vague analysis that lumps various currents of opinions, revolts, social demands, innovations, and antistate campaigns together under this name.

The hyperliberal view is far removed from both nineteenth-century optimism and the ideology of classical sociology. This latter body of thought believed in the progressive triumph of civil society over the state and the churches and the parallel development of social and economic integration with social and political movements. This ideology has been particularly strong in the United States, where it is another version of the American dream: the effort to build a society that is at the same time economically dynamic, politically democratic, and socially open to organizational demands and protests. This is why classical sociology was more

influential in the United States that in Europe, especially between the two world wars and during the 1950s.

Before I consider the issue of the existence of new social movements, we must recognize as a partial conclusion that the image of a civil society in which opposite and complementary social movements conflict with each other while sharing the same confidence in the idea of progress is an illusion. This illusion, however, is still alive. It was directly present in Italian unionism between 1969 and 1975 and in the ideology of self-management that culminated in the LIP strike in France during this same period. These unionists sought to free their movement from the control of political parties and to create a society dominated by face-to-face conflicts and negotiations between management and workers. But we know today—and we should never have forgotten—that the state never can be reduced to the political expression of civil society and cultural demands cannot be identified with programs of social transformation.

Culture, society, and state power are more and more separated from each other. The consequence is that no social movement can bear in itself a model of an ideal society. Their actions are limited. Either the cultural and political unity of the national society is strong, which limits social conflicts and movements, as has generally been the case in the past, or this unity is weak or absent and nothing can integrate cultural demands, which are more and more individualized. The history of modernization is not the victory of the market and economic actors over states and churches but the decomposition of community, the growing separation of state economic activity, and personality problems. At the end of the decomposition of "society," defined as interrelated economic, cultural, and political systems that are integrated by institutions and socialization processes, it seems logical to announce the end of social movements, which are destroyed by the double triumph of individualism and state power and can no longer transform a society that has disappeared.

If we consider not only the most industrialized countries but also the rest of the world, the most important collective movements today are not social movements, such as socialism, communism, or unionism, which have been largely transformed into the ideological bases of state power, but rather the Islamic movement and, more broadly, the movements calling for identity, specificity and community that link cultural demands and state power and suppress, generally in a violent way, public space and social movements. The world appears divided into two parts: Western countries that are dynamic, individualistic, anomic, and deprived or freed from collective action, and Third World countries that are dominated by cultural or even religious nationalism. In between these two parts the communist world crushes both individual demands and collective

action; its use of the vocabulary of the labor movement only emphasizes communism's destruction.

In such a situation, is it not logical to consider that social movements take place only in historical settings in which principles of social integration and open social conflicts coexist? Without a principle of social integration based on a legitimate state, no central social movement can be created; without open social conflicts and a recognized plurality of interests, social movements are reduced to rebellions. Social movements were, according to this view, directly linked with societies integrated by unifying myths—of the national state or society—as well as with autonomous economics relations. We now observe their decomposition in countries where an absolute state tolerates no diversity and imposes its rule in the name of a communitarian destiny.

3. Postsocial Movements?

The decline of modern societies, together with the consequent decline of the particular stage of social thought we call sociology, leads us to a representation of social life as a flow of continuous changes. It means the triumph of modernization but at the same time the end of the idea of society. Large parts of what we call sociology, if this field of knowledge can be redefined as the study of social life instead of the study of society, corresponds to this purely dynamic view of social life. The modern theory of organizations, which is dominated by H. Simon's concept of limited rationality, is the most elaborate form of such neorationalism. According to this theory, actors do not behave according to their status in the system but according to their position in the process of change. In this approach, a word that has long been marginal in sociology all of a sudden takes on a central importance: that word is "strategy." Individual and collective actors do not act according to values and norms. Rather, like state, they act in strategic ways, trying to get the best possible results in a given process of change that is never completely controlled by a central authority. In a parallel way, Goffman or the ethnomethodologists represent social actors as states who use diplomacy and war in their dealings with other actors, and those other actors are more strangers than partners in a system of roles and role expectations. Social movements cannot appear in such a "Cold War" environment. Strategy does not require either affective mobilization or collective consciousness. It only requires the rational search for optimal solutions, and in particular the minimization of risks and uncertainty.

The importance of strategy does not recall the nineteenth century, whose political life was dominated by mass movements, but the eighteenth

century, because not ordinary people but powerful elites elaborate strategies. The members of these elites are highly individualistic and value their own pleasure. Such an individualism can go very far in criticizing the established order, social conventions, and moral rules, as far as the Marquis de Sade the legendary figure of Don Juan went. In our time, as in the eighteenth century, love affairs and perspectives on war appear to be more important than social problems and collective protests, which are still loosely organized and which do not represent any major threat to the institutional order. The social scene looks empty in comparison with the overfull theater of the nineteenth century, which was agitated by democratic campaigns, labor movements, and national movements. The contemporary period criticizes principles and methods of social integration and mechanisms of social control more actively than it organizes social conflicts and social movements. The traditions are more directly attacked that domination, and confidence in the future and its opportunities is stronger than criticism of power elites. The idea of postmodernity correctly describes this situation.

We are living in a period dominated by rapid social changes, a deep crisis of established values, and the initiatives of elite groups, who are able to elaborate complex strategies. Our time is also dominated by international problems: the permanent risk of a major crisis involving the two nuclear superpowers and the difficult birth of new national states, especially in the Middle East. Only an empty space exists between Freud and Khomeini. This space used to be occupied by Marx and the social and political thinkers who spoke for the labor and other social movements, both reformist and revolutionary. Social life seems to have lost all principles of unity. It is still possible to define democracy in such a social situation? It seems more appropriate to speak, on the one hand, of the permissiveness of mass society and, on the other hand, of a constant mobilization of the state in dangerous international crises. The state is no longer at the center of society but on its frontier. The unity of social life is limited to mass consumption. It is deprived of any capacity to impose obligations or sanctions but leaves individuals a free space for isolation, withdrawal, or exit. These images correspond especially to the European present because in the Europe the deep crisis of the national states limits nations to the role of members of a more-or-less common market and to an economic and cultural space in which extreme individualism and mass culture easily combine and cooperate in eliminating all kinds of active social and political participation. Intermediary bodies—parties, unions, churches—are weakened. In the gap between planetary and individual problems, it seems impossible to organize collective action. The concept of a good or fair society cannot be defined because the idea of society itself is disappearing. We seldom refer to social systems, institutions,

and power structures, but we very often refer to processes of change, their risks, and their positive aspects.

Let us accept once more the conclusion of the decline of the idea of society and its direct consequence: the decomposition of collective action aimed at the transformation of social, economic, political organization. But are we allowed to conclude from this waning of a long period of direct correspondence between the national state, socioeconomic organization, and cultural demands that no central principle of social organization can any longer exist and that no social movement, that is, collective action that aims at controlling central cultural resources and models, can be organized? This is the core problem. The notion of social movement is not important if it is used to name a heterogeneous set of protest actions and conflicts that try to modify particular aspects of social and political organization. However, the concept has a central place in sociological analysis if it introduces the hypothesis that there exists in a given society a central conflict—for example, for political liberties or workers' rights—and that this conflict is associated with the defense of central, social, and cultural values, for example, internal peace or economic development. For these reasons, the analysis of social movements cannot be separated from the question of the unity of the social situation in which they appear. In the past we defined this unity as a culture, then as a civilization, then as a political regime, then as the social relations of production, and finally as a socioeconomic system. Does this unity take a new form in contemporary industrialized societies or does it disappear, as I just discussed, to be replaced by boundless and loosely related changes? And what could this principle of unity be if it is no longer the community's rules of exchange, a civilization's collective creeds, the modern national state, or the capitalist system? In the past, modern societies have always provided an answer to this question, introducing a new principle of unity at the same time they were destroying an old principle. But perhaps the moment has come when there is only a nihilist answer to these questions. Is not present-day sociology smothered by the ruins of the idea of society and its concrete expression, the functionalist school?

The answer cannot be a novel one; it must come from the heart of the Western cultural tradition because it necessarily appeared along with the process of modernization itself. I earlier observed that when religion and the political principles of social integration were decaying, the concept of individual subject, that is, the production of individualization, took on an increasing importance. The subject, which Western tradition also refers to as the conscience, is not the expression of an absolute, a transcendence, or an individual existence. It is consciousness of the human capacity to create and transform its environment and culture. During the sixteenth century, modernization not only produced a new rationalism

and a rapid development of the natural sciences; it is also created, through the Reformation, a new moral individualism. With the development of bourgeois society, emphasis is put on personal feelings, morality and intimacy. Today, the subject is defined by its capacity and right to oppose political or cultural processes and to defend its freedom. The more we move away from religion and what Comte called the metaphysical era, the more the subject stops being transcendent and transforms itself into a principle of protest against the social and political order.

The idea of subject is both linked and opposed to the idea of individual. It is linked because it presupposes the loosening of communitarian bonds and even social roles; it is opposed because utilitarianism leads to a deterministic view of human behavior, which is supposed to be led by self-interest. On the contrary, the defense of personal freedom and, more especially, of the capacity for each individual to choose and control his individual life creates a constant tension between the logic of social integration and the reference to human rights.

The individual subject can be the principle of collective action only when two conditions are met. The first is that the defense of the subject must no be just a call for identity; rather, it should be a force of opposition to the dominations exerted on the person's language, tastes, values, and projects. Such a defense becomes much more important today than it was in the past because the industrialized production and diffusion of cultural goods are growing rapidly in importance. The second condition is that the individual cannot represent himself as a subject if he does not recognize other individuals as subjects. This idea has assumed a more and more central place in our culture; we call it "love." The individual becomes a subject through love and ceases to be a subject when he or she denies other individuals the right or the possibility to be subjects, as Levinas repeatedly pointed out.

The contrast with industrial society is striking. The liberation of individuals and societies was identified with the development of "production forces," and freedom was identified with modernization. In a postindustrial society—defined by the central role of "cultural" industries—freedom of the individual subject must be defended against mass production and mass consumption. The image of our society is dominated by this bipolar view, rationalization on one side, "subjectivation, that is, the recognition of the rights of the persons and groups," on the other, instead of the unified "progressive" view of modernity, which is so visible in theories of modernization. This transformation is probably more acutely felt in Europe that in North America because of the memory of the totalitarian regimes that destroyed European nineteenth-century optimism. Social movements no longer pretend to control and reorient the process of modernization; they oppose moral principles to "total" powers. These

new movements not only assert principles and aims; they also define themselves by their opposition to the social and cultural forces that dominate the production of symbolic goods. These movements consider such a conflict to be central to the new postindustrial society, which is organized around the production of symbolic or cultural services, such as the mass media, which shape our images of the world, medical care, which determines our perceptions of life, birth, reproduction, illness, and death, and to a certain extent of science and education.

Once again, let us compare the two opposite images of social life. What we have described on the one side is the image of diverse and continuous change that eliminates all principles of unity and integration of the social system and completely separates individual actors. These actors follow utilitarian strategies in the states that are more and more the makers of war and less and less the makers of the law. On the other side is the image of a social system organized around the production and diffusion of cultural goods and structured by conflicts between those who rule this production and those who resist the domination that is exerted on them not as citizens or workers but as persons.

These two images are not contradictory: they are both complementary and opposed. Democracy cannot exist if there is no exit from a central social conflict and if there is no external element that can mediate between conflicting interests. The liberal reference to social change and to the creation of new opportunities is the classical way of finding compromises between opposing class interests. An open geographical, technological, and economic frontier allows a society to negotiate the results of growth instead of being stifled by a paralyzing conflict. But if social conflicts must be complemented by an open political system, such a system, to be representative and democratic, needs to be based on the social conflicts.

Although complementary in some ways, these two images are nevertheless opposed to each other. The strategic approach to social life corresponds better to the interest of powerful categories, the conflict-oriented approach attracts those who feel dominated, and the idea of subject appeals more directly to intellectuals. But this apparent opposition is a limited one. First, the idea of the subject is not a purely abstract one in a society where the main social conflicts are organized around it. Second, utilitarianism is not to be found only among rich and powerful people in a mass-consumption society. Finally, social conflicts and the subject are concepts that cannot be separated from each other: the central social conflicts concern conflicting views about subject-building. Liberal utilitarianism, social movements, and the idea of the subject are as interrelated as opposed teams and the field on which they compete.

It is more useful to recognize that each of these three main themes can

take a relatively different importance according to the historical situation. Here we can use the Greek differentiation between periods and epochs, that is, between types of societies and processes of transition. Periods are historical ensembles organized around particular cultural orientations and social conflicts. Epochs are moments of rupture and transformation. During the epoch of transition, such as the Renaissance, individualism, the rejection of traditional rules, stronger competition, and the risk of war gain around. Do we live today in a new historical period or are we still in an epoch of rupture and transition? I believe that we are leaving such an epoch. What have been called new social movements during the 1970s and the early 1980s expressed in many cases this crisis of industrial values, the push toward a more permissive society, and a deep preoccupation with the risks of war. During the last decade the desocialization of society has been highly visible. This situation recalls the end of the nineteenth century when Durkheim was acutely sensitive to the decomposition of traditional forms of social control, and when Weber, going beyond his misgivings about the effects of modernization, was fascinated by the value-orientations of a modernized society.

There is another way of contrasting historical situations. Sometimes the subject becomes self-aware through achievement and "engagement." Other times, however, the subject becomes self-aware through struggling against reification, that is, disengaging, and freeing himself or herself from the world of objects. Thus an epic image of the subject is criticized by a romantic image of its process of self-production. The subject is never located in the middle of social life, as is the image of the prince or symbols of national unity; it is the common reference of conflicting social actors, both in their positive projects and in their attacks against what they consider to be dangerous for the subject. No particular actor can identify himself or herself with the subject.

I conclude that the hypermodernity of our society, because it destroys the possibility of a permanent order and the very idea of society, makes the formation of "proper" social movements impossible. But collective movements have not always been social; often, before developing in a political or economic arena, they had been religious. Conflicting social interests and cultural innovations expressed themselves in religious forms from the time of ancient societies to the European sixteenth century. In the same way, what we call social movements are becoming less specifically social. Their main objective is no longer to create an ideal society but to defend the freedom and creativity of the subject in a universe that appears to be dominated by money and pleasure, technology and war. Perhaps we are already living in a new historical period, in a postindustrial society. One of the arguments in favor of such a hypothesis

is the necessity to distinguish between two kinds of collective actions that are different from the social movements characteristic of industrial society: on one side are a new progress of individualism and a new fear of war and catastrophes; on the other side are the new social movements that challenge the control of cultural goods.

4. Social Movements and Historical Movements

In the preceding section I concluded that there has been neither the triumph of social movements in a society that has become entirely civil, as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century progressives hoped, nor their disappearance. Rather we see a growing separation between the two axes of collective action on which social actors may be situated: synchronic and diachronic. The synchronic axis situates actors by their roles in a social system that is defined by the level of "historicity" (that is, the capacity of self-production). The diachronic axis situates actors by their participation in the process of change and by the strategies that orient this process. When speaking of social movements we refer almost exclusively to dominated and powerless actors. Earlier I observed that strategies of change or development are more easily elaborated by powerful elite groups. It is a mistake, however, to identify each of these main orientations of collective behavior with a specific social category. Instead, we must offer a more complete view of the actors in social life and the historical process by defining both the dominant and the dominated actors in structural conflicts and processes of historical change. The term social movement should not be used to characterize only opposition forces or low-status groups. On the contrary, the term identifies the main actors—both dominant and dominated—of central social conflicts through which the main cultural resources and values are transformed into forms of political and social organization. Social movements are those movements that deal with structural problems in a given society. Historical movements are those that aim at control of process of historical development. The separation between the two categories of problems and actors is more extreme in our societies, which have achieved a high level of historicity, than it was during the industrial period. Although British and American social thought was more influenced by liberalism and emphasized processes of change, German and French social thinkers, especially the Marxists, emphasized structural conflicts.

Having recognized the strength and influence of the hyperliberal ideas that identify social problems with processes of social change and modernization, let us begin the effort to give a more complete view of collective actors in our society by considering the historical movements that opposes the process of change and the elite that controls this process.

The antinuclear and ecological movements oppose a hyperindustrialization that destroys natural equilibriums and reinforces militarism. They attack not only the social elite but also the belief in economic growth and new technology, which they consider illusory, dangerous, and self-destructive and which they believe create unbearable tensions and conflicts in the world that can lead to an apocalyptic war. These criticisms are generally directed against technocrats, but often they have an anticapitalist component that maintains a certain continuity with the labor movement. The continuity from revolutionary socialism to new social movements was enhanced by the central role of radical leftist in the protest campaigns that gained momentum after 1968. This radicalism expressed itself through a post-Marxist structuralism that denounced all aspects of social life as representing the logic domination, manipulation, and exclusion in favor of the ruling groups. This radical criticism is directed against what Althusser called the state's ideological apparatuses. This expression makes clear that the enemy is no longer a social class or even a power elite but the state itself as a system of total control. This is a clear demonstration that this radicalism is not a social movement but a historical movement, and that it is more antimodern or antistate than anticapitalist. Its main preoccupation is to fight the identification of the totalitarian state with modernization and growth.

This absence of concern with defining relevant social actors and the global character of its attacks differentiate these "critical" intellectuals from social movements, which are always organized around a social conflict between clearly defined actors. Historical movements constantly swing from a countercultural global critique to a series of loosely connected campaigns because the absence of a clear definition of the parties to a social conflict deprives it of any principle of stabilization. Nevertheless, historical movements like political ecology are not just countercultural; they combine a critique of the process of economic change with attacks against a power that is defined more in political than in social terms. When this conflict-oriented dimension disappears, a historical movement can be transformed into a sect that marginalizes itself by rejecting society's cultural orientations and forms of social organization.

If we define a social movement as the confrontation of opposed groups for the control and use of the main cultural resources and values, in knowledge and ethics as much as in economic life, antinuclear and ecological actions are not social movements. Rather they are "alternative" movements that try to globally transform cultural orientations, social organization, and political power. Their antimilitarist and antimodernist actions are directly opposed to the individualism and strategies of the ruling group, which values any social change it can use for its own interest. The ruling group's historical optimism values utility and pleasure;

the pessimism of alternative movements opposes policies and programs it considers to be carried forward by impulses of power and death.

These two movements have one thing in common: they are both more political than social, that is, they question processes of changes rather than forms of social organization. Their common strength is to define themselves at the state level and to intervene directly at the center of public life.

The new social movements that protest the power that controls the productions of cultural goods are different and in many ways opposed to these historical, "alternative" movements. Debates and conflicts about the effects of the mass media or biological and medical technologies are not political discussions. Rather they question a sociocultural domination while accepting a positive judgment about modern technology in general. Today, as at the beginning of industrial society, social movements and historical movements are both mixed and separated, but a great distance always exists between social movements that attack civil powers and historical movements that oppose the state. This distance is now even larger than was the gap that separated labor unions from communist or socialist groups at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Feminist movements are more complex. It is necessary to distinguish in them at least two different orientations. On one side exists a feminist liberalism, which is an emancipatory movement following the tradition of British and American nineteenth-century reform movements. This movement rejects the identification of women with private life and fights for an equal participation of women in all aspect of public life and in all occupations, law and politics in particular. Simone de Beauvoir was the central figure of this progressive liberalism, which occasionally becomes radical by linking itself to socialist ideas but is most influential among women who enter into social and occupational elites. The women's liberation movement is quite different from this liberal or radical feminism. It emphasizes the particular features of feminine sexuality and fights directly against male domination. This movement has been especially active in the United States and its links with psychoanalysis have been emphasized both by American writers and by A. Fouque, head of the most militant group in France. The liberal wing of the women's liberation movements is a historical movement, and its optimism is similar to the orientations of dominant groups. The radical wing of the women's liberation movement is a social movement of opposition. It is fragile because it emphasizes women's sexuality and the differences between men and women. The difficulty of building equal heterosexual relations runs the risk of isolating militant women in a homosexual rupture that could result in the creation of a marginal cultural that ceases to be a social movement. This fragility, which contrasts with the efficiency of liberal feminism, should not prevent us

from recognizing the deep and lasting effect of a movement that transforms the man-woman relationship.

The experience of industrial society clearly indicates the two main obstacles that hinder the development of social movements. On the one hand, such movements, because they are not political but purely social, are likely to dissolve into a plurality of campaigns and protest movements. On the other hand, if they are tightly linked with political action—as was unionism, which was generally subordinated to socialist parties—this action imposes its rules on the social movements and can even lay the groundwork for a new "popular" political power that suppresses social movements and public liberties.

Contemporary antinuclear movements are far from serving an authoritarian state, but their main strength comes from an antistate orientation. This orientation is especially evident in Germany, a country that is still dominated by the horrors of the Nazi regime. This antinationalism represents, as much as nationalism, a predominance of political over social orientations.

The idea of a growing separation between social and historical movements will not be accepted easily. On the contrary, many people think that the distance between these two kinds of collective action is shrinking and even disappearing. This idea was one of the main assumptions of gauchisme and I consider it to be one of the main obstacles to the formation of social movements in Western countries. If we consider Soviet society, it is true that the global, national and cultural protest of Solzhenitsyn or Bukovskii was stronger, at least during the Brezhnev period, than the social criticism elaborated by Plioucht or Sakharov. But when we consider Western countries it is false and almost preposterous to say that all aspects of social life are subordinated to the interventions of a repressive and military state power.

It is too early to know how new social movements will grow, but it seems reasonable to expect that the social movements that question cultural domination will be more distant from political action than was the labor movement in industrial society, and will be even more distant than the movements of peasants and craftsmen that characterized preindustrial societies. In many countries, especially in Germany and France, we observed the separation of two types of protest. In France, two opposite movements came from May 1968: one attacked the state and used a vocabulary that came from the revolutionary tradition; the other gave life to grassroots movements, in particular to women's liberation and campaigns on behalf of immigrant workers. In other countries the same duality is visible. For example, in the United States during the 1960s the student movement at Berkeley was quite different from the radical political orientation of student protest on campuses like Columbia or Cornell.

These new social movements, like their predecessors, have both a defensive and an offensive face. The defensive face is the more visible: the defense of identity and, sometimes, of community against the domination of new technologies and new power. The stronger this defensive action, the more likely the social movement or the historical movement is to fight against the state because when a social actor feels unable to make headway he rejects society, power, and modernity in a global way. An offensive action tends to identify itself in an optimistic way with the new cultural orientations it seeks to control and to reject its enemies as obstacles to progress. The risk here for social movements is to become incorporated too early and too easily into the institutional system and to be absorbed by political forces. Offensive action reveals more clearly the problems and orientations of a postindustrial society. In particular, it substitutes the idea of system for the old idea of evolution, and it acts on behalf of a cultural rather than an economic concern.

The liberal critique of social movements has rightly shown that new social movements must leave the political field, strictly speaking, because they defend individuals who feel threatened—but at the same time excited—by the new cultural productions. Private life does not replace public life, as is too often contended; rather it becomes the core of public life. Culture becomes political in much the same way that the economy became political in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when workers and craftsmen fought as producers and as agents of a practical reason that opposed itself to the irrationality of profit.

Today individuals are dominated in their perceptions and emotions. They cannot resist this domination but oppose it with the whole of their personalities, their imaginations, their primary groups, and their personal projects. This view of the individual corresponds to the new global definition of the social field, which is no longer a collective activity that transforms nature but a system whose elements are interdependent and whose modernity is defined by its level of complexity and its capacity for internal and external communication. A society of communication replaces a society of production in the same way that a Cartesian "soul" is replaced by an existentialist image of the subject.

To round out this definition of the main social and historical actors of our time, let us not forget the social movement created by those who control the production and diffusion of cultural goods. The leaders of these industries, like all dominant groups, are not just looking for more profit or more power; they seek to create a social movements that organizes the main cultural resources and models of our society in a way that corresponds to their interests. This new elite speaks of creativity, complexity, and freedom of choice. It links these values to the development of a centralized system of cultural production and to the diffusion of new

needs and new values of success and seduction. In particular, it favors the search for pleasure, commercial eroticism, and the discovery of cultures that are historically or geographically different from ours. These are important elements of the elite's ideology. Social movements of opposition criticize its emphasis on acquisitiveness and on symbols of social status, as well as its commercialization of interpersonal and cultural experiences.

5. From Old to New Social Movements

The protest movements, opinion campaigns, and social conflicts that are lumped under the vague name of social movements and that attracted the interest of an unusually large number of sociologists during the 1970s are a very heterogeneous set of collective actions. Here I seek to disentangel the phenomena that have been mixed together in a situation of economic and cultural crisis. Let us sum up the results of our analysis. Three main types of collective behavior may be distinguished.

The first type includes those that manifest the crisis and decline of industrial society. After a long period of growth and the predominance of the ideology of modernization, protest movements reject the very idea of development. The Clud of Rome was one of the first groups to criticize the myth of endless growth and to recognize the limits of growth.

Many people today are convinced that we should end development and enter into a new equilibrium. They defend the idea of a self-sustaining equilibrium against the idea of self-sustained growth. The fascination with oriental cultures stems from this idea. Although only superficially known, these cultures are used as expressions of opposition to aggressive rationalism.

The second type of collective behavior focuses on the hypermodernist ideas in which systems and structures are replaced by processes of change. The more optimistic groups have developed strategic views of these changes to use them on behalf of their own interests. The more pessimistic groups are preoccupied with a possible loss of individual cultural identity and the uprootedness of a society that is more and more similar to a market in which nothing prevents the stronger from dominating the weaker.

The convergence of the critique of industrial society, sometimes inherited from socialist ideas, and antidevelopmentalism led to the success of a gauchisme that took new forms by fighting cultural as well as economic domination. But this gauchisme was far from being a class-conscious movement like the labor movement. It was not even specifically anticapitalist. Rather it rejected all aspect of the process of modernization and cultural change. It did not believe in the existence of collective actors or the possibility of new liberation movements. It limited itself to opposing a

complete and closed system of domination. Its pessimism came in part from its tendency to maintain itself within the limits of industrial capitalism, Marxism, and the labor movement and in part from the fact that it was highly conscious of the failure and crimes of the regimes that pretended to come out of the labor movement and to be socialist. That explains its view of society as a coherent system of signs and instruments of domination. Its image of social life can be called semiological because it considers all social phenomena as signs of an omnipresent logic of domination and exclusion. This extreme view attained a predominant influence in sociology during the 1970s after the collapse of the optimistic view of social development shared by both functionalists and Marxists. It penetrated sociological thought in the United States later than in Europe but maintained itself later in the United States than in France, where it almost entirely disappeared at the end of the 1970s. Only in Germany did it rest on a solid intellectual tradition.

The third type of collective behavior involves the control and use of the main cultural resources. On one side, a dominant ideology emphasizes the individualism of consumers and proudly creates a society that is ever richer in information and capacities for communication. On the other side, opposition movements defend identity and community but imagine at the same time a society more favorable to initiative, personal development, and interpersonal communications.

Sociological analysis, which separates the various meanings of collective behavior, can never be identified with historical analysis because historical analysis gives a synthetic view of the various analytical meanings entwined in complex phenomena. What sociological analysis considers to be most important is not in general what has the deepest and most lasting effects from the point of view of historical analysis. Protest movements depend for their historical successes or failures on external factors even more than on their intrinsic importance. The relative historical importance of crisis behavior, reactions to change, and social movements depends first of all on the capacity of a collectivity to pass from one societal form to another. When dynamism and creativity are at a low level, crisis behavior and critiques of modernization are strong. When the construction of a new type of society and culture is active, positive and negative reactions to social change gain ground. Finally, when a new type of society has already been built and when the rupture with interests and values of the old society is complete, new social movements gain a central place and define new problems and values.

In a schematic way, crisis behaviors are still stronger in Europe, especially in the oldest industrial countries, and positive and negative reactions to social change are predominant in the United States. Thus new social movements are formed in different contexts on the two sides

of the Atlantic. In some European countries, especially Germany, critical social thought is stronger because it is more directly based on antistate attitudes. In the United states, the creation of new cultural orientations is more active because new social movements are linked, as in Germany, with antistate attitudes but, unlike Germany, the attacks are more directed against an "imperialist" state than the destruction of society by state power. For this reason new social movements are more influential in the United states but critical action and radical ideas are more important in Germany. France is the unexpected case of a country where a period of active cultural and social innovation (around 1968) was followed by a successful effort to revive old models of social and political action and by a strong distrust of all social movements, a result of a protracted influence of the communist party on the French intelligentsia. These factors reinforce the tradition subordination in France of social movements to political forces that express the growing political influence of the new middle classes, which were republican in the nineteenth century and are socialist in the twentieth century.

But, on the whole, more optimistic can be reached. Western countries are emerging from a long period of crisis. At first they were dominated by a pessimistic version of social ideas that corresponded to industrial society and by a structural Marxism that eliminated social actors and movements from its analysis. Then at the end of the 1970s came a short period when private issues completely dominated public life. Soon new economic and technological development and the success of liberal ideas favored either a conservative nationalism or, in a deeper sense, the interpretation of a new cultured situation by dominant groups. New movements of opposition are organizing themselves in the face of this dominant ideology. As at the beginning of industrialization in the nineteenth century, these movements are now going through a phase of utopian communism and infantilism. Their new demands are too early and too easily institutionalized in our open political system. These two factors make it difficult to form new social movements, but it would be a mistake not to perceive that the social scene has already been transformed. The first observers who spoke, fifteen years ago, of a postindustrial society have been accused with some reason of not having distinguished clearly enough postindustrial from industrial society. Today it is easier to see that technological transformation represent only a new stage of industrialism and that new cultural and social demands appear—in the cultural sphere—far from the economic and occupational area and constitute the main basis of postindustrial society.

These transformations of social practices call for a new representation of social life. We need new sociological models or a new kind of social

thought. This thought should be as different from classical sociology as that body of thought was from the political of the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries. The central question of the new type of social analysis is the following: when all absolute principles of social organization have disappeared and when a more complex civil society has separated itself completely from the state and no longer derives any principle of unity from it, should we abandon the very idea of social system? Or put another way, should we only conceive of social life as a flow of changes in which social actors elaborate rational strategies or resist a flow that is dominated by a state that is no longer a political institution and is more and more a maker of war?

Although developing a critique of the idea of society, my analysis affirms that social life has a unity. It is a system that is defined and constituted by the conflicting relationship between dominant and dominated groups for the control of what I call historicity, that is, the main cultural models through which a collectivity shapes its relationship with its environment. Our "society" no longer has any institutional or moral unity, sovereignty, or central principle of legitimacy. It does, however, have the unity of a drama.

Many people have thought that the decline of all forms of transcendence would lead to triumph of the rational pursuit of interest and the transformation of society into a marketplace. These is the dominant assumption of present-day historical movements, including both those in favor of such an evolution and those opposed to it. But the best social thinkers have always recognized, in addition to interests, the existence of convictions. When the process of secularization triumphs, the world of religious and political passions does not disappear; it becomes social. Gods were replaced by reason and reason by history; now history is replaced by the subject. Social life can never be reduced to rationality and conflicts of interests. On the contrary, economic behavior is integrated into social movements that fight for the social control of cultural values, that is, for the transformation of convictions into forms of social organization.

From industrial to postindustrial society, collective action stops being explained by social or economic situation. Classes, as defined by a situation, are being replaced by social movements and by the action of social categories that are defined by both relations of domination and cultural orientations. This eliminates the notions of human nature and natural law but it also eliminates the ideas of the laws of historical evolution and economic structure. All aspects of social organization result from the conflictual process of the self-production of social life.

In the present intellectual situation the most urgent task is to reintroduce the ideas of modernity and development that have been so strongly

attacked during the last twenty years. The analysis of social movements is linked with the idea that the level of self-production of social life tends to rise and to create new opportunities and new conflicts. The idea, so fashionable today, of postmodernity is useful only if it frees us from the exhausted industrial image of modernity. Postmodernity corresponds to a moment in which the consciousness of historicity in lost, in which "mannerism" is triumphant in art, and in which intellectual no longer appear to be able to express and represent collective and personal experiences. Postmodernity corresponds to decreased creativity and a crisis of collective action.

It is urgent to analyze new forms of cultural creation, social domination, and social movements. It is also urgent to overcome the strange pessimism that foresees the decline of our democracy even as we observe a rapid extension and diversification of public opinion and the public space, an evolution at least as important as the new threats appearing against our liberties. Social thought has been dominated too long by the crises of industrial society, the labor movement, and the ideologies, optimistic or pessimistic that were linked with them. Today we lack a general analysis of social changed and the new forms of cultural and social life that are rapidly spreading around us. Sociological analysis cannot rise as late as Minerva's bird. It is rather at dawn, when a new day begins and new images and new people appear on the social scene, that sociologists must understand the new drama that is being performed.