Daniel Chirot

Book ReviewStalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison.Edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+369.

for complex cultural and psychological reasons, individuals value the costs and the benefits of protest as they do. Surveys are not the best means for getting at this. Klandermans cites a few classics of social psychology on information processing and communications reception, but otherwise uncovers little that would suggest that interesting processes are going on inside people’s heads. The Social Psychology of Protest, along with a recent book by Sidney Tarrow (Power in Movement [Cambridge University Press, 1994]), and an edited volume by Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald (Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements [Cambridge University Press, 1996]), feel like the summary chapters of a paradigm: the delimitation of a small and finite set of concepts for understanding the world, a disjuncture between the empirical evidence and the theoretical statements made about it, and “theoretical” works that are more literature review than creative theorizing. For 30 years, a relatively structural and organizational paradigm—once called the resource mobilization approach and more recently the political process approach—has inspired vast quantities of normal science by excluding a number of difficult phenomena. Many of these are knocking at the gate: cultural constructionism, cultural meanings and social psychology, individual biographies and psychologies, affective loyalties and emotional reactions, the psychology of strategic choice, the tactical, cultural, and organizational creativity of protesters, and much more. They have only occasionally been admitted, as in the use of “frame alignment” as a recruitment strategy. The old paradigm has too many important insights to vanish altogether, but its outer walls may be ready to come tumbling down. Bert Klandermans has written a fine scholarly book, which goes as far toward accommodating social psychology as one can go within the essentially structural root metaphor of an organizational paradigm. But it feels more like an end than a beginning.