Preface and Acknowledgments

This book assembles and reflects on work I carried out over four decades in Italy, France, and the United States, and in the territory between social movements, comparative politics, and historical sociology. Because of its heterodox pedigree, I do not expect all of my readers to be equally engaged by everything in the book. Time has also not been on my side. Consider: while Chapter 2 draws on work I did in Italy when Communism was still a living force there, the final chapter was written when that country was being fleeced by a vain huckster with an implanted hairline and a taste for young women. Readers will have to search deep and hard to find continuity in these essays.

Moreover, the book gives short shrift to general intellectual developments in the social sciences as the work collected here was done – such changes as the impact of rational-choice theory and constructivism, historical institutionalism, and path dependency. Had I stopped to place it in these broader developments, the book would have been twice as long and more ponderous. But it was deeply influenced by events in the periods in which it was done. The Berkeley Free Speech movement that raged outside my window at the University of California in Berkeley influenced Chapter 2; the Civil Rights Movement affected my thinking about American contentious politics in Chapter 3; state breakdown, insurgency, and terrorism in the post–Cold War world led me to return to the French Revolution in Chapter 4; the 1968 movements triggered my analysis of policy impacts in Chapter 9; the current era of globalization affected how I studied the transnational movements examined in Chapters 11 and 12; and the explosive events in the Middle East in 2011 shaped the reflections in the coda. The book also reflects changes in how contentious politics and social movements have been studied since the 1960s, when there was a paradigmatic shift from a tradition that assessed the influence of structural cleavages on social movements to new and more “political” paradigms.