UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL WORK
PROJECT FOR ENGLISH
1ST YEAR
Student,
Cot Andreea ‘Nicoleta
1st Series, 2nd Group
2017-2018
My choice of book is Social Movement: Key Concepts in Political Science by Paul Wilkinson, written in London in 1971.
Introduction
The English word ‘movement’ derives from the old French and medieval Latin words ‘movoir’ respectively ‘movimentum’.
A different and now obsolete usage of the term was to denote some ‘liberal’, ‘innovatory’ or ‘progressive’ parties or functions as in cases of ‘parti du movement’ in France or ‘movement party’ in the early part of the nineteenth-century Britain.
Political concepts are a big part of our daily speech-we abuse 'bureaucracy' and praise 'democracy', welcome or recoil from 'revolution'. Emotive words such as 'equality', 'dictatorship', 'elite' or even 'power' can often, by the very passions which they raise, obscure a proper understanding of the sense in which they are, or should be, or should not be, or have been used. Confucius regarded the 'rectification of names' as the first task of government. 'If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things', and this in time would lead to the end of justice, to anarchy and to war. One could point out that the attempts by governments to enforce their own quaint meanings on words have not been conspicuous for their success in justice.
There are many today who would disagree with Bismarck's view that politics can never be an exact science. But all of us who are students of politics-and our numbers both inside and outside the universities continue to grow-will be the better for knowing what precisely we mean when we use a common political term.
Concepts
It is possible to analyse the difficulties of the refinement of the social movement concept under five main headings: the problem of generality, dangers of ambiguity, problems of reification, problems of the type concept and problems of comparison.
The things that are logically connected with the problems of reification are the pitfalls of type-concepts. Social movement is itself a ‘type’ concept, in that is must necessarily be related to a wider typology of social institutions, collectivities and phenomena, and it rises simultaneous problems of defining social movement types and subtypes.
However, social movements are rarely one-dimensional; they tend to be multidimensional.
A working concept?
It is proposed that our working concept should attempt to identify and generally define the quintessential characteristics may thus be defined as a precondition of social movement.
‘ A social movement is a deliberate collective endeavour to promote change in any direction and by any means, not excluding violence ,illegality, revolution or withdrawal into a ‘utopian’ community.
‘ A social movement must evince a minimal degree of organization, though this may range from a loose, informal or partial level of organization to the highly institutionalized and bureaucratized movement and the corporate group.
‘ A social movement’s commitment to change is founded to the movement’s aims or beliefs and active participation on the part of the followers or members.
Historically, social movements are multi-dimensional and kaleidoscopic. British socialism, for example, has from time to time, contained the characteristics of a class movement, a quasireligious labour secretarianism, a moral and intellectual crusade, populism, and even imperialism and nationalism.
Rural and urban movements
‘Popular movement’, however, is too broad a term to constitute a type of social movement in any meaningful sense.
‘The people’, surely, are the vital element of all the social movements.
National movements
There is no justification for restarting the history of nationalist concepts and doctrines, as this has been outlined in several able accounts to which the reader is reffered. Nevertheless, students of social movement will note a lack of analytical and comparative studies of national movement.
Race movement
Races can be loosely defined as human groups sharing certain easily identificable somatic characteristics, the most important of this being skin pigmentation.
The wide occurrence of colour prejudice, however, is generally exacerbated by the dissemination of various racial myths which have been used
to justify a particular pattern of dominance to provide quasi-ideological rationalization for the cruelest forms of racial persecution or the stirring up of race hatred.
Moral crusade
Modern moral crusade and moral protest movements are confronted with extremely testing problems of political strategy. To add to their traditional repertoire of public meetings, processions, marches, demonstrations, the presentation of petitions, mass lobbying of legislators and pamphleteering, moral crusades have developed new means for exerting moral and psychological pressure-planned mass civil disobedience, ‘sit-ins’ and ‘freedom-rides’.
Revolutionar and totalitarian movements
Revolutionary movements are aimed at sweeping away existing political, economic or social structures.
Guerilla-based revolution
One of the great, possibly decesive strengths of modern revolutionary movements in the Third World Countries has been their ability (as for example, in China, Algeria and Cuba) to establish a firm foundation of popular support among the rural poor.here…