社会運動論の系譜と若干の問題

米国の社会学部門を中心に

抄録

We can distinguish three theoretical antecedents of social movement in American sociology; the theory of mass society; the psychological theory of movement, and the theory of collective behavior.
The theory of mass society uniformly presumes a particular socio-political situation called mass society or state of the mass, and sorts out a specific form of social movement. Then it relates them causally, with the concept of the collapse of pluralistic structure as an explaining principle. We can find two shortcomings in this movement theory. First, as pointed out by Mr. Gusfield, it considers only the connection between the mass situation and extremist movement. It neglects another possible combination, that is, the functional aspect which mass society situations may assume. In the second place, the underlying belief of its movement theory which traces an ultimate cause of the rise of totalitarian movements to the collapse of intermediate social organization, is that the pluralistic structure is the necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of democratic society. This optimistic belief not onyl makes the theorists of mass society misconceive the present situation in the U. S. A., but also averts their attention from the fact that there are some factors within pluralistic structure which make for extremist mass movements.
The movement theory of social psychological lienage generally gives priority to investigating the psychological mechanism of participating behavior, and depends on functionalism as a method. Then it applies the concept of frustration as an explaining principle. Inquiring participation from the functional point of view leads to presupposing the existence of movement or, at least, its core group as an operating agent. So the participants are reduced to the place of the manipulated. The tendency to seek in “frustration” a final motive results in conceiving the participant's behaviour as always irrational. For it has become common sense in psychology since the 1930s to think that frustration is apt to produce some irrational behaviour like aggression or regression. What this theoretical approach shows us is the subordinate behaviour and passive mechanism of people who are dominated, curbed, and driven away. It overlooks the positive behaviour and mechanism of autonomous people who participate voluntarily, take an active part, restrain leaders, and influence the direction of movement.
There are three characteristics in the theoretical apprach of collective behavior. (a) It attaches importance to explaining the character and type of each kind of collective behaviour, and throwing light on the relationship between them. Therefore, in this case, the theory of social movement forms only part of a more inclusive theoretical system which equals collective behaviour theory. This fact, together with the abstractness of the theory itself, makes its contents comparatively superficial. (b) It treats the relationship between social movement and other kinds of collective behaviour not as the constructive or causal relation, but as the relation of difference in the degree of organization or institutionalization, and then conceives such a grading order as follows; elementary collective behaviour: social movements: institutional behaviour. This tends to avert the eyes of the writers from the important roles of organizational agents like trade unions or political parties which often become integrating core groups in movements. (c) The movement theory of this lineage is the general theory, the content of which consists of definition, construction of ideal types, and explanation in terms of diagrams. Although he did not direct his criticism to those American theorists we have dealt with, Mr. Shigeru Yamate who criticized several writers in this country who had developed general theories of this kind. He said that the orientation of general theory was necessarily contradictory to practical orientation,