5 - The Resistance as Mass Local Dynamic

Summary

A posthumous debate pitted Max Weber against Norbert Elias, two pioneering sociologists born in Wilhelmine Germany. In his book Economy and Society, written in the aftermath of the First World War, Max Weber defined “social activity” as a “fundamental concept of sociology.” In his view, “if at the beginning of a shower a number of people on the street put up their umbrellas at the same time … this would not ordinarily be a case of [social] action, but rather of all reacting in the same way to the like need of protection from the rain.”¹ To which Norbert Elias in the 1980s responded that one only has an umbrella if one is located in certain civilizations and that opening an umbrella is thus not socially neutral.² This is not the place to consider whether Weber’s vision of social activity was really so narrow.³ But it is clear that opening an umbrella is also not a politically neutral action. For the decision taken in isolation by thousands of individual actors in France to open their umbrellas to protect Allied soldiers and airmen on the run was at the origin of wartime escape networks and thus of one aspect of the Resistance. An isolated action repeated so many times is a social and political action.