1 - Mobilization from the Margins

Summary

Nobody is my name

Odyssey 9.366

Collective acts of risk taking pose a puzzle to the social sciences. One minuscule contribution to a precarious collective endeavor does not improve its prospects, but it often puts the individual perpetrator at grave risk. So why do political revolutions, economic meltdowns,mass religious conversions, linguistic shifts and collective innovation adoptions happen often, and when they do occur, why are they the most unexpected? One could argue that given the scale of these social reversals, the premonitions should be clear enough. Then why do movements encompassing absolute majorities arrive as surprises to the illuminati and the powerful, not as mere predictable, perhaps governable outcomes? I provide an answer in this book based on the idea of leading from the periphery. I argue that marginal leaders set into motion collective cascades of risk taking that are distinct from centrally generated coordinated campaigns. Keys to “surprising” and “rapid” elements of social and political uprisings are to be sought not at the centers of social attention, but in the margins, where switching to the far fetched and dangerous is more likely and less costly.

The existing solutions to the collective action problem stress economizing means for creating unity among the masses: central and focal forces of ideologies, repertories of action, carefully designated incentives rewarding individual acts, as well as centers of social life, structural or ideational, all help to generate action in concert. In their emphasis on central and visible themes, the more recent solutions to the collective action problem follow the early modern writings on crowds, in their interpretation of collective action asmonolithic and unified. Only that now we have amore sophisticated way of discussing crowds in unison: more reasonable and verifiable than the holistic and anthropomorphic idea of crowds as the representation of some “primitive state of human mind”. Nevertheless, the thrust of the argument has not shifted much, still that unity, that simplifying holistic idea of the collective action in concert is central to the existing explanations. There is also a clue to the same line of reasoning in one of the folk pillars of collective action theory, which is the division between socially central vanguards, and following masses. The division between the vanguard and the population, has been key to theories advancing a more heterogeneous outlook of collective action among the crowds.