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Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, edited by Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 370 pp. $54.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-30398-5. $21.00 paper. ISBN: 0-226-30399-3.
As the editors of this collection point out, the study of emotions in social movements was treated for a long time as a suspect enterprise, appearing to hark back to theories of collective irrationality that had been used in the 1950s to discredit all forms of popular mobilization. When the objects of study shifted from the 1950s' concern with fascism and communism-movements that were seen as threats to western democracy-to the more sympathetically evaluated 1960s' student mobilizations in the United States and Europe and national liberation struggles in colonial states, the focus of social movement theory shifted as well. In Europe, the new models stressed identity and culture (new social movements theories), and in the United States, they emphasized narrowly defined organizational rationality (resource mobilization and political process); but these theories of the 1970s and 1980s continued to treat emotions as suspect, now associating them not with dangerous mass mobilizations but with discredited theoretical approaches.
What then does it mean that in the 1990s and 2000s, emotions have been rediscovered as significant elements of social movements, as the editors of this volume argue and the many empirical studies of this collection...