In the modern world, social movements are one of the main ways that people try to control their lives and articulate their moral positions. From utopian and revolutionary efforts to start society anew to reactionary attempts to resist new technologies or trends, normal people often become embroiled in titanic struggles over the world’s future. These four volumes present major statements of how scholars have understood these movements over the past century. They are essential reading for anyone interested in social change, politics, and real people in action.

Each volume examines...

Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis.

With this new collection of essays, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the...

How to Explain a Social Movement brings together essays written by Jeff Goodwin over the past twenty years, including several award-winning papers and a number of provocative new essays that reflect on the field of social-movement studies. The collected essays draw on a wide range of empirical cases to illustrate the author's theoretical claims. Among these are the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions, the Communist-led Huk rebellion in the Philippines, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the gay and lesbian movement in the US. This book will interest and challenge students,...