Big Books and Social Movements: A Myth

of Ideas and Social Change

David S. Meyer, University of California, Irvine
Deana A. Rohlinger, Florida State University
Explanations of the past both reflect and influence the way we think about the present and future. Like artists
and politicians, social movements develop a reputation that includes a capsule history of a movements origins,
goals, and impact. Both popular narratives and scholarly treatments identify four books published in the early
1960s as having spurred important social movements and government action. This big book myth provides a simple
origins story for social movements, a version of an immaculate conception notion of social change. We compare the
mythic accounts of feminist, environmental, anti-poverty, and consumer movements of the 1960s to fuller histories of
these movements and find consistent distortions in the common big book narratives. Mythic accounts shorten the incubation time of social movements and omit the initiating efforts of government and political organizations. The myths
develop and persist because they allow interested actors to package and contain a movements origins, explicitly
suggesting that broad social dynamics replicate idealized individual conversion stories. They also allow actors to edit
out complicated histories that could compromise the legitimacy of a movement or a set of policy reforms. These mythic
accounts spread and persist because they simplify complicated social processes and offer analogues to the individual
process of becoming active, but they may lead us to misunderstand the past and make misjudgments about collective
action and social change in the future. We consider those implications and call for more research on the construction of
myths about the past. Keywords: social movements; myth; books; narrative; culture; reputation, collective memory.

Popular narratives identify four books published in the first half of the 1960s as having
spurred large and important social movements and government action. Critics tie Michael
Harringtons treatment of poverty, The Other America (1962), to the war on poverty and activism
on behalf of welfare recipients and poor people generally. Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique
(1963) is said to have spurred recognition of womens oppression and catalyzed the modern feminist movement. Ralph Naders expose of General Motors Corvair, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), is
linked to the emergence of the modern consumer movement. And Rachel Carsons Silent Spring
(1962) is routinely cited as the inspiration for the modern environmental movement.
In these familiar stories, the authors identified problems brewing below the surface in
American life: invisible poverty, unnamed sexism, unrecognized pollution, and irresponsible
corporations. Both government and citizens movements responded to the issues of concern,
spurring collective action on poverty, sexism, pollution, and corporate greed. This big books myth
emphasizes the primacy of ideas in promoting political mobilization and policy reform and
provides a convenient shorthand understanding of protest and politics. These stories obviously

The authors thank Jesse Klein for assistance with research in this article. They presented earlier versions of this article to
the Social Movement/Social Justice group at the University of California, Irvines Center in Law, Society, and Culture, and in
the Department of Sociology at Florida State University. They are grateful for helpful comments in those settings, and for
detailed suggestions offered by Lynn Chancer, Dennis Downey, Leah Fraser, Brandy Griffin, Jim Jasper, Paul Lichterman,
Steven Mailloux, Kevin Olson, Brook Thomas, John Torpey, Jennifer Earl, and Mayer Zald. Direct correspondence to: David
S. Meyer, Department of Sociology, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail: dmeyer@uci.edu; or Deana A.
Rohlinger, Department of Sociology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2270. E-mail: drohling@mailer.fsu.edu.
Social Problems, Vol. 59, Issue 1, pp. 136153, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. 2012 by Society for the Study of
Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp.
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2012.59.1.136.

Big Books and Social Movements

oversimplify the complicated dynamics of social movements and social change, but the ways in
which they do raise questions for those interested in culture and in political change.
The stories we tell about the past reflect contemporary values and beliefs; the big books myth
offers a simple account of the relationship between ideas and social change. It also implicitly offers
(perhaps erroneous) advice to those who wish to promote popular mobilization or policy change
today: write a powerful book.1 The big book myth is a variant of an immaculate conception
(Taylor 1989) story of movement origins, in which mobilization occurs suddenly, without apparent
antecedent, through a few dedicated individuals, and produces relatively quick political response.
Although narratives about the past are influenced by available facts, they are not completely
constrained by them (Schwartz 1991). Interested actors construct stories about past events that
serve their current purposes. We want to know why one set of myths about the past comes to be
accepted, and how these accepted tales influence not only our understanding about the past,
but also contemporary politics. To examine these questions, we look at four movements (the
anti-poverty, feminist, consumer, and modern environmental movements) where both academic
and popular analysts commonly assert that the ideas offered in a well-placed book provided the
stimulus and direction for social change.
We begin by examining scholarly research on the role of ideas in social change, identifying a
scholarly version of the big book myth. We then turn to the construction of narrative as a means of
making sense of the past for contemporary purposes (Meyer 2006; Polletta 1998a, 1998b, 2006).
We can think of a myth as a broadly accepted narrative that, regardless of veracity, structures
understanding of the past and guides contemporary activity. We argue that the process of constructing a myth is analogous to devising a reputation for historical figures (Bromberg and Fine
2002; Fine 1996) or a commemoration of an important event (Armstrong and Crage 2006),
reflecting both deliberate efforts of interested actors and a receptive political and cultural climate.
We revisit the big book myth by examining the four big book cases identified above, noting consistent omissions in the narratives. All versions of the myth neglect (1) the long percolation period of
challenging ideas; (2) the intensive and organized efforts to generate activism; and (3) the role of
activist government in spurring public attention. The big book myth, reinforced in both popular
and scholarly discourse, has analogues in other fields, in which the stories told about the past oversimplify the origins of important phenomena. In doing so, they suggest that the process of promoting social change is far more accessible than it actually is.
Here, we argue that explanations that prioritize the power of ideas miss important political
and structural factors that can make an ideas time come, overstating and obscuring the actual role
books serve in a campaign. The focus on ideas, rather than material conditions, as the proximate
causes of movements parallels a similar divide in the study of social movements between those
who emphasize culture and ideas at the expense of political and material conditions (e.g., see the
debate in Goodwin et al. 1999). We conclude with a call for more research on the role of ideas,
their expression, and the context of reception for social movements, and on the construction of
narrative and popular understanding of the past.

The Big Books Myth

The big books myth is one basic plot line modeling the relationship between ideas and social
change and it comes in both scholarly and popular versions. This simplifying narrative crystallizes
1. People take this advice. Kozol, for example, continues to write putative big books (e.g., 1967, 1988, 1991), reporting that the potential of a political movement responding to his work gives him hope for the future. I write books to change
the world, he explained (quoted in Martelle 2005). Lamenting the lack of attention to climate change, scientist Hansen
(2006) looked for missing texts (even while reviewing several), wondering, Is it possible for a single book on global warming
to convince the public, as Rachel Carsons Silent Spring did for the dangers of DDT? . . . perhaps what is needed is a range of
books dealing with different aspects of the global warming story.

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causal relationships and implicitly offers both moral lessons about the past and prescriptions for
the future. In the scholarly model of the big book myth, new ideas formulate and percolate within
relatively isolated groups (Haas 1992; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Thomas Rochon (1998:23) refers
to these groups as critical communities, that is, a small community of critical thinkers who
have developed an analysis of, and solution to, a perceived problem. Critical communities
attempt to influence the conceptual framework used to think about a cluster of issues (Rochon
1998:23; also Frickel and Gross 2005). In order for these ideas to affect social change, they must
spread beyond the critical community into the broader culture. Versions of critical ideas can circulate in a variety of sites, including academic journals and monographs (Frickel and Gross 2005),
mass media (Rohlinger 2002), the Internet (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Rochon 1998), magazine
articles, books and book reviews (Rochon 1998; Somers and Block 2005), and music (Roscigno
and Danaher 2004).
Rochon (1998) argues that media texts, and books in particular, provide communication
both within and beyond a critical community. Using The Feminine Mystique and Unsafe at Any Speed
as exemplars, he argues that books articulate and legitimate new ideas for both the critical community and mainstream society. The book also establishes the author as an expert, affording her
cause and credibility to make speeches and comment on contemporary events.
But ideas do not compete equally for attention and acceptance, nor do they promote themselves. Prospects for success are affected by supporters efforts, their capacity to promote their
story, and the reception context in which an idea is introduced. Scott Frickel and Neil Gross
(2005) note for ideas to take hold they must be orchestrated, coordinated, and collectively produced (p. 213). Proponents of new ideas, like those of social movements or historical reputations
(Fine 1996; McCarthy and Zald 1977), constantly seek to mobilize resources to promote their
ideas more broadly (Frickel and Gross 2005; Somers and Block 2005). Ideas may bounce around
critical communities for years before finding a climate made receptive by changes in politics, policy, or problems (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). As example, the idea to privatize Social Security
originated in the business community in the 1970s, but did not receive broad attention until
George W. Bush made it central to his 2000 presidential campaign (Quadagno 1989; Rohlinger
and Quadagno 2006). Finally, ideas must be culturally resonant, or seem natural and familiar, in
order to garner popular support (Gamson 1992; Snow and Benford 2000)2, and its resonance will
vary across different institutional, political, and cultural contexts (Campbell 2002; Ferree 2003;
Somers and Block 2005). The scholarly literature often divides its attention between focus on text
and focus on context.
Scholars writing about ideas and social change describe complicated processes through which
an idea garners attention and generates action; this process may include the publication of a book.
Popular stories are much simpler, and probably more consequential. Any story of the past entails
a selection and ordering of events and individuals, and the range of relevantand potentially
relevantfactors affords interested actors numerous options. Narrators craft stories of the past
mindful of their impact on the present.

Myth, Narrative, and Social Movements

Narratives affect the mobilization and development of social movements (Benford 2002; Fine
1995) as well as their outcomes. In order to make sense of the past, both public and personal, and
to offer lessons for the future, people create narrative simplifications that draw from an immense
2. Much of the critical work on framing nods to the importance of cultural resonance, but focuses on the purposive
efforts of activists to construct such tales. In this way, it resembles a genre of how to books that offer advice about how to
promote ideas effectively. For example, Heath and Heath (2007) suggest that six elements (simplicity, unexpectedness, connectedness, credibility, emotion, and stories) are critical in making an idea stick. Such manuals can be traced back, at least, to
Aristotles Rhetoric, which offers the same general advice.

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number of events to construct coherent stories. These stories offer a heavily edited version of the
past, infused with plot, and often coupled with a more or less explicit moral or lesson (Armstrong
and Crage 2006; Griffin 1993; Meyer 2006; Polletta 2006; Stone 1997; Tilly 2003); variant stories
are told to different audiences, including both activists and potential activists within a movement,
and authorities and broad publics outside. Such narratives make sense of complicated and sometimes confusing events and often reflect activists strategic efforts to garner public sympathy and
support for their cause.3 Interested parties strategically construct competing narratives about past
events to emphasize their preferred vision of causality, and to encourage a particular kind of
activityor inactivityin the future (Stone 1997). Stories that draw on resonant themes and
speak to the shared experience of larger publics are more likely to gain attention and, therefore,
to aid recruitment and mobilization within a movement (Armstrong and Crage 2006; Polletta
1998a; Tilly 2003), and sympathetic recognition from outside. Narratives that make sense of
political defeats can sustain participation and commitment by providing a sense of long-term
struggle and the prospects for success in the future (Voss 1998).
We can think about accepted stories as comprising collective memories (e.g., Schwartz 1991,
1996; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991) that affect public understanding of the past. Stories
identify factors relevant to a particular set of issues, policy areas amenable to reform, and potentially significant political actors (Stone 1997). A story that emphasizes activists purposive efforts as
effective can legitimize social movements more generally, and emphasize the political importance
of mobilization outside of government. In contrast, a story that emphasizes broad historical forces,
accident and contingency, or the efforts only of committed individuals within government, can
discourage potential activists (Polletta 1998b).
We can see how one explanation ascends over others in studies of historical reputations. Gary
Alan Fine (1996) notes that complicated historical records offer the raw material for several
distinct, often contradictory, evaluations of an event or a career. Reputational entrepreneurs
promote selections of the facts with an eye to the present, seeking to validate particular issues and
actors while undermining others. Our memory, Fine (1996) writes, is not a summation of
historical events, but a processing and repackaging of facts and slogans through the efforts of
reputational entrepreneurs in a way that makes historical sense and follows a cultural logic
(p. 1187). Fine (2001) has examined the development of diverse reputations, including the designation of Warren Hardings presidency as failed (Fine 1996), the valorization of John Browns
violent abolitionism (Fine 1999), and the cleansing of Pete Seegers reputation to produce a consensual hero, mostly devoid of political significance (Bromberg and Fine 2002).
Just as reputational entrepreneurs can burnish heroic feats or cleanse troublesome flaws in an
individuals past, activists try to construct collective memories of events. Elizabeth Armstrong and
Suzanna Crage (2006) examine the gay and lesbian movements construction of an origin myth
focused on the Stonewall riots of 1969. They note that similar events, in which gays and lesbians
resisted police harassment, had occurred elsewhere, but did not achieve comparable historic
recognition. They persuasively contend that activists seeking to promote a story of resistance and
political power saw the intrinsically dramatic Stonewall events as an opportunity. As important as
the character of the events, however, organized groups in New York enjoyed the mnemonic
capacity to construct a resonant origins myth and reinforce it through persistent and creative
commemorations. The constellation of external events, the time and place of resistance, and the
movements developing organizational infrastructure, afforded activists the opportunity to create
a resonant memory. Armstrong and Crage (2006) conclude The Stonewall story is thus an
achievement of gay liberation rather than an account of its origins (p. 724).
These analyses leave three distinct gaps in our understanding. First, they look at individual
cases rather than identifying patterns across cases. The big book myth transcends and unifies the
3. Scholars of social movements devote considerably more attention to collective action frames and framing processes
(e.g., Snow and Benford 1992; Snow 2004) than to stories. Frames represent crystallized cognitive understandings, extracted
from causal explanations, whereas narratives, by ordering events, imply causal relationships.

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particulars of several movement stories, reinforcing romanticized notions about activism and
politics. It can also be translated to more generalized misconceptions about the way social change
occurs: an individual identifies a problem, raising public awareness and inspiring activism, and
government responds in some way. A simple schematic line like this is better suited to the limited
carrying capacities of both the public arena and individual cognition (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988),
where simpler stories usually prevail over more complicated, albeit more accurate, ones (Meyer
2006). Second, existing analyses view interests relatively narrowly, neglecting the broader range
of actors involved in constructing a resonant historical account. Movement actors are not alone in
having an interest in constructing the past, nor do they enjoy unchallenged authority in telling
stories about the past. They tell stories, to be sure, but in many arenas, addressing diverse audiences who give their tales more or less attention and credence. Third, they neglect the ways in which
a constructed account, once accepted, becomes part of a broader cultural milieu in which a variety
of accounts reinforce each other. Stories are less likely to stand on their own than as part of a larger whole. Moreover, it will be easier for an audience to accept a story about one movement when
it echoes the basic outlines of stories about other historic movements.
Activists tell stories in ways that they think will win the acceptance of their target audiences;
past and potential activists are critically important for social movements, for they will repeat the
story. Individual reconstructions of personal pasts often replicate, and support, collective faith in
an overarching myth. People try to make sense of how they came to a social movement or public
life more generally, and construct explanations of their own histories, in part by drawing upon
prevalent narratives in public discourse (Blee 2002). In doing so, strategic narrators describe
biographical factors that can be generalized and exported. Reading a book, in this way, is a better
story to tell than, for example, being groomed for activism by ones parents. The former path is
readily accessible to any listener, whereas the latter will appear unique, not replicable, and thus
not useful for recruiting new supporters. This presents a paradox: distinct personal and historical
events shape the consciousness of the young activist, but in trying to mobilize others, activists do
best to edit out of their personal stories all that is really personal, focusing on experiences that are
at least potentially common, if not universal. Many young activists on the left and right in the
1960s traced their own involvement to reading an important book, including those discussed
here. Although the activists pointed to books, Rebecca Klatch (1999:6669) notes that most
shared good relationships and activist histories and politics with their parents that long predated
reading the critical text. Whats more, they found the critical text often given to them by another
activist.
At both personal and social levels, a book stands in for larger and more complicated social
processes, but it is not a necessary element in a resonant movement story. Even in the 1960s, the
movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War are not commonly linked to key texts, but
their stories are also interesting. For the civil rights movement, for example, apparently spontaneous actions of heroic individuals are cited as a spur for mobilization and political action (see Morris
1984; Polletta 1998a). Like the big book myth, such tales offer immaculate conception (Taylor
1989) notions of the birth of a social movement, in which movements are initiated suddenly and
heroic efforts are valorized by immediate impact.
The big book myth persists because it resonates with contemporary cultural beliefs and familiar
plots about social movements and social change in America, propagated by people invested, for one
reason or another, in this vision of social change. The myth supports an image of ideas as precursors
to both organizational and political action, and a vision of a government that responds to important
problems once recognized. More broadly, it suggests an open field upon which a good idea, if
championed effectively, can prevail by generating collective action and response. Implicitly then,
failed efforts represent flaws in message or messenger, rather than part of a longer process of building a community to support social change. The myth is sociologically interesting not only because
of what it suggests, but also because of what it masks, including the broader social dynamics that
give rise to the myths in the first place (Armstrong and Crage 2006; Meyer 2006). By comparing
the mythic version of social change associated with these four books, Silent Spring, The Feminine

Big Books and Social Movements

Mystique, The Other America, and Unsafe at Any Speed, to fuller historical accounts of the past, we
can identify systematic patterns of distortion. What is edited out, overemphasized, or misplaced in
time informs us about broader beliefs about social change in the United States, and helps shape
those beliefs.

Exploring the Big Book Myth

The big book myth offers a simple model of social change that is attractive at least partly
because of its simplicity. There is also something intrinsically appealing in believing that the public,
once informed about an injustice or threat, would mobilize en masse to redress it. The notion is that
a book, by exposing an injustice or suggesting an idea, reaches masses of people, who then act collectively, generate government response, and affect social change. This is a common explanation
in historical accounts of several movements of the early 1960s.
As example, Phillip Shabecoffs (1993) history of the environmental movement assigns Silent
Spring a critical role in the reemergence of the U.S. environmental movement. Appearing first as
excerpts in The New Yorker, Carsons writing on pesticide pollution is now recognized as one of
the truly important books of this century . . . it changed the way Americans, and people around
the world, looked at the reckless way we live on this planet . . . it sounded a deep chord which
affected people emotionally and moved them to act. It may be the basic book of Americas environmental revolution (Shabecoff 1993:107). This narrative is common (e.g., Czech 2001). Jonathan Lash, Katherine Gillman, and David Sheridan (1984) report that Silent Spring led to new
scientific studies of pesticide effects [and] stricter government controls over pesticides. . . . It
inspired a new way of thinking about the natural environment (p. 16667). Andrew Hoffman
and William Ocasio (2001) assert, Silent Spring triggered, within weeks of its release, a political
and cultural struggle between the chemical industry, scientific academies, conservation groups,
and various government agencies (p. 414). Gary Kroll (2001) notes that The New Yorker excerpts,
the book itself, and a subsequent CBS Reports special, The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, were
crafted to push Carsons analysis to different audiences, noting that each text brought a constellation of stylized issues to a specific audience (p. 404).4 Pointing to Carsons powerful writing,
treatments of the environmental movement contend that she awakened governmental, scientific,
and popular concerns with pesticides, in particular, and environmental protection more generally.
Published at about the same time, Harringtons description of poverty in America is commonly lauded for alerting the public and mobilizing government action. David Zarefsky (1980:2425)
identifies the books 1962 publication as the most significant event in making the general public
aware of poverty, and not, for example, any of the dramatic events of the civil rights movement.
To Michael Harrington must go the credit for sparking the rediscovery of poverty in the 1960s.
David Rothman and Sheila Rothman (1972) write, His best-selling volume . . . helped arouse the
nation to the dimensions of the problem (p. 203). Even more scholarly analyses, such as Michael
Katzs (1989:20) intellectual history of American culture and the poor from the 1960s through the
1980s, identify the book as pivotal. John F. Kennedy did not read Michael Harringtons The Other
America and suddenly declare war on poverty, Katz (1989:82) claims. A long essay on poverty
in The New Yorker by Dwight Macdonald, which reviewed The Other America, exerted a greater
impact . . . on Kennedy and his advisors. Still, Harringtons writing is seen as the catalyst for public
concern and ambitious government action.
Stories of the consumer movement tend to focus on Nader even more than on his indictment
of General Motors (GM), now out of print, but Unsafe at Any Speed was the way Nader first became
a public figure. Its publication in 1965 ostensibly alerted journalists, politicians, and the general
4. The television special surely reached more people than the book, suggesting another route to public awareness.
Movies or television programs can stand in for the book in variants of the myth; witness, for example, the important role that
climate change activists accord the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), featuring Al Gore (Hansen 2006).

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public to the excesses of American business (Brobeck, Mayer, and Hermann 1997). Lawrence
Glickman (1999:6) credits the book with having launched the contemporary consumer movement, by promoting citizen awareness and insisting that citizens pressure government to provide
them with more complete and accurate information in the marketplace. Although other popular
treatments of corporate cheating of consumers had already been published,5 Unsafe at Any Speed
made auto safety the breakthrough issue for the consumer movement (Nadel 1971).
Both activist and scholarly accounts of the second wave of the feminist movement recognize
a somewhat longer incubation period following the publication of Friedans Feminine Mystique,
consistently identified as critical to the movements emergence. In her memoirs, author and feminist activist Susan Brownmiller (1990) terms Friedan a visionary who noticed a festering problem and defined it. Ginette Castro (1990) credits Friedan for describing and identifying a social
type, the housewife. Kathleen Berkeley (1999:26) argues Friedans book provided the incipient
movement with an emotional reference point and an identifiable leader, in Friedan herself. The
book identified and popularized the problem that has no name that afflicted . . . hundreds of thousands of educated, white, middle-class suburban women who had exchanged their diploma for a
marriage license. That problem was a growing sense of disquietude with an ideology that encouraged middle-class white women to seek fulfillment [solely] as wives and mothers . . . The
problem was one that each suburban housewife struggled with alone, until Friedan named it,
collectivized it, and popularized it (Berkeley 1999:27). The accounts describe a sequence in which
Friedans words spoke to large numbers of women, who then turned their personal concerns into
political causes. Friedan (1976) endorses this story, claiming that her book started a process of public
sharing that led to consciousness raising and then collective action.
Indeed, when Stephanie Coontz (2011) published an account of Friedan, The Feminine
Mystique, and the emergence of the womens movement that explicitly debunked the big book
myth, reviewers used the occasion to resurrect the myth. Coontz, a social historian, points to more
complicated causes, government action, and political antecedents. But reviewer Louis Menand
(2011:7778), an English professor, is clearly dubious about this claim, and heavily invested in an
explanation that puts the text at the center of social change. Responding to Coontzs claim that
there would have been a womens movement without Friedan and the book, Menand (2011)
writes:
That may be so, but its a counterfactual assertion. When Friedan was writing her book, the issue of gender
equality was barely on the publics radar screen. On the contrary: it was almost taken for granted that the
proper goal for intelligent women was marriageeven by the presidents of womens colleges . . . But why
a book? Why not a court case, or a boycott, as in the case of the civil rights movementsomething that
challenged existing law? . . . Why was a long and semi-scholarly study by a magazine writer the catalyst
for a social change that might have got under way years before? The answer may have something to do
not with the status of women but with the status of books. In the early nineteen-sixties, books, for some
reason, were bombs (p. 7778).

Menand goes on to emphasize the power of words, pointing to Carson and Harrington as
authors of similar big books. This underscores our point that the accounts selected above are not
unusual; the big book myth is ubiquitous. Both scholarly and popular accounts of these events
assign the texts a critical role. There is a general pattern among these ascriptions of influence: a
well-positioned book describes a problem, popularizes it, suggesting urgency and offering solutions. The book offers a master frame (Snow and Benford 1992) that provides a shorthand
diagnosis of a social malady and a means to rectify it. When that description resonates with readers, and is amplified and extended through reviews and broader news coverage, people can come
to see themselves as potentially effective political actors with a common cause and mobilize, both
inside and outside of government. This myth condenses and reorders a complicated social process,

5. Mitfords (1963) expose of the funeral industry generated a great deal of attention to consumer issues.

Big Books and Social Movements

in which mobilization and government action are both the product and source of numerous other
actions, into a simpler linear tale.

Dismantling the Big Book Myth: Distortions and Omissions

Even slightly more detailed histories underscore parts of the stories edited out of the big books
myth. We will see that mobilization was underway well before the big books appearance, and
that government was a critical actor in the development of all these movements. To the extent
that the book was responsible for broad social change, it was less as a source of ideas and more as
exemplar and symbol, one used by a range of political actors, many of whom were already actively engaged on the relevant issues. The myth consistently (1) truncates the long incubation period
of critical ideas; (2) neglects activists efforts at organizing support; and (3) omits the initiating role
of government action.
The environmental movements long history in the United States dates back, at least, to the
turn of the twentieth century and President Theodore Roosevelts preservation of public lands.
Carson commonly gets credit for reviving environmentalism and shifting its focus to limiting
pollution. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993:97) note, however, that Congress had commenced hearings on pollution that aired criticism of pesticide producers by the end of the 1950s.
Congressional efforts to protect the environment had piqued Carsons interest and that of her
publisher when they planned Silent Spring; President Kennedy had appointed the environmental
crusader, Representative Stewart Udall, as Secretary of the Interior, before the book or articles
appeared in print. The New Yorker pieces advanced an environmentalist perspective, but mainstream media were already covering pesticide abuse extensively before the books publication
(Hoffman and Ocasio 2001). Carsons book articulated and amplified a preexisting concern; her
career in the Forest Service, coupled with extensive scientific citations, afforded her expert credibility. Pesticide producers orchestrated an attack on the author and the claims, unintentionally
bringing themselves under greater scrutiny (Murphy 2005). Supporters advanced mythic claims
almost immediately, looking to link the popular writer to the development of their cause. In the
CBS special, host Eric Sevareid explicitly compared Silent Spring to Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), an
earlier big book (Murphy 2005:152). Silent Spring did not so much revive the movement so much
as give it a focal point and provide a visible symbol to a broader public.
The federal government continued its environmental efforts but not directly in response to
Carsons text. It created a Land and Conservation fund to purchase park land, and maintained
well-established environmental protection policy. The take-off of mass mobilization is commonly
dated much later, to April 1970, when activists celebrated the first Earth Day (e.g., Dunlap and
Mertig 1992), proclaimed and organized by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Citizen and
government action on the environment grew from this point, with the formation of numerous
environmental lobbying and watchdog organizations. The federal government instituted regulation of air and water pollution, and created a permanent institutional home for environmental
regulation by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. Carsons book focused attention
on pesticides, one ripple in a movement that would address many issues.
Harrington saw himself less as a writer than as a peace and social justice activist. He served in
the Catholic Workers Movement, was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, and
founded several labor and democratic left groups. He wrote The Other America with the express
intent of mobilizing mass concern, although he later expressed amazement at his apparent success
in doing so. But Harrington was not alone in making vigorous claims about social justice. Just
months before his book appeared, 250,000 people assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial in
an appeal for jobs and freedom. The civil rights movement, then in its heyday, put economic
justice and poverty on the public agenda (Morris 1984; Nojeim 2004).
Harringtons book enjoyed extensive attention immediately. Newsweek ran a news story
upon its publication, and Dwight Macdonalds (1963) long review essay in The New Yorker

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generated additional attention. After reading the review in November, Kennedy committed
to including an anti-poverty program in his next years budget (Isserman and Kazin 2000).
Kennedys assassination, a few days later, increased the scope of anti-poverty activity from the
White House; Lyndon Johnson enthusiastically embraced and inflated Kennedys commitments,
declaring a war on poverty in his first State of the Union address (Lemann 1991). This initiative, however, was clearly a response to the civil rights movement, at least as much as to
Harringtons book.6 The Johnson administration provided both programmatic resources and
often sympathetic rhetoric that dovetailed with parts of the civil rights movement and the
student movements social justice projects. The Other America offered a whiter face of poverty to
America. Ostensibly responding to the book allowed two presidents to explain their programs
and simultaneously obscure that they were reacting to the civil rights movement.
The womens movement also did not spring de novo onto the political scene following The Feminine Mystiques publication. Several of the organizations that had animated the suffrage movement
remained intact, albeit in smaller and more insular forms than during earlier activist campaigns. The
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution still circulated among intellectuals and around
party platforms (Rupp and Taylor 1987); partly to forestall a campaign for an ERA, President
Kennedy appointed the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. In 1963, at the urging of Commissioner Esther Peterson, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, the first law furthering
womens rights since the 1930s (Costain 1992).
The civil rights movements influence was also critical. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which
prohibited employment discrimination based on race, afforded government support to equal
rights claims for women. At the same time, women who had worked in the civil rights movement,
frustrated by how male activists treated them, used their activist experience to address their own
recognized oppressions (Evans 1979). Friedan had a long activist history prior to writing her big
book, most notably as a labor journalist in the 1940s and 1950s (Hennessee 1999; Horowitz
1998). Her book spoke to both incipient liberal and radical wings of the womens movement,
becoming a touchstone that described common frustrations.
Friedan used The Feminine Mystique as a vehicle for speaking and organizing. Pointing to the
book as elaboration, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and proffered
a reform agenda to address womens oppression. The book provided a platform for doing the work
of organizing and mobilizing more effectively. Extensive public mobilization and government
action followed NOWs formation, taking off in the 1970s, and very loosely clustered around a
campaign to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (Costain 1992; Freeman 1975; McQuiston 1997;
Sawyers and Meyer 1999).
The consumer movement, at least more than the others considered here, represented a new
rather than revivedforce in American politics. Nonetheless, it was linked to government, to other
social movements, and to political organizing beyond the book (Mayer 1989). In the mid-1950s, as
increased traffic fatalities accompanied the growth of the interstate highway system, public and
government concern turned to automotive safety (Baumgartner and Jones 1993:122). As a law
student, Nader began a research project on General Motorss Corvair, finishing the book while
working at the Department of Labor. President Kennedy had floated the idea of a consumer bill of
rights in 1962, and called for increased attention to the regulation of food and drugswell before
Nader appeared on the political scene. Publication of Unsafe at Any Speed fortuitously coincided with
an activist government and responsive public.

6. President Kennedy initially opposed the March on Washington in August 1963, but agreed to meet with the leaders
of the event afterward, and immediately issued a statement announcing his administrations support for job training and full
employment more generally. Kennedy, eager to frame his responses in terms that would not antagonize southern Democrats
in Congress, worked hard to explain his programs in nonracial terms. Adam Yarmolinsky, Sargent Shrivers Deputy in the
War on Poverty, explained, We were busy telling people it wasnt just racial because we thought itd be easier to sell that
way . . . (quoted in Lemann 1991:156).

Big Books and Social Movements

General Motors, in an effort to manage the public relations problems the book created,
tried to intimidate and discredit Nader; instead, it helped turn him into a movement icon.
Nader fought back, filing harassment claims in court. In an out-of-court agreement, GM
admitted to spying on Nader, and paid him a large financial settlement, which he used to
found the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. Ironically, GM helped raise Naders public
profile and finance his efforts, establishing his reputation as a consumer crusader, an effective
organizer and advocate, and as a leader of a movement that would grow around him. In the
late 1960s and early 1970s, Nader and his associates founded a series of consumer action
organizations, and the government instituted regulatory reforms, institutionalizing consumer
watchdogs inside and outside of government.
Taken together, the four movement stories suggest common departures from the big books
myth. Publication of the big book was never the first event bringing broad public attention to a
problem. Not only did visible public concern precede publication of the book but government had
already acted in some substantial way on the relevant issues. Indeed, the federal government
employed Carson and Nader as writers. But the big book myth was useful to authors, activists, and
even their opponents. The authors used their books as platforms to support other educational
activities and political organizing. (Rachel Carson was less active; she finished Silent Spring while
very ill, and died within two years of its publication.) As authors and speakers calling for government action, they had no interest in recognizing that government was already active; such recognition could undermine the urgency of their efforts to exert political pressure. Seeking to form
new organizations, Friedan and Harrington particularly had an interest in downplaying their own
activist backgrounds to present their claims as untainted by left politics. Each author, then, had an
interest in promoting the book as the start of meaningful action. Each book became a symbol of
and a focal point for growing social movements, rather than an initiator of those movements.
Interested actors could use the book as shorthand for a broader political agenda and a cultural
resource (Williams 1995). Moreover, the big book myth provided an attractive conversion story
that allowed organizers to generalize and personalize the complicated movement story. Referring
to the book, and sometimes distributing it, they provided an easy and obvious way into the movement for potential recruits: read the book.
Of course, the constructed individual conversion stories dont add up to explain the larger
movement; instead, they distort it. The big book myth provides a reordered sequence of events that
puts a book and the exposition of ideas at the start of a larger social process. This narrative
describes activist organizing and government policy initiatives as responses to new ideas, rather
than as efforts to prepare a receptive political context for those ideas. It directs attention to the
nature and presentation of ideas in public circulation, neglecting the context in which those ideas
circulate. Second, the myth omits critical actors, particularly government; in doing so, it encourages
a fundamental misunderstanding of the process of social change, particularly the ways in which
public policy shapes emergent politics. The successful construction of the big book myth reflects
activists entrepreneurial efforts in conjunction with fortuitous settings (Armstrong and Crage
2006), as well as the collaboration of other actors.

Big Books and Understanding Social Change

The myth of books moving publics and policy, prevalent in accounts of prior social change,
could not stand without finding contemporary cultural resonance and political support. Some
ideas enjoy an epistemic privilege that allows them to undermine, dislodge, and replace a
previously dominant ideational regime (Somers and Block 2005:265). They succeed at least partly because they resonate with broader ideologies about political and public life. As Charles Camic
and Neil Gross (2001) note, the power of an idea in part is derived from its fit in a broader
context. If it is relatively simple to identify more comprehensive and accurate explanations of the
origins of a social movement and the pathways of social change, establishing those narratives,

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Table 1 Percentage of Scholarly Articles that Deem the Big Book as Critical to or a Spark for the Movement

Book sparked movement emergence

Book critical to the movement
Neither
Total number of scholarly articles

Harrington

Friedan

Carson

Nader

27.1
8.5
64.4
59

27.5
11.3
61.2
80

41.2
35.3
23.5
51

83.3
8.3
8.3
12

Note: As a result of rounding the columns may not total exactly 100 percent.

which note the importance of government initiative and political organizing, is less simple. If only
English professors, like Menand, projected an appealing, but unwarranted, faith in the power of
the written word, it would be understandable, but no cause for great concern. But if the myth has
broad resonance in popular culture, and even among experts in the field, we have tapped into a
larger phenomenon.
Social scientists, who offer theoretical accounts of social movements that emphasize political
opportunities, or context, and social movement organizations, should be the analysts least likely to
buy into accounts of the primacy of the big book. To examine whether this was so, we searched the
Web of Sciences Social Science Citation Index for scholarly reference to each of the four big books
explored here. Citation counts for the books (as of September 2010) suggest the prevalence of the
big book story: Nader (257), Harrington (761), Friedan (1,237), and Carson (1,926). As each texts
treatment of its respective social problem is substantially out-of-date (General Motors no longer
makes the Corvair, for example), its reasonable to think that most of these citations refer to the
social impact of the books themselves, rather than their claims. To employ a somewhat stricter test,
we sampled 20 percent of the scholarly articles from the social sciences, which includes sociology,
political science, interdisciplinary social sciences, social issues, and behavioral sciences.7 We read a
sample of those articles,8 noting (1) whether the author deemed the book critical in some way to
the movement, but did not spark the movement; or (2) whether the author credited the book with
starting the movement, a somewhat stricter test of adherence to the big book myth.
Table 1 shows the percentage of scholarly works that make claims regarding the role of the
big book in the corresponding social movement. For context, we also provide the percentage of
articles in which social scientists mention the book in their work but do not connect it to the
movement directly. The big book myth is prominent in scholarly literature. In fact, scholars attribute a book for movement emergence on a regular basis. More than one quarter of the articles we
coded directly credited Michael Harringtons The Other America with sparking a movementand
this is the book least often credited for sparking a movement. Including other analyses that assign
the book a critical role but stop short of giving credit for emergence, some version of the big
book myth appears in more than one third of the sample. Scholars attributed the other books for
movement emergence more frequently, sometimes far more often: The Feminine Mystique (27.5
percent), Silent Spring (41.2 percent), and Unsafe at Any Speed (83.3 percent), with an additional
increment of treatments that assert the importance of the book to the movement in other ways.
Social scientists, then, are not immune to the charms of the big book myth.
A substantial stream of scholarship, written by experts who should be well aware of more
contextual approaches to the study of social movements, stresses the critical importance of a book
to its respective social movement, an evaluation that we believe to be overstated. Quite likely,
each book was far more important in the subsequent understanding of its respective movement
than in the movement itself.
7. These labels come from the Web of Science.
8. Because some books are discussed more often than others, we generated samples to correspond with each author and
book. The number of relevant articles that discuss each book and author are as follows: The Other America (291); Silent Spring
(250); Feminine Mystique (393), Unsafe at Any Speed (59). We organized each sample chronologically and read every ninth
article until we had coded 20 percent of the sample, a total of 202 scholarly articles: 59 for Harrington, 51 for Carson, 80 for
Friedan, and 12 articles for Nader.

Big Books and Social Movements

Clearly, the notion of a big book promoting social change has appeal to both scholars and a
broader public. Its easy to note a books publication date, whereas the origins of political organization or changes in culture are far murkier, and make for sloppier narratives. Menands (2011)
review also suggests that it was something about the importance of books in American life during
the 1960s, but we know the myth has been applied to earlier periods in American history. Harriet
Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) is a commonly cited touchstone for abolitionist action,
for example, and Upton Sinclairs The Jungle (1906), is a central part of the story of regulatory
reform of the meat industry.
Its helpful to see the big books myth as one variant of what Verta Taylor (1989) calls an
immaculate conception narrative of movement origins. Not books, but ostensibly spontaneous
actions like the Stonewall Rebellion and Rosa Parkss civil disobedience are placed at the start of
the gay rights and civil rights movements. Although the spark is clearly different from a text, it is
a similarly sudden and unrooted act that spurs a movement, one that similarly attenuates the process of social change, making it seem simpler and more accessible.
Indeed, there is little reason to believe that such immaculate conception narratives are limited
to social movements. Pino Audia and Christopher Rider (2005) identify a corporate variant of
such a myth in the stories of large successful companies that were, purportedly, started in garages.
Both the business press and companies themselves promote stories of the humble origins of such
companies as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and YouTube in the garages of individual entrepreneurs who brought only their ideas and their hard work to creation of huge enterprises. Audia
and Rider note that whats edited out of these humble origins stories is demonstrated expertise in
the critical industry, in conjunction with extensive business background, which afforded founders
access to both critical expertise and venture capital. They conclude that the garage myth makes
starting a business seem easier than it actually is, and de-emphasizes the critical importance of
existing corporations in providing both the expertise and the capital for new enterprises. The myth
of the garage, they argue, overstates the importance of an idea at the expense of experience, contacts, and capital.
Immaculate conception notions of the origins of anything suggest a more open field for
innovation and overstate the importance of individual commitment. They offer a similarly
distorted vision of the process of change, and provide inappropriate and ill-informed comfort and
encouragement to would-be entrepreneurs carrying new ideas or products.

Mythic Neglect, Practical Consequences

The big books myth overstates the importance of books in social movements and social
change, and misstates the sequence in which books may become relevant. We do not mean to
suggest that the books themselvesor the ideas they representedwere unimportant; books
can be useful tools that provide a common language and frame of reference for activist work,
and an agenda for developing social movements. Once established, they provide a cultural resource for would-be reformers (Williams 1995). But as tools, their utility is largely a function of
how effectively activists and others employ them, just as the carpenters skill is more important
than the heft of the hammer she wields. The books can offer evidence or a theoretical undergirding
for movement beliefs, articulating an agenda broader than the particular claims of any campaign;
they can also provide a shorthand means for defining and signifying a collective identity among
movement activists.9 The extent to which that political agenda appears in public is less a function
of whats in the book than of what political figures use the book to say.
9. Jasper and Nelkin (1992) report that Peter Singers Animal Liberation help [ed] to form the animal rights agenda . . . It
gave the incipient movement an ideology and a vocabulary (p. 92). Similarly, Brownmillers Against Our Will (1975) was less
a spur for the waves of anti-rape activism and rape law reform begun years earlier (Gornick and Meyer 1998; Matthews
1994), than an analysis grounding existing feminist reform efforts in a broader critique of patriarchy.

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The content of the big book myth is defined not only by whats included, but also by whats left
out. In these cases, one omission is glaring: activist government was a critical factor in spurring social
mobilization in the history of the movements of the 1960s, one consistently placed out of sequence,
after the big book, in iterations of the myth. The movements we consider here all asked the federal
government to take a more assertive role in promoting the public good: reducing economic
inequality and discrimination; protecting the environment; regulating businesses and informing
consumers. At the same time, they all followed substantial government action on the issues of their
concern. Government action can build demands for more government action; government programs can engage citizens and encourage long-term participation (see Mettler 2002). The broader
tenor of the times supported beliefs that government could do more, including: expand public
education; promote democracy globally; end poverty and hunger; cure cancer; send rockets to
the moon. Failures, sometimes extremely costly (Vietnam comes immediately to mind), coupled
with economic challenges (particularly the oil price shocks of 1973), and the delegitimation of
political leadership (especially through Watergate), undermined faith in the governmental enterprise (see Ingram and Mann 1980). The notion that government might provide the initiative for
social action and social justice has taken a beating. Starting in the middle 1970s, support for limiting
government activity, particularly among candidates for elective office, has grown tremendously
(Skocpol 2003). At a time when the preferred size and scope of government is diminishing, faltering
government capacity precedes declines in claims for collective goods. Oddly then, the notion that a
powerful and poetic book was responsible for assembling tens of thousands of people demonstrating to protect the earth nearly a decade later became more credible than recognizing the fingerprints
of a U.S. senator on the demonstration.
There is a fundamental irony in the way in which the big book myth resonates with an unduly optimistic market-oriented pluralism. The myth suggests that a valuable idea, if effectively
presented, will find a base of support and generate appropriate responses from government and
society. Margaret Somers and Fred Block (2005:26061) identify such market fundamentalism
as a dominant logic in contemporary social and political life, buttressed by widespread, if generally
unexamined beliefs in the practical and moral superiority of market mechanisms for resolving
social ills. Even slightly more elaborated histories of the movements of the past note the importance of critical investments in organizing from both government and civil society. Citizens and
scholars who recount mythic versions of the past should be aware of the visions of the present,
and the prescriptions, that those myths support.
Dramatic changes in the forms of political organization since the 1960s have altered the field
for new social movement initiatives. Since the middle 1960s, increased participation in nonconventional politics has reshaped the political universe. Political parties have gotten weaker,
while the number and wealth of interest groups has increased tremendously (e.g., Berry 1999;
Edsall 1984; Minkoff 1995), effectively promoting increased dedicated advocacy for narrower
claims and constituencies. The movements that have flourished, for the most part, are those that
represent middle-class and wealthier people; those movements have established fairly permanent
organizations as actors on the political scene, part of a social movement society (Meyer and
Tarrow 1998). Membership usually entails little more than financial support for an autonomous
leadership (Skocpol 2003).
Paradoxically, regular representation of these claimants in government lessens the potential influence of any new initiative. The signal movements of the 1960s operated on a more
open field. Even as mobilization of those movements faded, many of the organizations created
remained. A more crowded political field means that new entrants face a tougher time in
making their way: breaking through the clatter of public discourse, reaching and mobilizing
constituents, and finding ways to reach a broad public or government among numerous competitors (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988). Further, as the social movement repertoire of collective
action has diffused widely to relatively advantaged constituencies, the public space available
to the less advantaged has diminished (Meyer and Tarrow 1998). Rather than pressing for
new political initiatives, public claims from inside and outside government, have generally

Big Books and Social Movements

called upon government to do less. More recent putative big books, supported by elected officials, have justified government inaction on, for example, poverty (Murray 1984) and gun control (Lott 1998). These books and the ideas they championed emerged in a landscape that
sponsors within government had already cultivated for them, legitimating (in)action already
underway. The big book myth serves to reinforce the status of actors established by the movements of the past and, paradoxically, the message of contemporary advocates of government
inaction and the conservative movements they sometimes join. Serious books about political
issues continue to appear, but it is hard to make them part of a larger story that includes social
mobilization and government action. But it is the broad social movements and government
responsiveness that have changed much more than the texts.

Conclusion
The Gospel of John rewrote a well-established creation myth, putting the Word at the origin.
This rhetorical move allowed preachers and proselytes alike to focus on the moment of conversion
rather than a longer past. The big book myth has similar implications, making mobilization, engagement, and influence appear more accessible, even as they are mystified. Indeed, the actual
perquisites of effective action, organization, resources, planning, and strategy are edited out of the
story. The disparities between the myth and a more careful reading of relatively recent history
point to patterned distortions and underscore how our understanding of the past is shaped by
present concerns. Analytically, it is essential to separate uncovering a factual explanation for the
trajectories of movements and policy reforms past from the simpler causal stories we tell. The former is properly the province of history.
Why one version of the past prevails, however, despite distortions and the implications of
that story, is a critical area for sociological inquiry. Within the study of social movements, scholars
too often divide between those who emphasize culture and those who emphasize material conditions and politics. Obviously, social movements and social change are complicated, and in writing
any kind of analysis we simplify. How we do so, however, reflects both individual and collective
biases about whats important. In posing the question about prevalent explanations of the past, we
see the need to recognize the connection between cultural expressions and material conditions.
Once we realize that different narratives about how something came to be are possible, we need
to look critically at who promoted what narratives, how, and why it matters. We can see that our
understandings of the past are socially constructed, and that such constructions can support, or
undermine, collective action in the future. We can also see the prevalence of different narratives
within distinct communities, bounded by profession or ideological agreement, and within distinct
venues, such as textbooks. We also want to understand patterns of narratives about the past than
run across different episodes of collective action.
As with other origins myths, the big book myth is cultivated by actors with an interest in emphasizing a particular interpretation of a movements genesis, and the capacity to promote that
understanding (Armstrong and Crage 2006). Activists and entrepreneurs have an interest in promoting a simpler, shorter, and generally more accessible story about the origins of movements and
the process of social change more generally. The big books myth supported authors who wanted to
build new organizations and inspire citizens and government to take action. But the effects of this
myth extend beyond their sponsors initial intent.
In thinking about social problems, big book myths draw attention away from government to
focus instead on civil society. Two elements of the myth are particularly important in how we think
about social change. First, a reordered sequence of events puts a critical book and the exposition of ideas
at the start of a larger social process. This story describes activist organizing and government policy
initiatives as responses to new ideas, rather than as efforts to prepare a receptive political context for
alternatives. It directs attention to the presentation of ideas in public circulation, rather than the
context in which those ideas circulate. Second, the omission of critical actors, particularly government

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and political organizations, encourages fundamental misunderstanding of the complicated process

of social change. It attenuates the time needed to develop and promote a set of political concerns,
and it draws attention away from the critical work of organizing. Moreover, it neglects the ways in
which public policy shapes the politics that emerge. Taking the onus off government to initiate
social action, the big book myth implicitly blames the public for its own deficits.
In crafting stories about the past, its easier to trace the publication of books, which have copyright dates, than the start of organizing. Similarly, other immaculate conception myths of social
movement origins (Taylor 1989) neglect political organizing in favor of heroic individuals. Popular
understanding of the civil rights movement, for example, commonly starts with Rosa Parks or
Brown v. Board of Education (Meyer and Boutcher 2007), each tied to a distinct action, a limited set
of characters, and an identifiable historical moment. These stories undermine understandings of
the long and complicated process of making social change (Morris 1984). Would-be reformers may
find themselves waiting for the magic moment or big book, while foregoing efforts to build a context that would allow them to emerge. The innumerable events that dont immediately generate
dramatic responses seem to failor just fall out of the story. And would-be activists may turn to
their computers rather their communities, drafting a text rather than calling for a meeting.
The big books narrative also provides inappropriate comfort to later readers. It describes how
a committed individual, through hard, but solitary work, can bring recognition to a social problem
and spur meaningful action. Implicitly, the absence of effective collective action to remedy social
injustices is a function of ignorance not political opposition, despair, or resignation. As such, the
well-documented case, the well-turned phrase, or even the heroic action can set into motion the
events that can address any problem. Paradoxically, such a story directs attention away from systematic causes of injustice and social ills, and away from actions that might be effective, specifically
political organizing and government action (Edelman 1988).
The big books of the early 1960s articulated a vision of collective goods, government capacity,
and moral urgency, and those sentiments dovetailed with a broader political climate. Since then,
government has legitimized a privatization of concerns, increasingly adopting a role that allows
the market or individuals to solve their own problems. The growth of formalized interest groups
and social movement organizations, particularly those serving the interests of middle class and
affluent people, has aided a routinization of movement politics and ideas, such that new efforts
face a more crowded field, one in which they frequently lack the allies and resources to compete
effectively. In this market model of politics, ideas are increasingly seen as instrumental, means to
ends, rather than motivators and mobilizers. In thinking about active and latent social movements
today, we would do well to look beyond the texts.

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