Domination, resistance, compliance ... discourse

In the 1960s, American sociology and social history took a surprisingly populist turn. Scholars then began an unprecedented effort to speak for the powerless, or to help them speak for themselves. Voice itself validates insurgency, they seemed to claim. Both fields had long since undertaken studies of poor, powerless people; witness the Pittsburgh Survey of 1903 and R. H. Tawney's early writings on the 16th century (1912). Their successors of the 1960s, however, drove populism much farther; often activists and even radicals themselves, they aimed to give the silent masses voice by means of collective biography, oral history, participant observation, and involvement of the objects of study directly in their research. Studies of collective action illustrate that veer toward populism vividly: whole new schools of thought (such as resource-mobilization models of social movements) arose from a self-conscious program of empathizing with the members of mass movements (Aya, 1990; Gamson, 1990; McAdam et al., 1989; McPhail, 1991; Rule, 1989; Tarrow, 1989). Inspired by civil rights activism as well as by subsequent demands for empowerment of women, homosexuals, Chicanos, Native Americans, and many others, scholars tried to counter the condescension, denigration, and dehumanization they detected in earlier analyses of popular collective action. They insisted that routine social arrangements harmed ordinary people, and that only force held ordinary people back from overt resistance. Under banners of "history from below" and "empowerment," its ranks thinned and sometimes limping, that parade is marching still. Populist analyses rest on strong conceptions of power. With respect to the standard distinction between power to and power over which