The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (review)

Book Reviews 347 This book raises and answers a number of methodological questions that could lead to broader generalizations about social movements and social issue campaigns. It also raises, and does not claim to answer, a number of social and rhetorical questions worthy of additional and sustained investigation. Elizabeth Walker Mechling California State University, Fullerton The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. By James M. Jasper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; pp. xv + 514. $35.00. To anyone who has ever been active in a movement for social change, James Jasper's thesis will probably come as a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious. People get involved in social movements, Jasper argues, because they have strong moral commitments and strong feelings about those commitments. The whole course of their lives leads them to get involved. They find the meaning of their lives enriched and expanded when they act publicly upon their moral beliefs. Scholars of rhetoric and public affairs may find another side of Jasper's thesis equally obvious. These issues of morality, biography, and meaning, he contends, are deeply embedded in and shaped by cultural forces. If you want to understand what is going on in a social change movement, you have to understand modes of verbal and non-verbal symbolic expression, in both the movement and the culture it wants to change. Perhaps the one great surprise of Jasper's book, for those who don't know the scholarly literature on social movements, is to learn how innovative his argument is. One might have assumed that cultural and emotional factors have always been central in analyses of social movements (often, though too narrowly, called "protest movements" ). But that is far from true, as Jasper shows in his concise and very readable (indeed the whole book is very readable) overview of the history of previous scholarship. Reacting against the early idea that such movements are merely irrational outbursts of feeling, the field has stressed rational calculations as the central (and often the only) relevant factors. The prevailing theory is that groups (or entrepreneurial individuals), seeking to maximize their own interests, mobilize resources and seek out opportunities to use their resources most effectively. Those who calculate the interplay of interests, resources, and opportunities most accurately and deploy resources most efficiently are most likely to succeed. Jasper does not deny that these modes of analysis reveal important truths about social movements. He merely denies that they reveal all the truth. His book is an attempt to provide an overview of the whole field of social movement studies, interweaving familiar political and sociological factors with the new cultural and psychological factors he wants to emphasize. 348 Rhetoric & Public Affairs This is not a totally new approach. Jasper pays his respects to those who have gone before him, explaining the major innovations in the field during the last decade, studying social movements as cultural movements. But he suggests shortcomings in that work and constructive ways to move the field onward. Occasionally his complex analyses become overly pedantic, but more often they are subtle and thoughtful. After this long historical introduction, Jasper moves on to his own synthetic overview, focusing first on individual biographies, then on intra-group culture, and finally on interactions between groups and their surrounding cultures. He draws heavily on his previous field studies of groups protesting nuclear power and promoting animal rights. At every turn, he offers creative insights stemming from his broad understanding of the factors involved in such movements. Rhetoric is one of those factors, as any participant in a social movement surely knows. Jasper argues that rhetoric is especially important in recruiting new members and retaining their allegiance. Effective rhetoric is a resource that can sometimes compensate for a paucity of other kinds of resources (money, access to media, etc.). Rhetoric is effective when it connects the movement with the audience's world view and moral sensibilities. It is most effective when it creates a "moral shock" that touches some inchoate awareness of a problem and then moves the hearer to define it as a problem about which he or she can and must do something. This is most likely...