Historical Specificity

Abstract

THE suggestion that social movements should be treated as self-conscious and successful attempts to introduce innovations into a social system raises the question of whether they are historically specific, in the sense in which modern, scientific and technological innovations are historically specific: namely, that there have been historical periods when they have been favoured and powerful and others in which they have been ignored and weak. Equilibrium analysis of social change, it should be emphasised, makes allowance for such a possibility, at least in part. For example, Smelser’s seven-stage sequential scheme of structural differentiation is categorically described as being ‘especially characteristic of growing and developing social systems’ and not, therefore, applicable to, say, ‘the decline of the British cotton industry since 1914’. The kind of social movement which he describes as located between steps 1 and 7 of his sequence, that is, may be seen as a product of advancing development, not of economic decline. At this point of his thinking, to be sure, Smelser still expresses himself cautiously, using the conditional clause to introduce step 7 — ‘if the implementations of step 6 are received favourably…’ — although the final impression of his study is one of the inevitability of the sequence, even from step 6 to step 7, ‘presumably because the original “sore-spots” of the social structure have been modified during the course of structural differentiation’.¹