Dissatisfaction and Political Action

Abstract

It is difficult to escape the impression that the explanations of political action discussed so far are somehow ‘middle-class’ explanations. Education, mental skills, new values and so on, they all point to an expansion of the political action repertory among new non-manual class groups thrown up by the growth of the post-industrial economy. This may of course be no more than simple truth. The choice of protest methods, in particular, has spread well beyond the student communities who road-tested them in the 1960s. The data show this. Yet we have been continually driven back on explanations of people’s behaviour that take for granted the presence of some trained intellectual skills. To be educated is to understand, to understand is to choose and to choose is to act. While it may yet be true that, as Moorehouse and Chamberlain say, ‘… it is not necessary for men to encompass the world intellectually before they set out to change it’, the data keep insisting that such skills are extremely important.