Imagining American Democracy: An Interpretive-Hermeneutic Approach to Cultural Meaning in Collective Actor Formation Processes

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Practices of Mobilization

Abstract

This article develops an interpretive-hermeneutic approach to cultural meaning within collective action research. In particular, it analyzes how the student body of The City College of New York overcame bitter internal divisions to unify behind a strike action in the spring of 1949. Striking students demanded the dismissal of two professors, one accused of practicing anti-Semitism, the other of practicing Jim Crow segregation. The volatile divisions that inhibited unified collective action for the eight months preceding the strike were not between Jewish and Black students, but between “liberal” and “leftist” students over what tactical course of action to take in seeking the dismissal of the two professors. The dispute over tactics was not of a strategic nature, however, as students remained divided over the meaning of tactics, formal vs. extraordinary, which came to symbolize the legitimacy each side invested in actually existing democracy in the U.S. The students overcame their interpretive dispute through creatively imagining a new collective identity based on a normative vision of democratic citizenship underlying education. This article argues that by hermeneutically attending to the structuring role of the social imaginary in processes of collective actor formation, social movement scholars can, in an interrelated way, deepen the shallow conceptions of the political currently underlying research, expanding our understanding of what is politically at stake in collective action, thereby achieving more felicitous constructions of the empirical object of research.

Author

• Daniel Aaron Sherwood, New School for Social Research