Historians who have studied school attendance in the nineteenth century have noted the differences in enrollment rates between children of immigrants and children of parents born in the United States. These differences in attendance rates apparently persist even after controlling for the social and economic backgrounds of the children. Despite the fact that this result is familiar in the literature, historians have not agreed upon a single cause for these differences (Kaestle and Vinovskis 1980; Soltow and Stevens 1981; Perlmann 1988). Scholars have debated many possible reasons: perhaps different cultural or religious circumstances led immigrants and native-born Americans to act differently toward their children’s education; perhaps immigrants took their children out of school earlier because they could not afford the luxury of educating their children; or perhaps immigrants made a conscious choice between the education of their children and better housing, or other consumption for themselves and their families.

The study of social movements from “below” has been a major element in political sociology, and perhaps the dominant tendency in social history, in recent decades. While bringing welcome attention to neglected historical actors and episodes, much of this literature carries a congratulatory air without managing to identify the results of such movements or to specify the mechanisms by which actors effect change from below. The four essays discussed here (three appear in this issue and one, by Mark Traugott, will appear in the next issue) all contribute to understanding the consequences of popular social action by placing it in the context of recurrent elite efforts to assert power. They demonstrate that examining the structure of social relations is a precondition for understanding the possibilities for, and effects of, agency by both elites and popular groups.

The early decades of the nineteenth century are widely recognized as formative years for the English working class. During the first two decades a wide variety of trade groups struggled at both the regional and national levels to protect artisanal rights and unmuzzle the legally muted voice of labor (Prothero 1979; Randall 1991; Rule 1986; E. P. Thompson 1966). Success was at best uneven. Revocation of the Statute of Apprentices in 1813–14 was an alarming defeat for artisans who sought to protect their trade privileges from growing capitalist incursions. The successful repeal of the Combination Laws that had barred trade unions in 1824 encouraged a clamoring among many of London’s trades to resuscitate wage rates, precipitating strikes in many industries. Also emerging from the lean years was a new understanding of the relations between capital and labor. “The interests of the masters and men,” London’s Trades’ Newspaper pronounced, “are as much opposed to each other as light is to darkness” (Hollis 1973: 45).

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).

The dissolution of empires has been one of the distinguishing and most consequential characteristics of the twentieth century. The popular struggles for national sovereignty that have helped to destroy these empires have sometimes (although certainly not always) been fused with attempts to change radically the socioeconomic institutions inherited from the imperialists. The result of this fusion has been nationalist revolution—or revolutionary nationalism—another phenomenon largely unique to the present century. Most recently, in the Eastern European satellites of the former Soviet Union, imperial domination not only generated a nationalist opposition but also unwittingly radicalized it—albeit in a very peculiar way that I explain below. Thus, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, as Pavel Campeanu (1991: 806–7) has pointed out, had “a dual nature: social, since their goal was to destroy the socioeconomic structures of Stalinism, and national, since they aspired to re-establish the sovereignty of the countries in question.”