The first issue I wish to discuss is a distinction, familiar in the economics literature, between the study of equilibrium conditions and the analysis of the path by which this equilibrium is achieved. The study of equilibrium conditions tells us where under certain specified (and unspecified) assumptions the system will end up. It does not specify either the path taken to equilibrium, or how long a time must pass before the new equilibrium is achieved. This may remind some of Chicken Little, whose repeated assertions that the sky is falling still left that event’s timing somewhat uncertain. But often the length of this lag till the sky falls is of particular interest for political and other studies of the historical process, since it is crucial to know when the equilibrium is achieved and also how this length of time might itself influence the eventual equilibrium. It may be interesting for some questions of historical analysis or applied economic theory when we accept that something is “condemned to . . .” or that “it will eventually . . .”, but it is no clear that such statements should be regarded as historically or economically relevant or interesting in all cases.

Mutual aid societies represent intentional institutionalized cooperation. Groups of individuals pool their resources to provide risk protection and social benefits for themselves in what are usually inhospitable settings. Such organizations are clearly adaptive at the group level. However, their development and maintenance require considerable investment of time and financial resources that could be applied to more individualistic ends. What incentives encourage individuals to assume leadership responsibilities in such organizations? And by what means are free riders prevented from negating the organizations’ efforts by sinking the system?

“The worker has different opinions than his employer and is naturally socialist,” Toulouse’s police commissioner asserted confidently in 1849. “I have made this observation after visiting several workshops, especially those of printers, bookbinders, hatmakers, and tailors . . . where workers speak enthusiastically of 1793 and of the need to renew the terrors of this period in order to improve the conditions of the working class” (Aminzade 1981: 95).

In 1892 fifty-five former election officials began serving prison terms at hard labor for their actions at 16 precincts during the election of 1889 in Jersey City, New Jersey. A legislative investigation had concluded that approximately 10,000 fraudulent ballots were cast that year—more than one-third of the city’s votes (Sackett 1895: 321–55; McCormick 1953: 171–73). For many observers the episode’s most remarkable feature was not the criminal behavior but the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. Contemporary accounts of Gilded Age politics attest to electoral chicanery in virtually every state (Davenport 1881; Harris 1929: 1–20; McCook 1892; Summers 1987: 51–67; Benson 1978: 169–85). Many present-day scholars contend that electoral corruption reached its nadir in the nineteenth century.

A quick comparison of characteristic British struggles in 1758 and 1833 will show how greatly the predominant forms of popular collective action changed during the intervening 75 years. That change sets a research problem that I have been pursuing for many years: documenting, and trying to explain, changes in the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests—changes in repertoires of collective action. This interim report has two complementary objectives: first, to situate the evolving concept of repertoire in my own work and in recent studies of collective action; second, to illustrate its applications to the experience of Great Britain from the 1750s to the 1830s. It will do no more than hint, however, at explanations of the changes it documents.

Moments of madness—when “all is possible”—recur persistently in the history of social movements. In such turbulent points of history, writes Aristide Zolberg, “the wall between the instrumental and the expressive collapses.” “Politics bursts its bounds to invade all of life” and “political animals somehow transcend their fate” (1972: 183). Such moments are unsettling and often leave even participants disillusioned—not to mention elites and political authorities. But they may be “necessary for the political transformation of societies,” writes Zolberg, for they are the source of the new actors, the audiences and the force to break through the crust of convention (1972: 206). In Kafka’s parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

Charles Tilly has introduced to historical and sociological discourse the concept of the repertoire of collective action. The concept is rooted in the observation that “any given population tends to have a fairly limited and well-established set of means for action on shared interests. . . .” (Tilly 1977: 39) The repertoire of collective action, like its theatrical counterpart, implies a group of actors who choose among a restricted number of performances with which they are familiar. Their options are circumscribed both by prior experience and by the material, organizational, and conceptual resources they find readily at hand (Tilly and Tilly 1981: 19). Tilly also likens the repertoire of collective action to a game that involves a set of basic rules around which a considerable degree of extemporization is not only permitted but required. The result is a “paradoxical combination of ritual and flexibility” (Tilly 1977: 22; Tilly 1986b: 33, 37) in which neither element must be allowed to displace the other, lest the performance lose either its creative edge or its ready communicability.