The subfield of social movement studies has increasingly become inward-looking, disengaging itself from wider fields of social sciences that originally spawned it (McAdam & Boudet, 2012). In particular, social movements’ relationships with ideologies and values are largely neglected, giving place to instrumental analysis of resources and political opportunities. Consequently, the importance of morality in social movements remains underexplored. The recent volume edited by Anders Sevelsted and Jonas Toubøl, The Power of Morality in Movements, seeks to address this gap and bring the concept of morality into academic discussions.
To be fair, various concepts in social movements studies already centre on morality, but Sevelsted and Toubøl contend that these concepts either overlook the micro-level identity formation, resulting in the reification of the dynamic aspects of the phenomenon (e.g. in the case of ‘framing’), or suffer from not defining the assumed moral or ethical drivers at play (e.g. in the case of ‘moral shock’ theory). Due to these limitations, Sevelsted and Toubøl depart from these established conceptual frameworks in the field, proposing to reanalyze morality in social movements by tracing its origin in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral philosophy up until today. The result is an intriguing ‘genealogy of how the relationship between movements and morality has been interpreted in social thought’ (p. 23).
After a detailed elaboration of this genealogy in Chapter 2, Sevelsted and Toubøl followed this logic to structure the rest of the book into three parts. The first part, ‘selves in interaction’, draws from Hume’s conceptualisation of morality as socially mediated experiences. It asks questions like how morality motivates individuals or collectives in action, how these individuals change their morality throughout the process of mobility, and how moral agents act creatively to change the morality of a society. This section comprises three individual chapters that focus on the axiological drivers of solidarity mobilisation in the ‘refugee crisis’ (Chapter 4), the mediation role of contexts in terms of values and attitudes in movements (Chapter 5), the importance of cultural practices like meaning-making conversations among activists (Chapter 6).
The second part, ‘rationalization and justification’, stems from Kant’s interpretation of morality as acting according to a universal law. It addresses issues related to the Enlightenment tradition of social research and its critiques, focusing on the negotiation of principles and justification practices in movements. This part consists of four individual chapters: one on civic engagements in urban greenspaces based on Boltanski and Thevenot’s pragmatist theory of justification (Chapter 7), another on political theories created by prefigurative social movements through a decolonial approach (Chapter 8), a chapter on the dilemma in student activism concerning universal values and situated ethical concerns (Chapter 9), and a chapter on the value frames among moral elites in the Danish temperance movement (Chapter 10).
The third part, ‘culture and tradition’, emanates from Hegel’s notion that ethical life depends on the recognition of a community. While Hume underscored sentiments and Kant emphasised reason, Hegel espoused a more socially and culturally rooted conception of morality by arguing that contractual relations are embedded in the larger framework of a culturally formed economy. This section of the analysis concerns issues on emotions, narratives, and everyday moral routines in social movements. It includes three individual chapters on the use of humour in Czech far-right organisations’ social media posts (Chapter 11), the expression of emotions in Chinese online activism (Chapter 12), and the multifaceted moral dimension exhibited within the anti-feminism countermovement (Chapter 13).
Besides these individual empirical chapters, the volume also features insightful interviews with three influencing voices in the field: Doug McAdam, Jeffrey Alexander, and Nina Eliasoph (Chapter 3). The three prominent figures unanimously agreed on the intrinsic significance of morality in social movements. Furthermore, their discussions touch upon the role of morality in the discipline of sociology and social sciences as a whole, offering valuable food for thought for young researchers in these disciplines. McAdam, following Weber, advocates for scholars to freely choose their research topics based on their value positions while maintaining a systematic research method to guarantee that the research result is unbiased (p. 46). Alexander, without compromising methodological rigour, emphasises that sociology is a moral science, sitting between empiricism and moral philosophy (p. 52), and he reminds us that humanities should be as much a source for our theory and method as natural sciences (p. 51). Nina Eliasoph, taking a slightly more postcolonial approach, argues that ‘moral’ could not be separated from ‘political’ in the first place (p. 54). She criticises sociologists for forgetting their job of offering a vision of a good society that could transcend the fierce competition in which we are all losers (p. 57).
The selection of chapters in this volume skilfully accommodated a broad spectrum of positions from the ‘very positivist’ to the ‘very humanistic’. Those who have an appetite for systematic empirical research will appreciate statistical analysis based on survey data in Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, social network analysis in Chapter 10, and mixed method research in Chapter 12. Those advocating for a decolonial approach in social sciences will find satisfaction in the discussion of prefiguring political theory derived directly from social movements in Chapter 8 and the exploration of morality and ethics in student movements in Chapter 9. While consensus on the best approach to social sciences may be elusive, it is certainly refreshing to see the contributors employing creative methodological and theoretical toolkits to approach issues of their interest.
Another notable aspect of the book is that the editors paid attention to the case-selection bias in the field, namely focusing predominantly on the progressive movements. The reason, as McAdam has pointed out, could be that the researchers favour studying the group of people they sympathise with (p. 46). The result is that we know comparatively little about the dynamics of right-wing movements. Chapter 11 and Chapter 13 in this volume provide us with valuable insight regarding the content, cultural forms, and moral visions the right-wing groups use to mobilise. Social movement scholars bear the duty to provide more understanding to this segment of society, which is essential for us to comprehend why we are still so far away from the ‘good society’ Eliasoph envisioned.
All that being said, I find the treatment of ‘culture’ in this volume somewhat unsatisfying. While culture is empirically present throughout all the sections, the editors analytically situate it under the Hegelian tradition. While this settlement is already arguably problematic, the empirical studies in this section, conflating the concepts such as emotion, morality, value, and culture, add to the confusion. There is no lack of systematic theorisation of culture in sociology; for example, Jeffrey Alexander’s Strong Program in Cultural Sociology treats culture as an over-arching meaning structure of a society (Alexander & Smith, 2010), and he also builds his Civil Sphere Theory, which is an illuminating theoretical framework for social movement studies, on such an understanding (Alexander, 2006). The discussion on culture in this volume would be strengthened if such theories and approaches were taken into better consideration in the theoretical framework and empirical analysis.
Overall, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the field of social movement studies, and its discussion on the significance of morality is relevant for researchers of various fields such as political science, sociology, and philosophy. It is a must-read for researchers interested in advancing the studies of morality in social sciences and serves as an excellent advanced-level resource for undergraduate and graduate students in the aforementioned fields.