Abstract

The literature on contemporary social movements represents a political reductionism within which the ascription of instrumental rationality to these movements appears both as premise and as conclusion. Hence it is unable to offer an adequate theory of the 'social bases' of movement action, despite the key status of this issue for instrumentalist theories of movements. Reorientation is, however, blocked by the political reductionism of the literature, for which the everyday social reality of the movements themselves is only of interest insofar as they represent a convenient vehicle for accounts of 'rationality' (individual or societal).