Ideology and Popular Protest

Abstract

In this paper, I shall be using the word 'protest' to mean a social act (generally a collective act) that seeks to rectify an injustice, to ventilate a grievance of public concern, or to offer a more fundamental challenge to society or its established norms; and the 'people' with whom I shall be concerned will be the peasants, wage-earners or menu peuple mainly of 'pre-industrial' society in England, France and North America. The term 'ideology' of course presents a greater problem, as every writer in the social sciences I am thinking in particular of Marx, Mannheim, Lukacs, Clifford Geetz uses it in his own manner, some (since Marx's German Ideology) seeing it as a form of 'mystification' or 'false reality', others defining it strictly in terms of a structured set of values or political beliefs, others again favouring a more elastic approach in which myths, 'attitudes' and* what the French call mentalites all have their part. As a social historian I, too, lean towards this latter view, preferring an allembracing concept that takes account of all sets of ideas whether 'sophisticated' and structured or not that underlie or inform popular protest. (Therefore, in this paper at least, as I am concerned with action and not silent meditation or passivity, I shall take no account of such expressions of popular ideology as Oscar Lewis's 'culture of poverty.') In my sense of the term, ideology and, in this case, specifically 'popular' ideology is not a purely internal affair and the sole property of a single class or group. It is a 'mix', made up of the fusion of two elements, of which only one is the peculiar property of the 'popular' classes and the other is superimposed by a process of transmission and adoption of ideas from outside. Of these, the first is the 'inherent', traditional element a sort of 'mother's milk' ideology, based on direct experience, oral tradition or folk-memory and not learned by listening to sermons or reading books. In this fusion the second element is the sets of ideas and beliefs that are 'derived' or