Abstract
Beginning his career as a structurally oriented area specialist in Italy in the mid-1960s, Sidney Tarrow moved on to a paired comparison of France and Italy, then to more process-oriented work on social movements and contentious politics, and finally to European and transnational contention. In this article, he traces his theoretical development as a series of missteps, which – like a hiker crossing a turbulent stream – took him from one slippery rock to another.
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Notes
3 My Yale colleague, Roger Masters, bore some responsibility for this study by introducing me to Maussane, where each of us spent productive sabbatical years.
4 It took twenty years of enormous effort for my friend Putnam to answer that question, in Making Democracy Work (1993).
5 More than most, that study depended on the collaboration of friends and colleagues. Aris Accornero and Ida Regalia were precious sources of information on the workers' movement, while Luigi Bobbio and Adriano Sofri drew on their experiences in the student and extra-parliamentary movements to help me understand the evolution of the extreme left between 1967 and 1973.
6 The language of political opportunity structure first entered the social movement canon from Peter Eisinger's (1973) article on urban protest movements in the United States.
7 The Mellon-Sawyer project also produced two collective volumes: Aminzade et al (2001) and Goldstone (ed.) (2003).
8 I thank the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation for the support that has allowed me and a group of Cornell PhD students to investigate these questions over the past five years, and especially Lisa Jordan who, unaccountably, had confidence that a scholar from Ithaca, New York could teach us something about the world of global civil society she has worked in both as an advocate and as a Foundation executive. Also see della Porta and Tarrow, eds, 2005).
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Parts of this article appeared in Tarrow (2003) under the same title.
2 I was inspired by two devoted teachers who both later became colleagues and friends: Joseph LaPalombara, who taught me much of what I know about how to understand Italian politics, and David Apter, who urged me to think about Italy in comparative terms.
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Tarrow, S. confessions of a recovering structuralist. Eur Polit Sci 5, 7–20 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210064
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210064