Two Critics in Search of a Bias: A Response to Currie and Skolnick

Abstract

This essay is mainly a response to the foregoing one, in which Elliott Currie and Jerome Skolnick attempt to find an antidemocratic, irrationalist, "LeBonist" bias in my book, Theory of Collective Behavior. After noting some errors and misinterpretations in their essay, I attempt to dem onstrate that they take one of my several determinants and inflate it into an explanation, that they collapse several attributes that are analytically separate in my work, and that they turn my selection of determinants into simple value- preferences. The essay concludes with a general discussion of the issue of "discrediting" adherents to social movements by analyzing their ideologies in terms of determinants other than those contained in the ideologies themselves. I attempt to spell out my own position on these matters, and to locate some inconsistencies in Skolnick's approach to protest move ments in The Politics of Protest.