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Social Movements 111

in strategic and persuasive exchanges in which they try to bring others

into their project for change, redefining the terms within which the battle
lines have been drawn, changing people ’ s views of their real interests,
and convincing them to see the world and themselves in a different way.
Social change is not achieved by revealing the truth, as Touraine seems
to suppose, but rather by challenging received understandings and intro-
ducing new frameworks within which change becomes possible and
desirable.
Second, from the point of view of this model of cultural politics,
Touraine retains some of the problems of the Marxism he rejects, notably
– and ironically – its determinism. The problem lies in Touraine ’ s view
that there is a single appropriate social movement for every type of society
which will bring about the transition to another type of society. As Scott
points out, this is at odds with his defi nition of social action as having no
a priori direction or foreseeable outcome. The emphasis Touraine gives
to actors ’ interpretations of social action as its cause, rather than underly-
ing structures that work themselves out in a “ logic ” of development
“ behind people ’ s backs, ” is testimony to the idea that social action takes
place in an open system, potentially transformable in any direction. On
the other hand, his diagnosis of the transition from industrial to post -
industrial society depends on a theory of society as moving from one rela-
tively closed system to another. Furthermore, he supposes that what is
most important in this transition are changes in techniques of production
which produce changes in societies as totalities. It is clear from his discus-
sion of anti - nuclear protestors that, rather than analyzing social action in
its own terms, as he recommends, his theoretical commitment to the
movement for post - industrial society means that what he actually does is
to compare the aims of any social movement with the “ higher level ” anti -
technocratic aims he ascribes to it. Apart from problems of inconsistency
in his own theory in this respect, Touraine is therefore bound to ignore
the diversity of actual social movements and their signifi cance for less
total social transformation (Scott, 1996b ).

A lberto M elucci: d evelopments in “ n ew s ocial

m ovement ” t heory
Alberto Melucci, once Touraine ’ s student, has taken up many of the
insights of his approach, while at the same time avoiding its inconsistent
and untenable determinism and its idealist excesses. In order to avoid the
determinism of structural approaches such as that implied in Touraine ’ s
theory, he incorporates some ideas from the RMT tradition concerning