Domination. Resistance, Compliance . . . Discourse.

This article focuses on the populist turn on sociology and social history of the U.S. in the year 1960. Scholars began an unprecedented effort to speak for the powerless or to help them speak for themselves. Voice itself validates insurgency, they seemed to claim. Both fields had long since undertaken studies of poor, powerless people; witness the Pittsburgh Survey of 1903 and R. H. Tawney's early writings on the 16th century. Inspired by civil rights activism as well as by subsequent demands for empowerment of women, homosexuals, Chicanos, Native Americans and many others, scholars tried to counter the condescension, denigration, and dehumanization they detected in earlier analyses of popular collective action. They insisted that routine social arrangements harmed ordinary people, and that only force held ordinary people back from overt resistance. In short, compliance does not consist of conscious rule following or straightforward exchange, but of pursuing personal agendas by maneuvering among obstacles, obstacles put in place by other people and past experience.