Democracy and Disorder

Sidney Tarrow has assembled materials from newspaper records, documents and interviews with participants to reconstruct the cycle of protest in Italy from 1965 to its end in the organized terrorism of the mid-1970s. Using a combination of historical, statistical and theoretical approaches, he reveals that Italy's mass movements began before the French May. The involvement of three major groups in Italy's protest cycle are analyzed: university students, industrial workers and grass-roots Catholics. The author concludes that this period of disorder and conflict was the latest in a sequence of cycles of protest in capitalist society. In Italy, he argues, it became clear that the movement had extended the boundaries of mass politics and completed the consolidation of the young democratic republic that had emerged from the ashes of Fascism in 1946.