2023-08-15 00:05:55
It is precisely from the effect of upheaval caused by Western consumption models on archaic societies that Francesco Alberoni began the study of collective movements in the second half of the 1960s. Contact with a civilization with superior technology, whose consumer goods (weapons, means of transport, clothing, etc.) are superior, produces a state of ambivalence towards one’s own tradition, one’s values. And ambivalence produces cultural disintegration. Single individuals let themselves be seduced by new goods, new customs and betray their own traditions. Social life becomes unruly, disorder grows fearfully. However, beyond a certain threshold of disorder, a collective movement breaks out which first expels and then integrates the new models into a new social order.
Alberoni realizes that, speaking of the charismatic boss in the nascent state, Max Weber has described not only the properties of the boss, but of the entire group. The nascent state is the beginning of the movement, a very particular emotional and mental state, it creates a new history, it promises the renewal of the world. Then the nascent state becomes a movement and this institution. However, the institution created to realize the dream of universal brotherhood of the nascent state is increasingly moving away from it until, beyond a certain level of sclerosis, it has to be revitalized by a new movement. It is the Great Collective Cycle that Alberoni exhibits in the volume “Questioni di Sociologia” (Editrice la Scuola, 1967). The following year Alberoni discovers that the properties of the nascent state also exist in an apparently very different phenomenon: falling in love. And he exposes it in the book “Statu Nascenti. Studies on collective processes” (Il Mulino 1968).
Invited by Tom Burns to prepare a book on consumption for Penguin Education Alberoni exposes these new theses that produce scandal. The sociologist refuses to modify them and, for almost ten years, stops participating in the activities of the International Association of Sociology where he was general secretary for the Mass Communications sector. He retired to the University of Catania where he wrote the theory of collective movements (“Movimento e Istituzione”, Il Mulino, 1977, then enriched 1981). In 1989 he rewrote “Movement and Institution” solving many theoretical issues such as the fundamental experience of the nascent state, the difference between the nascent state and nirvana, the theory of democracy, the Cultural Civilizations and called it “Genesis” (Garzanti 1989) .
Later on this subject he wrote “Leader e masse” (Rizzoli 2005) in which he made some insights into contemporary non-European collective movements. Finally, in 2014 he wrote what he considers his final work on the subject, taking up the old title “Movement and institution” but with the subtitle “Parties, churches, nations, civilizations are born” (Sonzogno, 2014).
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