W. Lance Bennett’s review of my book is both perceptive and generous: It is perceptive in pointing to three main issues he has with the book; it is generous in how he deals with them: so generous that he passes over a fourth problem that his review helped me to understand better, as I will say shortly. But first to his concerns:

Bennett’s first worry is that focusing on contentious language over a long historical period, as The Language of Contention does, raises the question of how one decides among different arguments when operating at high levels of historical abstraction. For example I try to explain the decline of class language in U.S. and British books published in the last decades of the twentieth century as the result of declining subjective perceptions of class in popular culture. The account, in Bennett’s view, “seems a bit piecemeal in its neglect of a rising global neoliberal political economy during that period.” His critique is entirely correct: By focusing on language over the long haul, my book abstracted from complex structural developments that might have explained the changes in the contentious language it documents.

Bennett’s second concern is that although the book strives to reconcile a long-standing paradigm split within the study of contentious politics between “instrumentalists” and “culturalists,” its broad range of examples—from words that emerge in revolutions, industrial conflict, and about race, gender, and nationalism, and love and hate in contentious movements—“may not offer scholars sufficient guidance to work through these tricky differences of perspective.” Again I agree: I can only say that—like Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg in their magisterial Logic of Connective Action—I have always had a horror of the kinds of “paradigm warfare” with which academics often occupy themselves. The Language of Contention is an effort to bridge exaggeratedly polarized approaches but could have done so more systematically. For example—returning to Bennett’s first concern—I might have tried to link variations in the individual perceptions of class to exposure to neoliberal economic policies.

Bennett’s third critique is the most serious: It is that the work has not fully assimilated the “forms of mobilization that explicitly aim for ideational diversity and inclusiveness” in what he and Segerberg call, in their book, “crowd-sourced connective action.” He observes that Language gives little credit to the “broad frames that are highly personalized in form,” which underlie social-media driven episodes of collective action. This is a fair critique: Demonstrating the mechanisms through which these personalized messages at the base of movements in formation “scale up” to collective messages that will endure—as the terms “working class” or “freedom” did in earlier movements—seems to me the crucial next step in the research trajectory Bennett has pioneered in his work on digitally enabled contentious politics.

Bennett’s review sees correctly that my book tries to address the intriguing analytical question: “What is the link between repertoires of action and discourse repertoires?” For example, did the language of “the strike” inspire workers to put down their tools and go on strike more—and more militantly—than they would have had some other term been used to mobilize them? As he correctly observes, this remains a puzzle that the book never resolves. It does argue that, over time, words like “strike,” “birth control,” “citizen,” “patriot,” and “race”—born in situations of contentious conflict—gained a history that signaled future users of their broader cultural significance and sometimes (and I wish I could be more certain of when that sometimes is) inspired them to engage in collective action. In my book, I was trying to do for the repertoire of contentious language what Charles Tilly did for repertoires of collective action: ask big questions that raise enormous headaches. If I did not completely succeed, that was because Tilly’s were pretty big boots to fill!