Students—A Marginal Elite in Politics

Frank A. Pinner
Additional contact information
Frank A. Pinner: Department of Political Science of Michigan State University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1971, vol. 395, issue 1, 127-138

Abstract: Student activism has rarely been examined in political perspective. Most of the existing literature treats it as a form of deviancy which must be explained as a special tendency of students to respond, in an unorthodox manner, to social, psychological, and cultural disturbances. Such formulations generally fail to account adequately for levels of activism, let alone the political positions—left or right, nationalistic or internationalist—which students espouse. This paper represents an attempt to lay the foundations for a political theory of student activism. It points out the affinities between students and other "marginal elites," the military and clerical professions, which tend to play indepen dent political roles at times of crisis. Most political alliances involving student movements are ephemeral because students lack effective means of coercion, such as armaments and religious sanctions. And being the weaker partners in any alliance, students tend to be deprived of most of the fruits of victory, or become an easy target of repression following defeat. They then move into ideo logical opposition to their former coalition partners. The paper illustrates these shifts in coalition patterns and ideo logical positions by tracing the historical changes in German student movements from the period of the Napoleonic wars to the present.

Date: 1971
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271627139500112 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:395:y:1971:i:1:p:127-138

DOI: 10.1177/000271627139500112

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().