Moments of madness—when “all is possible”—recur persistently in the history of social movements. In such turbulent points of history, writes Aristide Zolberg, “the wall between the instrumental and the expressive collapses.” “Politics bursts its bounds to invade all of life” and “political animals somehow transcend their fate” (1972: 183). Such moments are unsettling and often leave even participants disillusioned—not to mention elites and political authorities. But they may be “necessary for the political transformation of societies,” writes Zolberg, for they are the source of the new actors, the audiences and the force to break through the crust of convention (1972: 206). In Kafka’s parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

Charles Tilly has introduced to historical and sociological discourse the concept of the repertoire of collective action. The concept is rooted in the observation that “any given population tends to have a fairly limited and well-established set of means for action on shared interests. . . .” (Tilly 1977: 39) The repertoire of collective action, like its theatrical counterpart, implies a group of actors who choose among a restricted number of performances with which they are familiar. Their options are circumscribed both by prior experience and by the material, organizational, and conceptual resources they find readily at hand (Tilly and Tilly 1981: 19). Tilly also likens the repertoire of collective action to a game that involves a set of basic rules around which a considerable degree of extemporization is not only permitted but required. The result is a “paradoxical combination of ritual and flexibility” (Tilly 1977: 22; Tilly 1986b: 33, 37) in which neither element must be allowed to displace the other, lest the performance lose either its creative edge or its ready communicability.