This thesis is a critical study of contemporary sociological accounts of the politics of radical social movements (RSMs). The study of this class of movement was revitalised by the general political and cultural upheaval across western democracies at the end of the 1960s, and remains relevant now in what is characterised as a movement society. The classical Anglo-American agenda post 1968 was to repopulate the territory of modern politics with a strategic and reasonable radical subject,

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... ally, one explicable within a framework of political rationalism; however, I contend that two fundamental properties of RSMs complicate this sociological project. Firstly, the practice and theory of radical communities disturb the existing order of society and politics. They exist in a space that is marginal to the political community. They act outside the established standards of behaviour and transgress the conventional limits of representation. Secondly, in so doing, these radical communities undermine the prevailing discourses on the connection of the radical community to politics. That is, RSMs disturb social order and the discourses that have that order as their object; therefore, I argue that a consequence of deploying a rationalist framework to model collective action is the effacing of the difference and specificity essential to the radical subject. My hypothesis, then, is that the politics of RSMs (the practice and theory of radical communities) are inexplicable through the aspect of instrumental rationality that indelibly marks contemporary sociological studies, in particular Anglo-American social movement theory (SMT). I defend this thesis in two main ways. Firstly, I engage the sociological accounts of RSMs in a case study of the Italian social movements 1968-78. This sector involved a diverse field of radical communities including those of the worker, student, counter-culture, and women. Unlike the trajectory of the events associated with 1968 in other western democracies, the Italian situation lasted for ove [...]