ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reasons why human beings protest. Critical realist writers have drawn upon the insights of the Frankfurt School about power and its expression in protest and acquiescence. Just as the Frankfurt School focused on the political and social conditions of possibility of protest and conformity, those affording conditions of its time and place also account for the emergence of the School itself. The intersecting impacts and identities of class, race, sex, disability, sexuality and age have created that new political form of identity politics. Protest and acquiescence have both contextual and personal elements, some affective, some cognitive, some conscious and some unconscious. A form of action emerging from the tensions created by power differentials then is protest but another is acquiescence. Power imbalances, and the disputes they create, may be structured as general tendencies, but they also may be contingent as concrete singularities in individuals.
