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The article develops an economic hypothesis about the origin of social movements. The paper is divided into three parts: the first elaborates a theory of demand for social change or, more specifically, a theory about why the demand for change manifests itself in social movements. This first part, in turn, is subdivided into two sections examining: first, some structural components of the environment in which social movements originate and discussing, second, the definitions and assumptions of the proposed theory as well as its essential mechanisms. The second part introduces the concept of the supply of social movements and examines how this supply is related to the demand for social change. This discussion sheds some new light on the question of social change itself. This is briefly discussed in Section III. The hypothesis formulated appears to be consistent, at least in the large, with what is known of the history of social movements in Canada, in the United States, and in Europe during the first part of the twentieth century.