Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000

Extract

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. By Charles Tilly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

Charles Tilly's study of democracy and contention is itself highly contentious and deservedly so. After reading and writing social and political history for over five decades, its author is well positioned to judge which social scientific understandings of democracy hold up to historical scrutiny and which do not. In his search for the “mechanisms and processes that promote, inhibit or reverse democratization” (p. ix), Tilly identifies a number of false leads. One of his most contentious points is that the quest for democracy's “necessary and sufficient conditions” is futile (p. 39). Democracy, he insists, “does not have a single history … repeated in more or less the same conditions and sequences by each democratizing country” (p. 35). Searching for either uniform conditions or repeated sequences is, thus, a waste of time. In an equally contentious mode, he cautions “culturalists, phenomenologists, behaviorists and methodological individualists” not to “treat individual dispositions as the fundamental causes of social processes.” Democratization and de-democratization cannot be understood through the “reconstruction” and “aggregation” of individual dispositions just before their point of action (p. xi). Nor, he argues, can democratization be understood as a “product of age-old character traits or of short-term constitutional innovations” (p. 9).