Charles Tilly was born in 1929, a year worryingly echoed in contemporary events. For all of his adult life, he studied the causes, patterns, cycles, changes, and continuities of such events. He focused most on social movements that responded to them and sometimes shaped them and on the states that often drove them and sometimes managed them. He studied the ways that states and others sought to coerce ordinary people and the ways that ordinary people mobilized to try to control their own lives and public affairs. He studied how capital and inequality figured in both the coercion and the struggles. And he studied how we study history, social structure, social action, and social change.

Tilly was among the most distinguished of contemporary social scientists. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is proud, accordingly, to award him its highest honor, the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The prize isnamed after another of the greatest figures of our era. Hirschman is one of the formative influences on the economics of development, a key researcher in Latin American studies, and a remarkable intellectual historian and social theorist

This article examines the public sphere in early-twentieth-century America via a study of Charles Richmond Henderson, Chicago reformer and sociology professor. It discusses Henderson’s broad visibility, from religious and university venues, through the club and voluntary association world, and into the professions and government. It examines the relations between this archipelago of reform venues and the intimate sphere of family and religion as well as the separation of the world of Protestant reform from both the Catholic and the immigrant publics. Finally, it examines Henderson’s own experience of his public role, showing how his religious understanding yoked objectivity and advocacy into a single concept of reform knowledge-driven reform.

At the Albert O. Hirschman Prize ceremony in October 2008, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), in cooperation with the Social Science History Association, announced the inauguration of the endowed Tilly Fund in celebration of the lifelong contributions of Charles Tilly and Louise Tilly (see www.ssrc.org/programs/tilly-fund-for-social-science-history). Charles Tilly died just a few weeks after receiving that year's Hirschman Prize.

The Tilly Fund provides travel grants to graduate students participating in meetings of the Social Science History Association and awards an annual Tilly Prize for the Best Graduate Paper in Social Science History. Funds permitting, it will also support graduate research and other activities with the goal of advancing historical social science, the interdisciplinary field to which both Charles and Louise devoted their careers.

The relationship between the development of rational public discourse and the expansion of democratic participation provides a focus for the comparative and historical analysis of the public sphere. Major scholars disagree, however, on the character of this linkage. As the contributions to this symposium demonstrate, the resulting debates have generated a rich literature in historical sociology. For Charles Tilly, public discourse and democratic participation proceeded largely in tandem, tracing out one important lineage in the history of democracy. An alternative understanding, informed by the early work of Jürgen Habermas, produces a more conflicted account of the tensions between democratic inclusion and rational deliberation. In their contributions to this symposium, Craig Calhoun and Andrew Abbott reconstruct the shifting and contested public arenas of London and Chicago. In an essay written after the original session for which my comments were crafted, Andreas Koller outlines a substantial agenda for comparative historical research on the public sphere.

This article conducts an analysis of public meetings in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The profound changes in frequency and character, the enormous increase of public meetings and the sharp decline in the relative frequency of violent gatherings, serve as an indicator of the expansion of the public sphere and its capacity to shape the social process. The article explains the rise of the public meeting and why it became so central to British political life during the nineteenth century through four intertwined changes: the development of British capitalism, the growing importance of Parliament, the multiplied opportunities for political entrepreneurs, and the effect of public contention itself.

I know just how pleased Charles Tilly was to receive the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an institution he cherished, and Hirschman is a person for whom Tilly had almost limitless admiration.

He particularly esteemed the assertive analytic power and intellectual modesty that characterized Hirschman's “Rival Interpretations of Market Society,” the brilliant 1982 Marc Bloch Lecture that addressed competing interpretations of modern markets as, respectively, “civilizing, destructive, or feeble.” “However incompatible the various theories may be,” Hirschman (1982: 1481) argued, “each might still have its ‘hour of truth’ and/or its ‘country of truth’ as it applies in a given country or group of countries during some stretch of time,” and he concluded by asking whether it is “not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?” (ibid.: 1483). These features, too, were hallmarks of Tilly's audacious originality.

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

The Albert O. Hirschman Prize is the highest award of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). It recognizes academic excellence in international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication in the tradition of the German-born American economist for whom it is named.

It makes sense that the SSRC honors Hirschman in this way, for he was, as one biographical summary puts it, a “maverick economist.” The same biography says that Hirschman lived in “the grey zone between economic and political theory,” forging connections between them in unusual and extremely creative ways (homepage.newschool.edu/het//profiles/hirschm.htm). His work in development economics insisted on attention to local structures and indigenous resources, arguing against the application of formal models and standard criteria, the dominant approach of modernization theorists. Ever concerned about political democracy, he explored its relationship to economics.

In state-of-the-field surveys of historical sociology and of historical social science at large, the study of the public sphere is missing. The rise of historical social science has not led to an established tradition of comparative historical research on the public sphere. This article gives an introduction to this topic and to this special issue, seeking to clarify the definition of the object of study and its stakes and providing an overview of analytic and historical dimensions relevant to the comparative historical study of the public sphere. The article argues that this search for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative historical research, for incorporating the fragmented research from numerous disciplines, and thus for improving our understanding of the historical formation and the transformations of this central sphere of social life.