Charles Tilly, a social scientist who deployed historical interpretation and quantitative analysis in the large scale study of social change, died on April 29 in New York City after a long illness. He was 78. Often focused on Europe since 1500, his work also made sweeping advances in social and political theory. He leaves behind a panoply of former students, friends, and colleagues to whom he contributed wisdom, mentoring, and friendship over a long and distinguished career.
Tilly was born on May 27, 1929, in Lombard, Illinois, and was educated at Harvard and Oxford, obtaining the Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard in 1958. He taught at the universities of Delaware, Toronto, and Michigan, as well as at Harvard and the New School for Social Research, and ended his career at Columbia, where he was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science.
Tilly published over 50 books and more than 600 articles in the fields of social movements, revolutions, state building, democracy, and historical and urban demography. Trained as a generalist, he never identified with narrow subfields or with any single discipline. Indeed, even to characterize his influence in political science alone would distort his intent and misrepresent the consistently interdisciplinary nature of his scholarship. Before turning to his importance in our field, we should at least recognize his immense influence on sociology and history and the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of his work.
As distinct from political science, contemporary sociology is made up of a large number of specialized subfields. Most card-carrying sociologists would be lucky to achieve distinction in as much as a single subfield; Tilly made important contributions to no less than seven sociological subfields. These are: political sociology, social movements, economic sociology, comparative/historical sociology, urban sociology, stratification and inequality, and theory. In one area, comparative/historical sociology, Chuck's work virtually defined the field into existence. In another, social movements, his scholarship helped set in motion a paradigm shift that redefined the study of movements and collective action as the proper province of political and organizational sociologists rather than social psychologists and scholars in the collective behavior tradition. The broad contours of political sociology everywhere bear his imprint.
Tilly's contributions to history are more difficult to pinpoint, since—in implicit polemic with the specializing tendency of much modern historiography—he contributed in equal measure to French, British, European, and world history. And as European historians were moving determinedly away from the study of large-scale social change and towards a “cultural turn” that sometimes left political change in the shadows, Tilly's relentless pursuit of the connections between capitalism, statebuilding, and contention marked him, for some, as a vestige of the out-of-date 1960s. He was hardly that, but younger historians, anxious to set themselves off from their elders, sometimes failed to notice that his methodological innovations were both fundamentally historical and were deeply impregnated with culture. For example, his concept of the “repertoire” of contention is both profoundly cultural and provides a key to the understanding of large-scale social and political change.
In our field, Tilly is best known for his signal contributions to the field of historical state building, which he compared to a protection racket. “Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” he wrote in his epochal chapter of Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. This insight broadened into his most ambitious work, Coercion, Capital and European States (Blackwell, 1990), in which he demonstrated how war and war-making capacity lay at the origin of the modern state. Students of state building outside his chosen territory of Europe have sometimes found these insights culture bound, but all who study state building have had to come to terms with his theory.
Tilly is likely to be best remembered in the interdisciplinary field of what he called “contentious politics,” an area of research that he virtually created. He argued that by limiting their ken to western reformist movements, most scholars of social movements were not only cutting themselves off from the rich fields of comparative revolution, strike waves, civil wars, and the like, but were also doomed to ignore the findings of historians working in periods when the social movement had not yet been invented. In his latest book, Contentious Performances (Cambridge, 2008), he demonstrates both the historical specificity of the social movement and how it emerged from the eighteenth-century repertoire through the nationalization and parliamentarization of politics.
The central core around which Tilly's work revolved was the relationship between large-scale social change and contentious politics. His first book, The Vendée (Harvard, 1964), was an archive-based study of the counter-revolution in France, in which he used paired comparison of two areas of eastern France to demonstrate the relationship between social change and mobilization. With Louise and Richard Tilly, he then turned to the comparative and historical study of contention, in The Rebellious Century (Harvard, 1975), and, with Edward Shorter, to a detailed statistical analysis of industrial conflict in Strikes in France (Cambridge, 1974). The methodological and conceptual departures he produced in these books would define the boundaries of the study of contentious politics for the next three decades. Based on these empirical studies, at the end of the 1970s, Tilly wrote what remained for years the definitive text on contentious politics, From Mobilization to Revolution (Addison-Wesley, 1978).
But he was far from done. In the 1980s, Tilly returned to the archives, constructing The Contentious French (Harvard, 1986), the most exhaustive study of historical contention in that conflict-ridden country. More significant for social scientists who do not specialize on France, in that decade he began to experiment with computer-assisted ways of studying contentious events, first at the University of Michigan and then at the New School for Social Research. In this work, Tilly shied away from pre-coding computerized records of social conflict—a method that he felt privileged quantity over quality—preferring instead to record long verbal accounts from original sources that specified the sources, objects, and forms of action involved in what he was then calling “contentious gatherings.” These verbal accounts were then reduced into broader categories and combined into composite events that he could examine both internally and in relation to each other. The method had the advantage of pointing to interactive pairs of contenders—labor and capital, farm workers and farm owners, and, increasingly, states and social movements—rather than focusing on “protest” alone, as many students (including the present author) tended to do.
Tilly's experimentation with computer-readable studies of historical episodes of contention came to fruition in his magisterial Contentious Politics in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Harvard, 1995). In this book, he demonstrated how the repertoire of contention evolved from the parochial, local, and often violent events of the eighteenth century into the national, associational, and non-violent events of the nineteenth. This epochal shift in contentious performances he associated with the rise of Parliament and the shift in scale from the local to the national level of British politics and with the rise of the social movement. The latter was marked by properties he stubbornly summarized as WUNC (worthy, unified, numerous, and committed) and by the development of modular performances—like the demonstration—that could be adapted to a broad spectrum of causes and contenders. His major insight was that new performances do not appear Venus-like, fully formed, but emerge out of constant, interactive innovation from the existing repertoire.
Tilly's increasingly preoccupation with contention did not still his contributions to other areas of the social sciences. In the same decade, Tilly co-authored (with Chris Tilly) Work under Capitalism (Westview Press, 1998), and also produced a theoretical and historical study of inequalities, Durable Inequality (University of California, 1998), which completed his epistemological shift from the structural approach of his early work to the emphasis on mechanisms and processes that marked the last decade of his thinking. For example, the mechanism of “opportunity hoarding” that he examined in Durable Inequality might look from a distance no different than exploitation, but it applied equally to large-scale industry protecting its inventions and to Italian gardeners in Westchester passing their businesses on to their sons. To critics who complained that the microscopic examination of how mechanisms and processes emerge gave short shrift to causation and outcomes, he would parry: “But how is why!”
Tilly's growing preoccupation with mechanisms and processes was the inspiration for Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly's 2001 Cambridge book, Dynamics of Contention. McAdam and I had thought we would help ease Chuck into retirement by taking him to breakfast at a conference called to honor him by former students Michael Hanagan, Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne te Brake. As he fondly cracked in his last book: “That plot failed.” To our delight, he proposed that we not only write a book together but develop a group project, one that would be supported by the Mellon Foundation at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. With the other members of the “contentious gang,” Ron Aminzade, Jack Goldstone, Elizabeth Perry, and William Sewell, Jr., that project resulted in a book (Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, Cambridge 2001), helped to train 14 Ph.D. students from around the country in the study of contentious politics, and formed the background for the series Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics, which is currently coordinated by Elisabeth Wood of Yale.
Even as his health began to fail, the new century saw, if anything, an acceleration in Tilly's productivity. His most recently published books are Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge, 2004), Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004), Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective (Paradigm Publishers, co-authored and co-edited with Maria Kousis, 2005), Trust and Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Paradigm Publishers, 2005, revised paperback edition of the 1995 book), Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (Paradigm, 2005), Why? (Princeton University Press, 2006), the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (co-edited and co-authored with Robert Goodin, Oxford University Press, 2006), Contentious Politics (co-authored with Sidney Tarrow, Paradigm, 2006), Regimes and Repertoires (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Democracy (Cambridge 2007), and Credit and Blame (Princeton 2008). Several of these books were written while he was receiving chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The latest, Contentious Performances, which Cambridge will bring out in late 2008, he was robbed of the satisfaction of seeing in print.
Tilly was recognized by honorary degrees from numerous universities and was a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He was recently awarded the Albert Hirschman Prize for significant lifetime contributions to the social sciences by the Social Science Research Council, which will be awarded posthumously in October 2008.
But recounting these honors and titles does little to communicate the character of Chuck Tilly the person. His sense of humor, his quick ear for cant, and his impatience with pretense were combined with unfailing generosity, broadness of spirit, and his open and his egalitarian relationship to all who knew him. I remember his review of a book on empires that enjoyed a brief moment of fame a few years ago. Chuck took that book apart chapter by chapter, exposing the hollowness at its core and highlighting its errors of fact and logic. But his abiding characteristic was his generosity. From our first encounter in Ann Arbor through his years at the New School and Columbia, I never sent him a text that he failed to comment on (usually overnight), or a student he failed to help. The only time this intensely private person allowed his emotions to show was when I presented him with a book I dedicated to: “Chuck Tilly; a teacher!”
It is fitting to close this memoir by highlighting Tilly's commitment to training students and mentoring them and younger colleagues. In his more than four decades of training graduate students, he directed over 200 Ph.D. dissertations and served on the committees of numerous others. His service to the social sciences went well beyond his own institutions. He created a listserv, AMSOC, which serves as an interactive forum for discussions and sharing of information in many areas of the social sciences. And his Columbia Workshop on Contentious Politics was a magnet for young and less young students of contentious politics across the broad New York metropolitan area.
Tilly's abiding virtue was the intellectual excitement he generated, which will be remembered by all those who had the privilege of working with him. As Roy Licklider writes of the time he spent as a participant in Tilly's seminar on social change at the New School:
His ability to treat all students, not just the chosen few disciples, as intellectual equals was equaled only by his eagerness to put his staggering knowledge and time at their service and his concern about their lives as well as their work which lasted long after they had departed.Footnote 1
