Charles Tilly

Charles Tilly (May 20, 1929 – April 29, 2008) was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who has written books on the relationship between politics and society.

Biography

Tilly was born on May 20, 1929, in Lombard, Illinois (near Chicago). He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, obtaining the Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard in 1958. He taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. At Columbia, he was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science.

Charles Tilly died on April 29, 2008 from lymphoma. As he was fading in the hospital, he got one characteristic sentence out to early student Barry Wellman: "It's a complex situation."

Academic work

Examining political, social, and technological change in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, Tilly attempted to explain the the unprecedented success of the nation-state as the dominant polity on Earth. According to his theory, military innovation in pre-modern Europe (especially gunpowder and mass armies) made war extremely expensive. As a result, only states with a sufficient amount of capital and a large population could afford paying for their security and ultimately survive in the hostile environment. Institutions of the modern state (such as taxes) were created to allow war-making.

Another focus of Tilly's work is the area of contentious politics. In opposition to individualistic, dispositional analyses of contentious politics, his work emphasizes how dynamics of social protest are tied to their political, social and economic context. Where previous studies of collective violence had argued their atypical nature, Tilly amassed a battery of evidence to show that they typically arouse out of the organization of normally non-violent political contentions.

Tilly's work has had considerable influence on the study of social movements. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tilly became one of the founders of the political process approach to studying social movements - linking their emergence to the rise of the nation state in Britain and France. Instead of defining all forms of social protest as social movements, Tilly uses a narrower definition, differentiating it from other types of contention, including electoral contests, ethnic conflict and guerrilla warfare. He argues that the social movement developed in the West after 1750 and spread throughout the world through colonialism, trade and migration. Local populations are more likely to experiment with the social movement with democratization, and when successful, are more likely to incorporate it into their political struggles.

He explained in his 2004 book Social Movements, 1768-2004 that the social movement combines three elements:

1. a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target audiences (let us call it a campaign);

2. employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering (call the variable ensemble of performances the social movement repertoire); and
3. participants' concerted public representations of WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment on the part of themselves and/or their constituencies (call them WUNC displays)

In the 1960s and 1970s, Tilly also studied migration to cities, and was an influential theorist about urban phenomena and treating communities as social networks.

Charles Tilly wrote more than 600 articles and 51 books and monographs. In his obituary, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger stated that Tilly "literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of political history". Adam Ashforth, of Northwestern University, described Tilly as "the founding father of 21st-century sociology".

Partial Bibliography

See Tilly's home page for more complete version: [1]

• The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter- revolution of 1793. (1964)
• "Clio and Minerva." Pp. 433-66 in Theoretical Sociology, edited by John McKinney and Edward Tiryakian. (1970)
• "Collective Violence in European Perspective." Pp. 4-45 in Violence in America, edited by Hugh Graham and Tedd Gurr. (1969)
• "Do Communities Act?" Sociological Inquiry 43: 209-40. (1973)
• An Urban World. (ed.) (1974).
• The Formation of National States in Western Europe (ed.) (1974)
• From Mobilization to Revolution (1978)
• As Sociology Meets History (1981)
• Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (1984)
• The Contentious French (1986)
• Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (1990)
• European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (1993)
• Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800 (1994)
• Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1995)
• Roads from Past to Future (1997)
• Work Under Capitalism (with Chris Tilly, 1998)
• Durable Inequality (1998)
• Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies (1998)
• Dynamics of Contention (with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow) (2001)
• Contention & Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000 (2004)
• Social Movements, 1768-2004 (2004)
• From Contentions to Democracy (2005)
• Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (2005)
• Trust and Rule (2005)
• Why? (2006)
• Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (2006)
• Contentious Politics (with Sidney Tarrow) (2006)
• Regimes and Repertoires (2006)
• Democracy (2007)
• Credit and Blame (2008)

External links

• Homepage at Columbia
• Tributes to Charles Tilly written by his colleagues
• Tilly’s Writings on Methodology
• 'Mechanisms in Political Processes', 2000 article, PDF online
• 'War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, 1985 article, PDF online
• Charles Tilly's Change Theory
• Ideas The ideas interview: Charles Tilly, in The Guardian
• Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual, Boston Review
• Predictions: a series of three emails written by Professor Tilly in the week following September 11
• Social Scientist Charles Tilly Joins Columbia Faculty, Columbia Press Release
• "How I Work" by Charles Tilly
• video interview with Chuck Tilly on his work