Charles Tilly

Charles Tilly (May 27, 1929 – April 29, 2008[1]) was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

Charles Tilly
BornMay 27, 1929
Lombard, Illinois, U.S.
DiedApril 29, 2008 (2008-04-30) (aged 78)
New York, New York, U.S.
Alma mater
Spouse(s)Louise A. Tilly
Children4
Scientific career
FieldsSocial Science
Sociology
Political science
History
InstitutionsUniversity of Delaware
Harvard University
University of Toronto
University of Michigan
The New School
Columbia University
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
Academic advisorsBarrington Moore Jr.
Doctoral studentsBarry Wellman, Ann Mische, Daniel Nexon

He has been described as "the founding father of 21st-century sociology"[1] and "one of the world's preeminent sociologists and historians."[2] He published widely across topics such as urban sociology, state formation, democracy, social movements, labor, and inequality.[3] He was an influential proponent of large-scale historical social science research. The title of Tilly's 1984 book Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons is characteristic of his particular approach to social science research.

Early life and education

Tilly was born in Lombard, Illinois (near Chicago). His parents were Naneth and Otto Tilly, Welsh-German immigrants.[3] He graduated from York Community High School in 1946.[3] He graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude. He served in the US Navy as a paymaster of an amphibious squadron during the Korean War. Tilly completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology at Harvard in 1958.[4][3]

While at Harvard, he was a student in the Department of Social Relations during the "Harvard revolution" in social network analysis.[5][6] According to Dr. Victor Lee Burke, one of Tilly's graduate students at the University of Michigan, Tilly stated that he was a teaching assistant to Pitirim Sorokin, who along with Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans was considered by many in the profession to be among the world's leading sociologists. According to Tilly, Sorokin was known to call him up in the wee small hours of the morning and say in a distinct Russian accent, "Mr. Tilly you have to teach my class today" and then hang up, leaving Tilly in a panic. Tilly dutifully taught the class without the slightest idea of what Sorokin intended for the day. Tilly also planned to have Sorokin chair his dissertation but every time Sorokin heard Tilly's ideas he would say something like "Very interesting Mr. Tilly but I do think Plato said it better."[7]

Tilly failed his preliminary examination at Harvard because he forgot what time it was and never showed up. He eventually turned to Barrington Moore and George Homans to supervise his dissertation, but Tilly never failed to say that Sorokin was a great person even though Tilly eschewed any great person theory of history. Although Tilly rejected exchange theory, he considered Homans, one of exchange theory's creators, to be among the best writers in the history of sociology and he mentioned to the audience at the American Sociological Association where he accepted his Distinguished Scholarship Award (he always called it the Sorokin Award to his students its original name) that he wished that George Homans were alive so he could thank him.

Academic career

Charles Tilly taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, The New School, and Columbia University. At Michigan, Tilly was professor of history 1969–1984, professor of sociology 1969–1981, and the Theodore M. Newcomb Professor of Social Science 1981–1984. At Columbia, he was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, and along with Harrison White, Tilly played a key role in the emergence of the New York School of relational sociology. Over the course of his career, Tilly wrote more than 600 articles and 51 books and monographs.[8]

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Sociological Research Association and the Ordre des Palmes Academiques.[9]

Academic work

Tilly's academic work covered multiple topics in the social sciences and influenced scholarship in disciplines outside of sociology, including history and political science. He is considered a major figure in the development of historical sociology, the early use of quantitative methods in historical analysis, the methodology of event cataloging, the turn towards relational and social-network modes of inquiry, the development of process- and mechanism-based analysis, as well as the study of: contentious politics, social movements, the history of labor, state formation, revolutions, democratization, inequality, and urban sociology.

Urban sociology

In the 1960s and 1970s, Tilly studied migration to cities, and was an influential theorist about urban phenomena and treating communities as social networks.[10] In 1968 Tilly presented his report on European collective violence to the Eisenhower Commission, a body formed under the Johnson administration to assess urban unrest amidst the Civil Rights Movement. The report was included in Vol. 1 of Violence in America, a collection edited by scholars on the staff of the commission.[11] As informed by his studies of contentious politics in 19th-century Europe, and the present violence in the U.S., his interest in cities and communities became closely linked with his passion for the study of both social movements and collective violence.[12]

State formation

Tilly's 1975 edited volume The Formation of National States in Western Europe was influential in the state formation literature.[13] In the volume and in subsequent works, including the 1990 book Coercion, Capital, and European States, Tilly advances a theory of state formation whereby warfare and competition prompted state formation.[14] [15][16] Tilly famously remarked, "War made the state, and the state made war." Per Tilly, the state developed largely as a result of "state-makers" who sought to extract resources from the people under their control so they could continue fighting wars. Rulers who were better able to extract the means of warfare were more likely to survive and conquer the territory of other rulers whereas rulers who were unable to effectively extract resources were more likely to see their political units decline.[17] Thus, the modern state emerged as the dominant organizational form through natural selection and competition.[18] Tilly's theory of state formation is considered dominant in the state formation literature.[18][19][20] Tilly's work on state formation was influenced by Otto Hintze, as well as Tilly's long-time friend Stein Rokkan.[13]

Other scholars have disputed this theory,[21] and argued that his argument does not extend to Africa[22][23] or East Asia.[24] He has also been criticized for not specifying what he considers to be a state.[25]

Honours

Tilly received several awards including the Common Wealth Award in sociology in 1982, the Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences in 1994, the Eastern Sociological Society's Merit Award for Distinguished Scholarship in 1996, the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2005, the International Political Science Association's Karl Deutsch Award in Comparative Politics in 2006, the Phi Beta Kappa Sidney Hook Memorial Award in 2006 and the Social Science Research Council's Albert O. Hirschman Award in 2008. He also received honorary doctorates from Erasmus University of Rotterdam in 1983, the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of University of Paris in 1993, the University of Toronto in 1995, the University of Strasbourg in 1996, the University of Geneva in 1999, the University of Crete in 2002, the University of Quebec at Montreal in 2004 and the University of Michigan in 2007.[9] In 2001, Columbia's sociology graduate students named Tilly the Professor of the Year.

After his death, numerous special journal issues, conferences, awards and obituaries appeared in his honor.[26] After his passing, the Social Science Research Council hosted a 2008 conference, co-sponsored with Columbia University and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, in his honor: "A Celebration of the Life and Works of Charles Tilly"[27][28] At this conference the SSRC announced the Charles Tilly and Louise Tilly Fund for Social Science History.[29] The conference had presentations from notable sociologists including: Craig Calhoun, Harrison White, Doug McAdam, Immanuel Wallerstein, William Sewell, Jack Goldstone, Sidney Tarrow, Barry Wellman and Viviana Zelizer. A 2010 special issue of Social Science History was dedicated to (the work of) Charles Tilly,[30] as was a 2010 special issue of The American Sociologist.[31] The latter was edited by Andreas Koller, and included contributions by George Steinmetz, Neil Gross, Jack A. Goldstone, Kim Voss, Rogers Brubaker, Mustafa Emirbayer, and Viviana Zelizer. In 2010, the journal Theory and Society also published a special issue on "Cities, States, Trust, and Rule" dedicated to the work of Tilly.[32]

Death

Charles Tilly died in the Bronx on April 29, 2008, from lymphoma.[1] As he was fading in the hospital, he got one characteristic sentence out to early student Barry Wellman: "It's a complex situation."[10] In a statement after Tilly's death, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger stated that Tilly "literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of political history".[8] Adam Ashforth of The University of Michigan described Tilly as "the founding father of 21st-century sociology".[1]

See also

Partial bibliography
  • The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-revolution of 1793. (1964)
  • "Collective Violence in European Perspective." Pp. 4–45 in Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. A report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Volume 1. Eds. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr. (1969)
  • "Clio and Minerva." Pp. 433–66 in Theoretical Sociology, eds. John McKinney and Edward Tiryakian. (1970)
  • "Do Communities Act?" Sociological Inquiry 43: 209–40. (1973)
  • An Urban World. (ed.) (1974).
  • The Formation of National States in Western Europe (ed.) (1975)
  • From Mobilization to Revolution (1978)
  • As Sociology Meets History (1981)
  • Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (1984)
  • War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, et al., 169–87. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985, PDF Online
  • The Contentious French (1986)
  • Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (1990)
  • Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992)
  • 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)
  • The Politics of Collective Violence (2003)
  • 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)
  • Contentious Performances (2008)
  • Social Movements, 1768–2008, 2nd edition (with Lesley Wood, 2009)

References
  1. Martin, Douglas (May 2, 2008). "Charles Tilly, 78, Writer and a Social Scientist, Is Dead". New York Times. Retrieved March 3, 2013.
  2. "Paid Notice: Deaths – Tilly, Charles". query.nytimes.com. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  3. Walsh-Russo, Cecelia; Castañeda, Ernesto (September 25, 2018). "Charles Tilly". Oxford Bibliographies: 9780199756384–0156. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0156.
  4. Martin, Douglas. "Charles Tilly, 78, Writer and a Social Scientist, Is Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2016.
  5. "Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University - ILAS Tribute - Charles Tilly". Archived from the original on July 26, 2014. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  6. Derman, J. (2012). Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization. Cambridge University Press. p. 225. ISBN 9781139577076. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  7. as recounted in his Big Structures, Large Systems, Huge Comparisons
  8. Bollinger, Lee C. (April 29, 2008). "President Bollinger's Statement on the Passing of Professor Charles Tilly". Columbia University. Retrieved June 22, 2014.
  9. ISERP. "Charles Tilly Remembered". Archived from the original on October 5, 2008. (Archived 29 April 2008 press release from ISERP, Columbia University.)
  10. Barry Wellman (May 1, 2008). "Chuck Tilly, the urbanist". SOCNET Archives. Retrieved June 22, 2014.
  11. Tilly, Charles. 1969. "Collective Violence in European Perspective." Pp. 4–45 in Violence in America, edited by Hugh Graham and Tedd Gurr. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office
  12. Tilly, Charles. 1988. "Misreading, then Rereading, Nineteenth-Century Social Change." Pp. 332–58 in Social Structures: A Network Approach, edited by Barry Wellman and SD Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  13. Ertman, Thomas (2017), Strandsbjerg, Jeppe; Kaspersen, Lars Bo (eds.), "Otto Hintze, Stein Rokkan and Charles Tilly's Theory of European State-building", Does War Make States?: Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–70, ISBN 978-1-107-14150-6
  14. Kaspersen, Lars Bo; Strandsbjerg, Jeppe, eds. (2017). Does War Make States?: Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316493694. ISBN 978-1-107-14150-6.
  15. Tilly, Charles (1990). Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-55786-368-3.
  16. Spruyt, Hendrik (1994). The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton University Press. pp. 30–33. ISBN 9780691029108.
  17. Schenoni, Luis L. (2021). "Bringing War Back in: Victory and State Formation in Latin America". American Journal of Political Science. 65 (2): 405–421. doi:10.1111/ajps.12552. ISSN 1540-5907.
  18. Gorski, Philip; Sharma, Vivek Swaroop (2017), Strandsbjerg, Jeppe; Kaspersen, Lars Bo (eds.), "Beyond the Tilly Thesis: "Family Values" and State Formation in Latin Christendom", Does War Make States?: Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 98–124, ISBN 978-1-107-14150-6
  19. Ertman, Thomas (1997). Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-521-48427-5.
  20. Bagge, Sverre (2014). Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation. Princeton University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-4008-5010-5.
  21. Abramson, Scott F. (2017). "The Economic Origins of the Territorial State". International Organization. 71 (1): 97–130. doi:10.1017/S0020818316000308. ISSN 0020-8183.
  22. Herbst, Jeffrey (1990). "War and the State in Africa". International Security. 14 (4): 117–139. doi:10.2307/2538753. ISSN 0162-2889. JSTOR 2538753. S2CID 153804691.
  23. Herbst, Jeffry (2000). States and Power in Africa. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01027-7.
  24. Huang, Chin-Hao; Kang, David (2021). "State Formation in Korea and Japan, 400-800 CE: Emulation and Learning, not Bellicist Competition". International Organization: 1–31. doi:10.1017/S0020818321000254. S2CID 236554884. SSRN 3776268.
  25. Bagge, Sverre (2019). State Formation in Europe, 843–1789: A Divided World. Routledge. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-429-58953-9. Tilly never specifies exactly what he regards as a state or how he arrives at the numbers respectively of 1,000 and 500, but he clearly regards the various fiefs in which large parts of continental Europe were divided as states.
  26. "Tributes to Charles Tilly -- Memorials to Credit & Blame » Annotated Links to Charles Tilly Resources". essays.ssrc.org. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  27. "SSRC » Albert O. Hirschman Prize » Award Ceremonies". ssrc.org. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  28. "Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly". h-net.org. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  29. "Tilly Fund for Social Science History — Fellowships & Grants — Social Science Research Council". ssrc.org. Archived from the original on July 25, 2014. Retrieved June 23, 2015.
  30. Social Science History Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2010 http://ssh.dukejournals.org/content/34/3.toc
  31. "Remembering Charles Tilly". The American Sociologist. Springer. 41 (4). December 2010. JSTOR i40044197.
  32. "Theory and Society, Volume 39, Issue 3 - Springer". link.springer.com. Retrieved June 23, 2015.

Further reading
  • Gentile, Antonina, and Sidney Tarrow. "Charles Tilly, globalization, and labor's citizen rights." European Political Science Review 1#3 (2009): 465–493.
  • Hunt, Lynn. "Charles Tilly's Collective Action." in Theda Skocpol and Daniel Chirot, eds. Vision and method in historical sociology (1984): 244+.
  • Kaspersen, Lars Bo and Jeppe Strandsbjerg (eds.). Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • Krinsky, John, and Ann Mische. "Formations and formalisms: Charles Tilly and the paradox of the actor." Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 1-26.
  • Tarrow, Sidney. "The people's two rhythms: Charles Tilly and the study of contentious politics. A review article." Comparative Studies in society and History 38#3 (1996): 586–600.
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