THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
The Contentious
Performances of Charles
Tillyi
By Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco
Charles Tilly studied the past in order to give us tools to understand the present
and the future. Charles Tilly was one of the key figures in the establishment and
institutionalization of the subfields of historical sociology, social science history,
social movements, and contentious politics within contemporary social science.
After a long and prolific career marked by the writing of more than fifty books
and around seven hundred academic articles, Charles Tilly died from lymphoma
on April 29, 2008 in a hospice in the Bronx. Tilly was brave in his long battle
against different types of cancer: despite submitting himself to intense
chemotherapy treatments, including experimental treatments, he persevered,
smiling, teaching and writing until weeks before his death. During his long and
productive life, he was always a source of human and intellectual light, an
example to follow, an exceptional man from whose life and work we have much
to learn.
Charles Tilly was born on May 27, 1929 in Lombard, Illinois (a Chicago suburb), to
an immigrant mother from Wales and into a working class family. With the help of
various jobs, scholarships and government assistance (like the G.I. Bill for which he
qualified after serving for the U.S. Navy during the Korean War) he paid for his
studies which included stints at Oxford and the Catholic University of Angers,
France. But he mainly studied in the Department of Social Relations (a mix of
various branches of sociology and psychology) at Harvard, where he received his
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
undergraduate degree in 1950, his masters, and Ph.D. in 1958. In a department and
field dominated at the time by sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), he preferred
to study with the also distinguished George C. Homans and Barrington Moore, his
dissertation co-directors. George Homans (1910-1989) was a social psychologist and
behavioral sociologist, who also taught medieval history at Harvard, and is known for
books such as The Human Group (1950). Barrington Moore Jr. (1913-2005) was a
political sociologist and an early master of comparative-historical analysis, known for
his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of
the Modern World (1966).
Coming from a working class background, Tilly often stood in awe and
incomprehension at Homans’ and Moore’s privileged backgrounds and quasiaristocratic lifestyles (see Tilly’s Barrington Moore Jr. 2006). Tilly probably identified
more with Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian émigré, who witnessed
firsthand the revolution of 1917. Sorokin also had a great influence on Tilly,
encouraging him in his interest in combining sociology and history into the
systematic study of revolutions and social change. Chuck, as he liked everyone to call
him, would refer to Sorokin in class and in his latest book Contentious Performances
(2008:19) as “his great teacher.”
Unfortunately, neither Homans nor Moore, nor Sorokin, helped young Tilly secure
a job after getting his Ph.D. Roy Licklider writes in his SSRC tribute that “part of
the explanation for Chuck’s extraordinary commitment to students could be traced
to this traumatic experience.”ii Tilly was a professor at the University of Delaware for
many years. He then managed a grant at Princeton thanks to his colleague and
schoolmate Harry Eckstein. From then he went on to Harvard (where it is said he
was denied tenure). After this, he gained tenure at the University of Toronto, and
then moved to the University of Michigan, the New School for Social Research and
after divorcing Louise Tilly he moved to Columbia University in the City of New
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
York where he taught for his last twelve years as the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor
of Social Science. He was also a visiting professor in France at the Sorbonne, the
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales) and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (the Institut d'Etudes
Politiques de Paris), as well as in Norway and the Netherlands. He received various
honorary doctorate degrees and distinguished academic awards. Within the last few
years, some standouts include the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from
the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005 and the Hirschman Prize from
the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 2008. He was a member of the most
prestigious scientific societies in the United States and Europe. Tilly read English,
French, Spanish, Italian, German, and some Russian and Chinese. He was also fond
of writing poetry early in the morning although he never chose to publish it.
Contributions and Implications
Charles Tilly, sociologist, incorporated history and politics into his work, and had
a large influence in currents inside contemporary history and political science.
Tilly began his career writing a thesis on the counterrevolution in France. He was
an impromptu historian, a coincidence that brought him to create catalogs of
contentious events in order to carry out quantitative analytic studies with strong
historical and contextual information, information which lends itself to the
comparison, across time and space, between phenomena such as revolutions,
social movements, strikes, protests, revolts or civil wars (see his Contentious
Performances 2008). After many years of maturation, Tilly and his research
colleagues created what the research field called Contentious Politics, a new
school that has influenced sociology, history, and political science. Many
interesting works have recently emanated from this school of thought.
Before working in Contentious Politics together with his colleagues Sidney
Tarrow, Doug McAdam, and many others, Tilly contributed the concept of “statemaking” (or the theory of the birth of the modern state), showing how the
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
historical formation of nation-states in western Europe was strongly linked to war
and the accumulation of capital to finance them. European monarchies fought
among each other for control of their colonies and global trade routes. The
urgency to finance these wars created in the governments of France and England
the need to develop systems to unify militias, govern territories, generate wealth,
collect taxes and administrate their estates. From the tools that these governments
used, today we have censuses, passports, customs, and accounting systems. These
processes resulted in the creation (to a certain point accidental) of strong nationstates, with independent economies, and true governance over a certain territory.
The theory of state formation reminds us that nation-states did not arise as a
product of a linear evolution but from a particular historical and international
context. Looking at the present, Charles Tilly talked about the illusory nature of
expecting the same types of state-society relations in countries more recently
formed who copied the western European model and expected to recreate
institutions top-down from one day to another by decree. Imitating laws and
promoting top-down reforms rarely translates into a bottom up reconfiguration.
Local knowledge, customs and traditions have to be taken into account to govern
(for more on this see Scott 1998).
Tilly reminds us that democracy represents one of many possible political
regimes, reflecting a system of social, political and economic relationships and
above all, a certain institutionalization of trust networks (see Tilly Trust and Rule
2005). In contrast with the literature which perceives democracy as goal unto
itself with a social, linear evolution, in his book Democracy (2007), Tilly shows
how democracy is a reversible process and introduces a new concept into the
literature: de-democratization. Explaining how even mature liberal democracies
can experience drawbacks and closing in civil rights, civil liberties, or in the
treatment of immigrants.
With his book Categorical Inequality (1998), Tilly demonstrated how inequality
and exploitation reproduce themselves through the institutionalization of group
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
behaviors and above all through assigning of professions to certain social
categories; for example in post-colonial societies like Mexico: natives working in
the fields, mestizos in the service sector, and whites working as managers; or in
advanced economies like the US: women in sales, men in production, immigrants
as janitors and local male citizens as bankers. The inequality between groups
reproduces itself for generations once these roles and different levels of life
become invisible and seem natural, spontaneous, or merited.
Given the history of state formation in Western Europe, Tilly compares state
formation with the criminal activity of the mafia who engage in protection rackets
through which they are paid to offer protection from a threat of violence that they
themselves create (see Gambetta 1996). Tilly shows how, historically, the art of
governing consists of large scale coordination among local leaders, militias,
powerful economic classes, and even organized crime. Using this insight one
would have been able to predict the terrible consequences (i.e. the steep increase
in violence and destabilization) that an open war on drugs by the Mexican
military commanded by President Felipe Calderon would create.
Just four days after September 11, 2001, in a reflection that could only be Tilly’s;
he predicted the political errors and terrible consequences to come of the
international politics of George W. Bush. Tilly intuited how the events of those
days had been derived from a decentralized network, with members who did not
know each other personally but who shared a political ideology and were trying to
make a political statement through non-conventional violent means. Tilly knew
immediately that a discursive barrier would be constructed between the two large
groups, the self-nominated “us” versus “them.” A resulting armed attack against a
certain region blamed for the attacks would change the power relations within
these given groups, amplifying the discontent amongst “them.” This would then
intensify their attacks, therefore aggravating the situation, leading to an escalation
and thus further justifying the confrontation between these two groups. This
division would call for the creation of new international alliances, which would
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
obligate the excluded ones to unite within themselves, and paradoxically make
room for the creation of new routes and opportunities for drug trafficking and
international organized crime. The result of a war declared against an enemy who
is invisible, and at the same time categorical, would end up giving more power
and outside support to dissident groups inside countries such as Algeria, Turkey,
Nigeria, Sudan and Russia. As a result, the level of democracy would fall, as
much as in these countries as in the West, product of a major militarization of the
forces of security and the reduction in civil liberties and human rights for both
citizens and foreigners. Regrettably, such predictions have become part of our
current reality.
In his last books, Charles Tilly illuminated for us some of our contemporary daily
behaviors. For example, why we see the need to give reasons and tell stories in
our social life (Why 2006); why we assign blame and give credit to people around
us (Credit and Blame 2008), and how researchers can reconcile the study of
culture and the post-modern challenge with a research agenda that generates high
quality and useful scientific social knowledge (The Oxford Handbook of
Contextual Analysis 2008).
Professor Tilly was also a scholar of migration: he was one of the first social
scientists to write on the important role that social networks play in chain
migration, which resulted in the accumulation, within the same locality, of
migrants in a distant labor market (Tilly & Brown 1967). For Tilly, remittances
are a way to fulfill family obligations, tangible proof of the importance of social
relations despite distance (see Zelizer & Tilly 2007).
Tilly the Original Scholar
While Tilly was extremely well read and had contact with the best scholars in the
world, he was a sort of an autodidact. Without been trained in historical archival
research he went into the archives of a French province to gather data for his
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
dissertation and what later turned into his first and groundbreaking book The Vendee
(1954). It is said that he arrived at the archives in Angers and when pressed,
demanded in French, “Montrez-moi un document (show me a document)!”iii After this
naïve beginning he was able to make history and sociology meet in The Vendee and
into social science history. In the same way, he would later develop very original
methods, models, and theories to answer what he saw as important questions. This
led him to make original contributions to urban sociology, demography,
immigration, politics, inequality, and culture.
The fact that his influence in these subfields was not as large as he would have wished
for is partly due to the fact that he would rarely start a book by citing the authorities
in the field at a given time or addressing the current controversies in that field but
would aim to get at the bottom of the issue. Tilly would often publish past current
discussions and in return the subfield would often ignore his contribution. He did
not want to become the new dogma but to at least be proven wrong. For example,
Tilly was somewhat disillusioned about the little attention that Durable Inequality
(1998) garnered in the subfield of social stratification and inequality at the time it
appeared.
His book Democracy (2007) contributes much to understanding what democracy
means for citizens and states without regurgitating centuries of author’s views on the
subject, which he clearly knew but thought were secondary to a more analytical view
on democracy. Tilly’s knowledge was encyclopedic and his technical knowledge and
statistical sophistication was quite high, but as an author he would try to avoid purely
scholastic or technical explanations over what he called “superior stories”
accompanied by contextualized stories, charts and diagrams (see Stories, Identities and
Political Change 2002, Why 2006). As Craig Calhouniv writes, like Hirschman, Tilly:
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
wrote clear books that made complicated and nuanced analyses seem almost
obvious—but only after their lucid formulations. Both men combined a
passion for social science with a determination not to let this be owned by
narrow disciplinary agendas or internal academic debates that lost purchase
on the big issues in the larger world.
Charles Tilly’s contributions to historical sociology, state-formation, and contentious
politics were the most productive in great part because these fields formed around his
work. In terms of methodology he followed Moore and others in pushing for the
historical comparative method across a limited number of cases, and the use of event
catalogues is amongst his most successful contributions, although it is used by relative
few (Beissinger, Franzosi, Tarrow, Wada among others) but its potential is quite
large (see Contentious Performances 2008). In terms of theory his call to look at
mechanisms, boundaries, and relations is the most promising and will continue to be
fruitful in the coming years.
Productivity
Tilly was an extremely prolific writer publishing more than 51 single and coauthored books and well over 600 articles. As colleagues often mentioned, he wrote
faster than we could read (and as I will explain, he also read many times faster than
we do). Thus it was hard to keep up with his writings and easy to misrepresent his
work given the size of his oeuvre, which I would claim one needs to consider as a
whole and not as independent pieces. I remember Chuck being disappointed when
people equated him to any one of his books. He also used to complain that more
people cited From Mobilization to Revolution (1978) than actually read it.
In his last years, instead of waiting until a text reached “perfection”, that unattainable
goal, or thinking that he had the ultimate word on a subject, Chuck was willing to
publish fast in order to be proven wrong (or only partially right), and thus rendered
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
perfectible. Indeed, why wait for someone else to fix his models? He often came back
and improved his previous ideas. This is exemplified by the story he loved to tell
about how his first book The Vendee (1964) was a refutation of his dissertation. One
could argue that despite his sociability, Tilly was often in discussion mainly with
himself. His work was a cumulative oeuvre where he tried to improve his previous
statements a common example is his change from a structural view to “relational
realism” (see McAdam et al. 2001).
How can we explain his fecundity? Besides the long hours, his efficiency, his lucid
mind, his love of writing, and the shadow of death, the reason for his productivity
was the way he saw scientific endeavor. By the manner and pace in which he
published, it appears that Tilly intuited that by its very nature all scientific
knowledge is temporary, and by this I do not mean that he was a postmodern writer
or that the quality of his work is mediocre. To the contrary, he took his academic
profession so seriously that he was never content with publishing and moving onto
another issue. He saw the building of knowledge as a cumulative and collective
process. Thus he constantly revisited, corrected, expanded and clarified his own work
and that of his colleagues and students. He saw some of his short articles as teasers,
sources of inspiration and ideas for others to follow up and develop in more detail.
How did he have the time to read and write so much while giving ample time to
students and colleagues? A small seminar was organized by the History Department
at Columbia on early 2007 precisely to ask him about how he worked. Chuck said
that the only way he could be so productive was by putting in the hours, working
literally from dawn until dusk, including the weekends. Chuck mentioned how the
legacy of his work meant that he went the last number of years without seeing a play,
going to the movies, or spending daily time with his family. Because of the
immediacy of cancer, his great knowledge and his ambition, in the last years Chuck
became a master of delayed gratification. He forwent some things in order to do
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
what he loved the most: read, write, mentor and be a professional academic
participating in panels. Yet his frequent smile proved how much he enjoyed his
academic life and the small pleasures of life. He was known for working with classical
music or jazz blasting from his office stereo. His social group was constituted by his
academic extended family with whom he would socialize at lunches, and in
departmental functions. His main socializing event in the last years was the dinners
he would have with students and colleagues on Monday evenings after his
Contentious Politics workshop at Columbia University. In these weekly dinners he
would display his mastery in story telling and that was one of the few places where he
would reveal details about his private life and biography.
Other reason he read so much, produced such great bibliographical compendiums,
and gave comments back to students normally within 24 to 48 hours, was because he
was a real “speed reader.” There are speed reading courses and methods, but
academics tend to dismiss them in order to savor every word; Tilly could do both.
Besides reading many words per minute, he also was in favor of selective reading. As
part of a required course on social science methods that many of us took at Columbia
University, Chuck started with a statement on how to read a book: Start by scanning
it. Look at the table of contents. Read the introduction and the conclusion. Read the
passages of interest. That should suffice, move onto the next book, and come back to
it when writing, teaching, or student projects make the content pertinent.
The Pedagogic Performances of Charles Tilly
So far I have briefly discussed Chuck as a student, an author, and as his own scholar.
Let me now turn to his role as a teacher and then as a mentor. Tilly is also known for
his theorizing on “contentious performances” events that use a set of known and
available repertoires in contentious politics at a given time and place: petitions,
marches, strikes, pamphlets, etc. While teaching (which we can describe as a public
performance) Chuck had the same repertoire as all of us: the lecture, the scholar
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
seminar for theoretical discussions, the assignment of readings, the student
presentation, the student project, handouts, the workshop, etc. Tilly had a special
preference for short lectures, student presentations, and treating graduate seminars as
academic writing workshop for work in progress; maybe his greatest contribution for
the professionalization of students and colleague were the seminars that he would
organize in his house with Louise at Michigan, at the New School, or the Workshop
on Contentious Politics at Columbia, as well as the accompanying list serve
([email protected]) continues to help a community of scholars gather
bibliography and research recommendations.
Nonetheless, some new students not part of this larger community would complain
that his graduate seminars were not very “rigorous”, “hard”, or “useful.” This
misunderstanding came about because, to our chagrin, Chuck was very reluctant to
lecture graduate students, post-docs, or visiting scholars for more than 20 to 30
minutes at a time. In a required seminar on Research Methods at Columbia, he
would talk for 20 minutes with expertise and authority but using simple language
and telling stories to explain long debates on important issues, rather than citing
every other scholar having worked on the subject or using obscure references. Then
the course would turn to the students alone or working in groups, who, given each
one’s ability, would then deliver the bulk of the lecture and book discussion, learning
by doing to become scholars.
His optional graduate courses at Columbia (of which I took two) were always in the
form of writing workshops. Students would present their work, and others would
criticize it, following the model of his contentious politics seminar, thus functioning
as a professional workshop for work in progress with short presentations throughout
the semester by the budding scholars. As expected, the papers would start off at a
level that needed improvement but Chuck would never judge someone’s potential by
the contents of a first draft. And after some years, many of these papers turned out to
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
be important pieces for the students who incorporated the comments from Chuck
and the seminar participants in subsequent versions.
Even while there would be distinguished, retired lawyers, doctors, publishers, fans,
translators, and visiting scholars from across the world that would audit and attend
his seminars and classes, he was too democratic and self-critical to jump into the
bully pulpit and deliver “the sacred word” in the French academic style. Tilly
preferred to interact with students and help them with their projects, and to then
write books for others to read. He often said that while some scholars thought in
terms of articles, he organized his thinking and notes in terms of books. People
would have preferred that Tilly engaged more in the lecture mode given his fame and
his encyclopedic knowledge. Nonetheless, because of his democratic demeanor and
always treating his work as work in progress, he saw teaching as an opportunity to
work and test his ideas. So while he would not lecture for the total of his time he
would be happy to assign his own books and those of close collaborators, looking
forward for clarifications, challenges and important criticisms.
Sometimes there was anguish and disappointment for those looking for a guru or a
more authoritarian patron saint, or even a colleague to hate. In many ways his large
and revolutionary oeuvre did not match his simple and humble ways, which
consciously betrayed his working class upbringing and his democratic and
cosmopolitan convictions. While he set many research agendas and collaborative
networks, he would never start a graduate seminar by discussing his work directly,
and he would avoid it when possible. In the syllabus to his Fall 2006 Research
Seminar on Political Identities he wrote,
Aimed chiefly at dissertation writers and graduate students who are already starting
research topics related to political identities, the seminar twins with a workshop on
contentious politics that discusses research in progress by graduate students and
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
faculty members from Columbia and elsewhere. Seminar members have no
obligation to participate in the workshop, but they are likely to find it valuable as a
place to meet other researchers and as a model for presentation of ideas and findings.
The seminar is emphatically not an introduction to Charles Tilly’s work on political
identities. To keep things honest, nevertheless, Tilly will take the first two sessions to
lay out theoretical and empirical contexts while students plan their own presentations
to the seminar. As background for those sessions, students will start off their course
work by reading Charles Tilly, Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (Boulder:
Paradigm Press, 2005), a collection of essays. They will also have at their disposal an
ample bibliography called “Selected Readings on Identities, Especially Political
Identities” (emphasis in the original).
While he mentored and convinced many of us of the importance of contentious
politics, and the relational approach, he did not give us strict instructions on what or
how to write. Chuck refused to be studied as a seminal author in life. Some
colleagues and I would often implore him to give a course on Tilly, the author. He
would categorically refuse by saying “I will never teach a course on Tilly” referring to
such a graduate course, although he later knew that Mauricio Font was offering such
a course at CUNY’s Graduate Center in 2007.
Fortunately, I had the great chance to co-teach a course on Tilly with Tilly at
Columbia College on Spring 2007. This was the last undergraduate class he ever
taught. It was a course on “Revolutions, Social Movements, and Contentious
Politics” following the publication of his Contentious Politics (2007) textbook coauthored with Sidney Tarrow. This textbook culminated a long search of many years
to produce a method and a research agenda that could be taught, understood, and
applied for the good use and enjoyment of scholars and students of any age. A group
of very brilliant Columbia and Barnard undergraduates were able to reproduce and
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
apply the Contentious Politics method to very interesting projects in one semester’s
time. Students looked at contentious issues in cases going across space and time from
Oaxaca to Sri Lanka, from England to Israel and covering vast periods such as
Imperial Japan or current protest events amongst peasants in China.
As his research assistant (working on a paper for him on categorical inequality in
Mexico) and later as his teaching assistant, I noted how he was always open to learn
not only about new topics and countries but also about new techniques. Before we
started this course, he asked me if I thought it would be a good idea to use
PowerPoint to show his famous diagrams in the screen and then put them on the
web for the students instead of using a projector and printing handouts. I told him I
liked the idea. And we did it. But why did such a famous Professor have to bother to
pick up a new technology in what would become his last undergraduate course? He
was a great lecturer who had never had the need to use PowerPoint but he had the
humility to ask me to help transform his complex diagrams from Microsoft Word to
PowerPoint. The reason was that he was always eager to learn more and humble
enough to let others teach him while doing. He would review the slides I wrote about
his work and provide helpful comments, replying to my e-mails almost immediately.
Some months into the course Chuck got very sick from an experimental cancer
treatment and had to be hospitalized. Still some days later we would get in touch
with me to inform me about his state and he trusted me to teach the course while he
was recovering. Still he would call and check on the course and the students. Illness
made him miss a number of lectures but he would often call me from the hospital to
check on the class, and update me on his medical condition. A number of times,
even when he was present in the class, he would let me lecture on his work, clarifying
or expanding only when necessary. This was not a sign of lack of energy or lucidity
but another example of his democratic and egalitarian demeanor. This is a testimony
to his real love and dedication to teaching. After coming back he graded half the
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
papers and had me grade the other half. In some classes I would teach half and half,
another example of his democratic and egalitarian practice despite his fame and
experience.
Tilly cared deeply about teaching. In his undergraduate course he was in continuous
self-evaluation. After each of his lectures he would ask me questions to see if he had
been able to get his point across, not for false modesty but for real reflexivity and a
continuous wish to improve. The fact that I taught with Tilly’s direction, even if
sometimes from a cell phone in the hospital, was a great gift. It was by teaching Tilly
with Tilly, and it was through working on the class slides that I was finally able to
fully understand the spirit, implications, and applications of his work.
Tilly the Writer
I am still shocked by how he was submitted to the same constructive but critical
treatment in the Workshop of Contentious Politics at Columbia as other presenters
were. Along with Nicholas Toloudis, I had the chance to be his critic the last time
Chuck presented a paper at the workshop on February 12, 2007 (after a cancelation
by Christian Münch, who was in a car accident in Germany and thus could not
attend). There Toloudis and I used the opportunity to critique the chapters he had
circulated, asking him for more clarification and to make the project more selfcontained instead of his implied references to all of his other work. By the way we
made our questions we reminded him that readers of his books may not have the
chance, time or patience to read his other works, so that if he wanted to win new
converts he had to be more straight-forward at risk of repeating himself. We thus
criticized him not as people who appreciated his intellectual enterprise but from the
eyes of those who easily criticize Tilly without having read much of him, specially his
later works. The workshop continued on, but he was somewhat taken aback from
the comments. He saw our many misunderstandings as his failure to make himself
clear.
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Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
At dinner afterwards, he told us how people always misconstrued him and how his
works were often misread. Being very sick he mentioned how he may not finish this
book - something that surprised us very much since Chuck was the eternal optimist.
Fortunately, as he had planned originally the chapters we critiqued in that workshop
session ended up being the opening chapters of his last book Contentious
Performances (2008) finished by Tilly and published posthumously, proofread by
Chris Tilly, and proofread and copyedited by Sidney Tarrow. After reading these
chapters, I was impressed by how much he had improved his already great chapters
with the comments given by those present at the workshop and elsewhere. Tarrow
responded this way after I told him this story: “that was Chuck!” This example
epitomizes the academic endeavor in which all of us, even a genius like Tilly, engage
in a process of writing, rewriting, and correction by our colleagues, students, and
teachers - a great example of collective cognition.
It is interesting to note that the encyclopedic knowledge, age, and fame of the late
Chuck Tilly made him, in general, more attractive to international students than to
American ones. Tilly was a real cosmopolitan and was extremely patient with people
who have foreign accents, like me. While he was an expert on France, England, and
the U.S., he knew much about the rest of the world. I remember the many
conversations we had about Mexico, France, Algeria, and on remittances, current
contentious politics, and social theory in general, and the many people he
recommended to me who were working on Mexico or in Mexico. His network was
really international and so is his influence.
Tilly the Mentor
Besides his great guest lectures, maybe where Chuck Tilly would shine the most was
during his office hours. Who knows how many papers and books came out much
better because of the precious minutes he dedicated to scholars coming from all over
the world. Chuck was a great mentor and he gave golden advice. But this did not
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
mean that he would give you unlimited time. On the contrary, the crowd waiting
outside to see him made clear how limited and precious his time was. Thus 15-20
minutes of advice would provide a lot of clarification, guidance, suggestions, and
challenges. People may say that it was “easy” to work with Charles Tilly since he
could rarely say no when asked to read a manuscript or be in a dissertation
committee. But this did not mean that it was easy to keep up with his suggestions
and high expectations.
Chuck was the ideal image of an advisor, always ready to give incisive criticism and
guidance while being supportive and helpful. Illuminating without lecturing, while
keeping his scholarly depth and wisdom to provide a philosophical humanist twist,
he was also always ready to bring back the issue to specific questions that could be
looked at historically and answered empirically.
Once I asked him how he had the patience to listen to graduate students’ small and
bizarre questions. And he answered, “For those in academia this is our trade. When I
decided to become a professor I knew that teaching and mentoring would be a part
of the job. And I have to say that I rather enjoy doing that.” Chuck was indeed a
generous and giving man, and also someone worried about his legacy and
contributions to future generations.
In a poem to celebrate his father’s 70th
anniversary, Chris Tilly remembers Chuck saying “You teach doctoral students if you
want to reproduce yourself.” Complete reproduction of such a genius and great man
in one other individual is impossible but through this network of students and
colleagues his memory life and work live on.
Thanks to his students from whom he was willing and ready to learn, he knew much
more than he could have researched on his own. Tilly was not shy to cite his
published students, colleagues and collaborators in his work and used many examples
and secondary evidence to make incisive and important points of his own, building
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
on the collective work of others. But it seems that the epistemic community that he
worked so hard to construct during his lifetime, and that is still with us today, had
the negative effect of creating a boundary where those not initially interested in
Tilly’s work, or lucky enough to know him, may have a hard time getting to know
his work.
I am a student of migration inclined towards ethnography, participant observation
and in-depth interviews. When I would mention to some that I worked with Tilly,
some would be surprised and ask me how come if Tilly did not study migration nor
was he an ethnographer. But indeed, he was conducting a major work comparing
French immigrants from Lyon controlling the silk industry in Paterson New Jersey in
the nineteenth century, and Italian immigrants from Frosinone to Mamaroneck,
New York and other world cities in the twentieth century (Explaining Social Processes
2008:127). Unfortunately his colleagues did not follow through and he was not able
to publish the final results of that large study. Nonetheless, Tilly was a student of
migration and published on the topic throughout his career and as late as 2007. And
while he was not directly an ethnographer, or a published expert on Latin America or
the North African countries that I was studying, I would claim that thanks to his
many ethnographer colleagues and students he had a great sense of what good
ethnographic writing was about and how to get about it. Many ethnographers that
worked with him can attest to this. In my case, working on contemporary Mexican
immigration in NYC, I had a great resource in Charles Tilly because we had both
worked with Robert Smith and read many drafts of his book before the award
winning Mexican New York came out in 2006. Tilly came to know this book very
well as well as the current literature on remittances pushing me hard to make original
contributions in my master thesis.
While he gave great comments, he also valued student’s creativity and independence.
His experiences learning about historical France directly from the archives, with no
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
direction, influenced how, he also expected his students to learn the most by doing,
by trial and error, by going out into the field, the archives or the materials and
coming back with the most unexpected and original ideas and data.
I remember approaching him in the hallway and saying “what do you think about
me making a comparison between the emigration from Mexico and Algeria?” He
immediately answered skeptically “well, it depends on the quality and nature of the
comparison”. After talking much more about this in office hours, he supported my
proposal to go to France and North Africa for a year to do fieldwork. But he
correctly convinced me to add Spain, along with the U.S. and France to my
comparison of countries of immigration. Many told me I was covering too much
ground and that I could not gather all the needed data in one year. But Chuck
inspired me get done my multi-sited fieldwork.
The Relational Tilly
In contrast to his students at Michigan and the New School, his students at
Columbia knew only the relational Tilly who had fully incorporated the insights
from the work of Harrison White and convinced many of us that the better way to
study society is by looking at relations, transactions, and dynamic interactions. This
does not mean that Chuck left his comparative historical approach aside but it
represented a Tilly that had left behind abstract structuralism or mono-causal
theories (like the special role of war in state-formation) for which many still criticize
him, even when he later provided more nuanced and complex views. And that is not
to say that even better answers cannot be found.
Chuck Tilly aimed to publish books and articles that changed the way we see history
and do social science. He opposed methodological individualism and studies that
locate responsibility in individual isolated consciousness; along with Harrison White
and Pierre Bourdieu, he pushed for a relational understanding. In particular, Chuck
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
was interested in social interactions, including contentious ones, and the social
networks they formed. When providing new concepts and mechanisms, he always
kept the historical context in mind, going beyond parochialisms or universal laws. He
connected his love for history with that of social movements, which, under the
banner of Contentious Politics, compares the common mechanisms in civil wars,
riots, revolutions, international wars, terrorism, protests, and many other events.
Since the theoretical changes he proposed are so ambitious and revolutionizing,
publishing his new research manifesto in the form of a textbook will probably end up
to be effective, but this is yet to be seen since, as he taught us, adoption and diffusion
are contingent, context dependant, and always take time.
Credit Where Credit is Due
Chuck wrote in his “Memorials to Credit and Blame”, written for the American
Interest (2008) and now posted at the SSRC tribute page,v “We grow up demanding
credit, avoiding blame if possible, ourselves in turn blaming and giving credit in
myriad ways.” Chuck lived in a way that deserves a lot of credit because of his many
important contributions to social science, but also for always keeping a smile and his
willingness and determination to help others. Chuck was too wise to assign blame
easily. But he was fast to assign credit in his conversations. In his talks he would
often refer to his colleagues and students in the audience, not to shame or embarrass
them but to praise them and assign credit. Chuck also lived by the dictum, “Failure
to meet daily obligations receives blame, while unexpected generosity receives credit.”
He was quick to assign blame when someone was not doing their part but he was one
of the most generous academics I have ever met, always available to answer questions
and e-mails.
Despite his fame and intelligence, Charles “Chuck” Tilly was above all transparent,
accessible, without pretensions; he was a true cosmopolitan, democratic and
egalitarian in action. He was helpful and patient with his colleagues and students (me
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
among them). He spent a lot of time helping us develop our ideas, reading all types
of drafts and giving valuable suggestions to improve the scientific content of our
texts. He constructed a social network, a community of scholars, to which Chuck
dedicated years of work, love and dedication. Because of this, through his death, the
hundreds of students and colleagues whom he helped throughout the last five
decades remember his great human quality and intellectual generosity. The fact that
it intellectual community withstands his passing is a testimony to its strength and his
success. Tilly was a great guide and model who has shaped generations of scholars.
During his life Chuck was too humble to hear people praise him too much. It is not
until now that we can openly praise him and be surprised by how many people think
alike. And about how everyone who had the chance to really get to know him has an
overall positive opinion of his character and persona. But I think we are yet to fully
grasp the worth and importance of the overall work of Charles Tilly and its
implications for future social science. While we all miss his e-mails, his jokes, his
laugh, and his stories very much, his passing provided the necessary opportunity to
reflect on his life and work, which will allow sociologists to use his insights in their
own endeavors. In 1998 Chuck wrote; “In the end we are our stories, but there is
nothing simple about how those stories get written or how future generations
understand them.” Many stories remain. As many hundreds can attest, Charles
“Chuck” Tilly was an extraordinary scholar and an exemplary human being. His
books and lessons stay with us to guide us in the difficult task of understanding
society and the many relationships and mechanisms within it and that sometimes
hide in front of our eyes.
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
References
Gambetta, Diego. 1996. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Goodin, Robert E. and Charles Tilly. 2006. The Oxford handbook of contextual
political analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Homans, George Caspar. 1950. The human group. New York: Harcourt.
Martin, Douglas. 2008. "Charles Tilly, 78, Writer and a Social Scientist, Is Dead."
The New York Times. New York.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney G. Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of contention.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moore, Barrington. 1966. Social origins of dictatorship and democracy; lord and
peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Have, CT: Yale University Press
Social Science Research Council. 2008. Tributes to Charles Tilly.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/
Smith, Robert C. 2006. Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New
Immigrants. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1964. The Vendee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
—. 1965. Migration to an American city. Newark, NJ: Agricultural Experiment
Station, University of Delaware.
—. 1978. From mobilization to revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
—. 1981. As sociology meets history. New York: Academic Press.
—. 1984. Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.
—. 1990. “George Caspar Homans and the Rest of Us,” Theory and Society, Vol.
19:3.
—. 1992. Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990-1992. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
—. 1993. European revolutions, 1492-1992. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
—. 1995. Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
—. 1998. Durable inequality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
—. 2002. Stories, identities, and political change. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
—. 2003. Contention and democracy in Europe, 1650-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
—. 2003. The politics of collective violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
—. 2004. Social movements, 1768-2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
—. 2005. Identities, boundaries, and social ties. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
—. 2005. Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834. Boulder ,CO: Paradigm
Publishers.
—. 2005. Trust and rule. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2006. "Barrington Moore Jr." Canadian Journal of Sociology Online.
—. 2006. Regimes and repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 2006. Why? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
—. 2007. Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2007. "Trust Networks in Transnational Migration." Sociological Forum 22.
—. 2008. Contentious performances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2008. Credit and blame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
—. 2008. Explaining social processes. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Tilly, Charles and C. Harold Brown. 1967. "On Uprooting, Kinship and the
Auspices of Migration." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 8:139-164
Tilly, Charles, Gabriel Ardant, and Social Science Research Council. Committee on
Comparative Politics. 1975. The Formation of national States in Western Europe.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, The Contentious Performances of Charles Tilly
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
Tilly, Charles and Willem Pieter Blockmans. 1994. Cities and the rise of states in
Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Tilly, Charles, Louise Tilly, and Richard H. Tilly. 1975. The rebellious century, 18301930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tilly, Charles and Sidney Tarrow. 2007. Contentious politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers.
Zelizer, Viviana A. and Charles Tilly. 2007. "Relations and Categories." The
Psychology of Learning and Motivation 47. pp. 225-255.
i
A shorter version of this paper was presented at “Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference
in Honor of Charles Tilly.” Co-sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and Columbia
University. New York, October 3-5, 2008. http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/event/2008 Part of the
text has been adapted from an article that will appear in Spanish in the journal Cátedra published by
the University of Colima, Mexico 2008 and from a personal tribute to Charles Tilly that appeared in
the SSRC website http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/castaneda. I want to thank Craig Calhoun and
Andreas Koller for comments, support, and for organizing that conference and its webpage.
ii
Licklider, Roy. 2008. “Chuck’s Stories about Himself: Entering Academe.” Tributes to Charles
Tilly. http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/licklider
iii
Merriman, John. 2008. “I Went Up To Amiens Today.” Tributes to Charles Tilly.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/merriman
iv
Calhoun, Craig. 2008. “A Voice We Will Miss.” Tributes to Charles Tilly.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/calhoun
v
Tilly, Charles. 2008. “Memorials to Credit and Blame”,
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/creditblame
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