Here is an article on the relevance of the work of Charles Tilly for Mexico and the world in English and Spanish versions.Distinguished Social Scientist Charles Tilly Passes Away
By Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco
An expert on Latin America and on the world, Charles Tilly studied the past in order to give us tools and theories to understand the present and the future. 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. 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 20, 1929 in a small city in Illinois, into a working class family, son of an immigrant mother. With the help of various jobs, scholarships and government assistance, he studied in the Department of Social Relations (a mix of various branches of sociology and social psychology) at Harvard. There he received his undergraduate degree in 1950, and his masters and PhD 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 sociologists George C. Homans (1910-1989) and Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Sorokin, a Russian immigrant, who witnessed firsthand the revolution in 1917, 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. Tilly was also largely influenced by Barrington Moore (1913-2005), a political sociologist and master of the historical-comparative method from the same generation. Charles Tilly was one of the key figures in the establishment and institutionalization of the subfields of historical sociology, collective action, social movements, and contentious politics within contemporary social science.
Tilly was professor in the universities of Delaware, Princeton, Harvard, Toronto, Michigan, the New School for Social Research and Columbia, the two last ones in New York City. 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 Hirschman Prize in 2008 from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. He was a member of the most prestigious scientific societies in the United States and Europe. Tilly read English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and some Chinese.
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 “state-making” (or the theory of the birth of the modern state), showing how the 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 nation-states, 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 wrote on 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 establishing top-down reforms would rarely mean a bottom up reconfiguration. Local knowledge, customs and traditions have to be taken into account to govern (for more on this look at James C. Scott. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press).
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 Diego Gambetta. 1996. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Harvard University Press). 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 Hinojosa would create.
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. 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.
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 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, Charles and C. Harold Brown. 1967. "On Uprooting, Kinship and the Auspices of Migration." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 8:139-164). For Tilly, remittances are a way to fulfill family obligations, tangible proof of the importance of social relations despite distance (see Viviana A. Zelizer and Charles Tilly. 2007. "Relations and Categories" The Psychology of Learning and Motivation:47 pp. 225-255).
With his book Categorical Inequality (1998), Tilly demonstrated how inequality and exploitation reproduce themselves through the institutionalization of group 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.
Despite his fame and intelligence, Charles Tilly, or Chuck as he liked everyone to call him, 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 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. 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. 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 is a doctoral student in sociology at Columbia University. He was a student and teaching assistant of Professor Tilly.
Versions of this article will appear in Spanish in the magazine Cátedra, published by the University of Colima, Mexico 2008. And in English in the newsletter of the Institute of Latin American Studies. School of International Affairs. Columbia University.
A conference in Honor of Professor Tilly was held at Columbia on October 3rd – 5th. For more information visit: http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/event/2008
As many have attested, Chuck Tilly was an extraordinary scholar and an exemplary human being. Let me briefly discuss his working style and pedagogy. Chuck was an extremely prolific writer; 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). It has been 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 single, independent pieces. I remember Chuck being disappointed when people equated him to any one of his books.
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 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 was a refutation of his dissertation.
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 way and pace in which he published, it seems to me that Chuck 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.
One 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. Besides reading many words per minute, he also was in favor of skimming. As part of a required course on social science methodology 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 work or students make the content pertinent.
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 in 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 things such as going to the movies or to a classical music concert in order to do what he loved the most: read, write, mentor and be a professional academic participating in panels. Yet his frequent smile showed how 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 which he would socialize in departmental functions, maybe his main socializing event in the last years became the dinners he would have with students and colleagues on Monday evenings after his Columbia Contentious Politics workshop. In these weekly dinners he would display his mastery in story telling and where he would reveal details about his private life and biography.
Teaching
Sometimes some students 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 while using simple language, telling stories to explain long debates and 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, 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 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 who 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 of the likes of Foucault, whose lectures at the College de France would be recorded and later turned into books. Chuck Tilly preferred to interact with students and help them with their projects, and to then write the books himself, as books proper, and not as lecture notes.
Still 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. So 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 Chuck 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 an undergraduate course on Tilly with Tilly. This was the last undergraduate class he ever taught. It was the undergraduate course on “Revolutions, Social Movements, and Contentious Politics” following the publication of his “Contentious Politics” textbook co-authored 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 students of any age. A group of very brilliant Columbia undergraduates were able to reproduce and apply the CP 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 I witnessed his work while being his research and later 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 what I thought of incorporating Power Point into the course. I said I liked the idea and Chuck was fast in learning how to incorporate this technology into our lectures. But why did such a famous Professor have to bother to pick up a new technology in what would become his last undergraduate course? 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. 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 when necessary. This was not a sign of lack of energy or lucidity but another example of his democratic and egalitarian demeanor.
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 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 and always take time.
Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco
Columbia University
Thanks to Craig Calhoun for inviting me to write this text and to Andreas Koller for putting up the SSRC tributes and resources page: http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/
