Social Theory: Charles Tilly

29th Jun 2022 by Ibrahim Halawi

By Ibrahim Halawi, Royal Holloway

When Charles Tilly passed away in 2008, Columbia University president, Lee C. Bollinger, said that Tilly “literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of political history”.[1] He developed relational and process-based methods of research, as well as concepts and theories serving the study of contentious politics, social movements,  history of labour, state formation, revolutions, democratization, identity, and inequality. Unsurprisingly then, he is considered by many the founder of historical sociology. Yet, very few scholars of the Middle East have taken inspiration from Tilly. So, this report will focus on Tilly’s input on the two most relevant issues to the Middle East, the state and revolution.

Intellectual Context

Firstly, one of his most popular contributions is on state formation, a term he later despised because of the teleological readings it invited. In crude and simple terms, Tilly (1975) argues that “war made the state and the state made war”. But, in application, Tilly is neither simplistic nor deterministic about state formation. The modern state was neither inevitable nor linear in its formation. He accounts for various contingencies behind the emergence of states, and, based on their fragile formation, they yielded various forms of contentions in the process of shuffling resource access. For instance, the process of border demarcation and social consolidation requires waging (internal and external) war. The necessity of waging war involves large-scale extraction and mobilisation of resources. Thus the nation-state provided a durable structural form for capital accumulation needed for war. In this sense, Tilly sees war-making and state-making as one.

Another illuminating contribution is Tilly’s work on revolutions, a phenomenon often seen as alien to politics, or, in more conservative circles, a negation of nation-state. Instead, Tilly brings revolution back to politics, tracing its manifestation to the contentious nature of politics, particularly in the setting of modern states. In From Mobilization to Revolution (1978), Tilly does not consider revolution as a separate political phenomenon, but instead as a manifestation of contentious power relations. It is but one extension of violent and non-violent politics of collective action – or  the ways in which people ‘act together in pursuit of shared interests’ (1978: 1-7). 

Studying collective action – such as revolution – is particularly delicate because ‘collective action is about power and politics; it inevitably raises questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, hope and hopelessness; the very setting of the problem is likely to include judgements about who has the right to act, and what good it does’ (1978: 1-8). This delicacy characterised in Tilly’s introduction to his work is reflected in the literature on revolutions where the ‘good’ revolutionaries are predetermined and the ‘bad’ state, or class, is also predetermined. With his typical sensibility, Tilly does not contradict this conviction either, when he clearly states that his own method of inquiry ‘is generally hostile to the collective action of governments and favorable to the collective action of ordinary people’ (1978: 1-11). Then, Tilly engages critically with this bias to unpack the restrictions that pre-determined moral standpoints create on studies of revolution. For instance, Tilly discusses how the concept of revolution is defined in several ways not only because the empirical is complex, but also because the definition itself lends itself to particular moral standpoints on what is good and bad (1978: 7-1). Power and politics are at the heart of revolution, and thus no definition of revolution can escape those limitations, knowing that for every definition, some choices must be made on what is and what isn’t a revolution: coups, terrorism, slow industrial change, change from above, etc. (ibid).

In order to clear a good deal of conceptual ground, Tilly draws a distinction between a ‘revolutionary situation’ – the presence of more than one political bloc effectively exercising control over a significant part of the state apparatus – and a ‘revolutionary outcome’ – the displacement of one alliance of power holders by another (1978: 7-3). For a political setting to become revolutionary, a single, sovereign polity becomes the object of competing mutually exclusive claims by multiple blocs. However, a revolutionary situation can occur without necessarily resulting with revolutionary outcomes. For instance, an existing coalition of that controls the government can beat down an alliance of challengers after a period of revolutionary situation: a period of effective, competing, and mutually exclusive claims on government. Also, it is ‘at least logically possible’ for a revolutionary outcome to occur without a revolutionary situation, through gradual addition or subtraction from the ruling alliance (1978: 7-8). 

Usually, at a given time, the revolutionary situation arrives at something between irrevocable split in a single polity and no multiple polity at all. Similarly, at a given time, the revolutionary outcome often sees something between the complete elimination of the ruling bloc and the maintenance or restoration of the status quo. Based on those variables, Tilly argues that ‘politics as usual’ is when the revolutionary situation sees no split and the revolutionary outcomes sees no elimination or addition of members of polity. In other words, within Tilly’s theorisation, revolution is the intensification of politics, which is contentious by nature. When power blocs have mutually exclusive claims on government, the political setting becomes revolutionary. Therefore, Tilly’s theorisation situates revolution in the context of power relations, and understands the phenomenon within the broader realm of politics. 

In Application

Before Tilly set out his theorisation of revolution which I discussed earlier, he embarked on an extensive study of counterrevolution in the Vendée, west of France, in opposition to the French Revolution. Instead of falling for the usual pre-determined good-or-bad separation between revolution and counterrevolution, his concern was to understand what led the groups involved to endorse a particular side of the conflict, focusing on inconsistencies, divisions, and contentions within the groups involved, and their diverse and changing motives and interests (Tilly 1964). 

In context, he shows that rural textile workers were hurt by the industrial crisis caused by the French Revolutionary economic reform laws that centralised power in the hands of merchants and landowners; and so joined the counterrevolutionary camp. The fact that this camp was primarily led by the clerical elite against the revolutionary state, Tilly argues, does not mean that the textile workers were supporting the old order of clerical rule. Such a reading of their mobilisation is rather shallow. Instead, their counterrevolutionary stance was chiefly motivated by their opposition to the revolutionary merchants (1964). This case illustrates how identifying a group’s ideology (or identity) does not provide a sufficient explanation of its politics. It is access to resources, he argues, that is pivotal in determining this (1973a: 28). ‘Resources’ refer not only to material capital, but also includes, among other things, arms, knowledge, communication tools and skills, social networks, loyalties, legislative rights, religious authority, legal and cultural privileges (1973: 38).

Tilly’s emphasis on resources is essentially a political economy approach to contentious politics. In the case of the Vendée, textile workers might not have mobilised under the banner of a clerical-led counterrevolution if they had had sufficient resources to mobilise and pursue their interests in other ways – i.e. through a non-binary opposition to the French Revolution. The monopolisation of resources by the French elite – mainly the clerics and the bourgeoisie – involved a pragmatic polarisation of political possibilities where the ability of interest groups and grassroots organisations to mobilise outside the elite-sponsored binary was largely restricted. 

As his analysis of the Vendée shows, explanations of social conflict, be it sect-based or otherwise, that focus on the role of groups with presumably uniform interests downplay the contentious nature of politics, and precludes consideration of the contingencies that shape the motives and interests of groups and individuals, not least the various types of resources which people thrive to access. 

Limitations

After more than half a century career, Tilly left us with a diverse and long list of seminal works. This typically means that one can either utilise some of his ideas as separate intellectual projects, or try to situate its meaning and value in a longer process of evolution of his thought. Despite sounding sensible, the latter approach is almost impossible in Tilly’s case, given how many ‘tangents’ he went on during his career. This leaves us with serious intellectual and ethical questions on how to approach his inter-disciplinary – if not anti-disciplinary, given how ambivalent he was to disciplinary orthodox – concepts, theories, and methods. 

For instance, Tilly began with a rather structural approach to the study of the state. But, by 1990, as his diverted his attention to social movements and mobilisation, his work fundamentally shifted to ‘relational’ approaches (Tarrow 2018). However, there is a real challenge to using Tilly posed by his methodological breadth (or divergence?). It makes it seem that we have ‘many Tillys’. Not only that, but he also constantly shifts from macro to ‘determinedly micro levels of social reality’, while also trying to link the two levels (ibid.: 515). This makes his work difficult to get a bead on. Where does his work on revolution (and contentious politics more broadly) meet with his work on the state and war-making? These two major fields that he contributed to are left strikingly disconnected. The former field is largely how Tilly is visited in sociology, and the latter is largely seen as Tilly’s intervention in political science. 

Final Remarks

If we are to synthesise Tilly’s vast work, we may find a potential solution to the agency vs structure dilemma that grips many scholars and students. Overall, Tilly manages to balance off structures and processes: the structures within which contentious politics manifest itself – particularly the state and society, and the interactive processes which define the prospects of political organisation and mobilisation. This reading of the political world departs from rigid categories and assumptions of good or bad, state and non-state, structure and agency, because it recognises the complex interaction between structurally-predictable phenomena and the contingencies of human interaction. 

Surely then, Tilly can be the key to unlock the complexity of Middle East politics and its discontent and contentions. Not only does he offer a way out of the agency vs structure dilemma, he carefully navigates the sensitivity of studying contentious politics, particularly revolution, which inevitably invites moral and ideological prejudice. In short, Tilly did what other social theorists often struggle to do: to show, with empirical data, that even the most violent or volcanic manifestations of collective active are intrinsic to politics. What better instrument of knowledge to de-exceptionalise the ‘war-torn’, indeed ‘state-torn’, Middle East? 

Suggested Reading and Bibliography

Kaspersen, Lars Bo,  & Strandsbjerg, Jeppe. (Eds.). 2017. Does War make States?: Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tarrow, Sidney. 2018. ‘The Contributions of Charles Tilly to the Social Sciences’. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 47(5):513–24. 

Tilly, Charles. 1963. ‘The Analysis of a Counter-Revolution’. History and Theory 3(1):30. 

Tilly, Charles. 1964. The Vendee. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Tilly, Charles. 1973. ‘Does Modernization Breed Revolution?’ Comparative Politics 5(3):425–47. 

Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill 

Tilly, Charles. 1985. ‘Models and Realities of Popular Collective Action’. Social Research 52(4):717–47.

Tilly, Charles. 1985. ‘Neat Analyses of Untidy Processes’. International Labor and Working-Class History27:4–19. 

Tilly, Charles. 1986. ‘Space for Capital, Space for States’. Theory and Society 15(1–2):301–9. 

Tilly, Charles. 1989. ‘State and Counterrevolution in France’. Social Research 56(1):71–97.

Tilly, Charles. 1991. ‘War and State Power’. Middle East Report (171):38. 

Tilly, Charles. 1993. ‘Changing States, Changing Struggles’. South African Sociological Review 5(2):1–13.

Tilly, Charles. 1993. ‘Social Movements as Historically Specific Clusters of Political Performances’. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 1–30.

Tilly, Charles. 1994. ‘In Search of Revolution’. Theory and Society 23(6):799–803. 

Tilly, Charles. 1995. ‘Citizenship, Identity and Social History’. International Review of Social History40(S3):1–17.

Tilly, Charles. 1998. Social Movements and (All Sorts of) Other Political Interactions - Local, National, and International - Including Identities. Theory and Society, 27(4), 453–480. 

Tilly, Charles. 2003a. ‘Changing Forms of Inequality’. Sociological Theory 21(1):31–36.

Tilly, Charles. 2003. ‘Political Identities in Changing Polities’. Social Research 70(2):605–20.

Tilly, Charles. 2003. ‘Armed Force, Regimes, and Contention in Europe since 1650’. 37-81. In D. Davis & A. Pereira (Eds.), Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Tilly, Charles. 2004. ‘Contentious Choices’. Theory and Society 33(3/4):473–81. 

Tilly, Charles. 2007. ‘History of and in Sociology’. The American Sociologist 38(4):326–29. 

[1] See Bollinger’s statement here: https://president.columbia.edu/news/passing-professor-charles-tilly