Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award
Charles Tilly, Columbia University
In an illustrious and extraordinarily productive academic career spanning nearly half a century, Tilly’s writings have transformed our understanding of politics, contestation, and social change more generally. From his influential early work on urbanization and industrial conflict, to his research on collective action, revolution, and state formation, through his recent emphasis on social relations, identity, and culture, Tilly has been consistently ahead of the curve, asking basic questions of the discipline (and of his own earlier work), and coming up with fresh and provocative answers.
In his major books on French society, including his classic The Vendee, and Strikes in France, 1830-1968 (with Shorter), Tilly places “the event” squarely on the sociological agenda, revealing the changing repertoires of collective action that arise during historically significant moments of public contestation. His writing deftly traces long-term processes of urbanization, proletarianization, and state formation culminating in the transformation of political identities and group interests. Part Durkheimian concerning institutional differentiation, part Weberian in recognizing state-making, and part Marxian in focusing on the central axis of social conflict. The end result is pure Tilly: theoretically synthetic, intellectually bold, and programmatic in its goals.
His programmatic contributions to theories of collective action and revolution are most clearly laid out in his remarkably influential study, From Mobilization to Revolution. Working with his colleagues at the University of Michigan in the 1970s and early 1980s, Tilly took on the prevailing “collective behavior” school that attributed outbreaks of mass protest to the breakdown of otherwise integrative societal norms, rules, and procedures. Rejecting the psychologizing assumptions that under girded the reigning consensus models, Tilly helped to invent a new conceptual vocabulary and analytical framework that saw social movements as a product of aggrieved actors, intentionally setting out to advance their interests through the most effective means possible -- whether from a position of relative strength inside the political system or, more commonly, as challengers from outside.
While Tilly has since embraced a more relational view of social movements in which political identities, interests, and goals are part of an ongoing process, the entire discipline remains indebted to him for placing social change on a more secure structural foundation. He has contributed a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular contention and state formation through such powerful works as Capital, Coercion, and European States. Indeed, if there is a unifying theme throughout Tilly’s writings, it is his effort to locate thinking, creative social actors at the center of an unfolding sociological drama in which the script is continuously being rewritten by the past. It is an irreducibly historical perspective that has influenced sociology and several neighboring disciplines, especially history and political science where Tilly’s work has had a major impact, in this country and abroad.
Tilly’s voluminous writings—more than a dozen major books, in excess of 250 articles and book chapters, and at least that many invited comments and book reviews—have appeared in leading journals in nearly all of the social science disciplines, with many of his writings having been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Turkish, Greek, Swedish, etc. A sociologist by intellectual instinct and habit, Tilly is truly a scholar of (and for) the world—as such, he is one of our discipline’s most treasured assets.
