[Marxism] Charles Tilly

[Louis Proyect]

I know it is unseemly to speak ill of the dead, but there is another 
side to Columbia University sociology professor Charles Tilly who died 
this week at the age of 78. I was pretty friendly with a sociology 
professor named John Hartman who used to be a Pen-l subscriber. After 
Tilly came in to Columbia around 10 years ago, the first thing he did 
was not renew the contracts of John and a number of other tenure-track 
professors. This was one of the ways that a university screws its 
non-tenured employees. The other is using adjunct professors, who don’t 
even get health insurance. John described Tilly to me as an academic 
version of a mafia gangster, who put his own cronies into the department 
as a way of boosting his own power. Maybe Tilly was applying the lessons 
he learned from a 1985 article mentioned in the NY Times obit:


The New York Times, May 2, 2008
Charles Tilly, 78, Writer and a Social Scientist, Is Dead
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Charles Tilly, a social scientist who combined historical interpretation 
and quantitative analysis in a voluminous outpouring of work to forge 
often novel intellectual interpretations — as when he compared nation 
states to protection rackets — died on Tuesday in the Bronx. He was 78.

The cause was lymphoma, said John H. Tucker, a spokesman for Columbia 
University, where Dr. Tilly was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of 
Social Science.

Dr. Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and 
contemporary accounts — including municipal archives, unpublished 
letters and diaries — that he used to develop theories applicable to 
many contexts. A particular interest was the development of the nation 
state in Europe, which he suggested was partly a military innovation. In 
his 1990 book “Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990” 
(Blackwell), he argued that the increasingly large costs of gunpowder 
and large armies required big, powerful nation states with the power to tax.

In 1985, he gave early indications of his argument that war made states 
in an article that said nation states, with their monopolies on 
violence, function like gangsters’ protection rackets. He said that 
governments emphasize, create and stimulate external threats, then ask 
their citizens to pay for defense.

“Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat 
and then charges for its reduction,” he wrote in a chapter of “Bringing 
the State Back In” (Cambridge), which was edited by Peter Evans, 
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol.

Provocative and profound ideas repeatedly appeared in Dr. Tilly’s 51 
books and monographs and more than 600 scholarly articles. Marshaling 
insights from sociology and political science, both of which he taught, 
he took on subjects including urban migration, the French Revolution, 
the dynamics of political contention and the sociology of trusting others.

In “Credit and Blame” (Princeton), published this year, he drew on 
sources from Dostoyevsky to Darwin and from the office water cooler to 
truth commissions to examine how people fault and applaud each other and 
themselves. In “The Contentious French” (Belknap, 1986) he plowed 
through four centuries of history to describe the French as ordinary 
people fighting for their interests against implacable state power and 
advancing capitalism.

In his 2006 book “Why?” (Princeton), he tried to make systematic sense 
of people’s reasons for giving reasons. Malcolm Gladwell in The New 
Yorker said the book “forces readers to re-examine everything from the 
way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.”

Dr. Tilly devoted a considerable part of his work to methods used by 
social science. He parted with some historians by advocating the use of 
numbers to come up with testable hypotheses, and with some sociologists 
by insisting — with Marx and Weber, he said — that the historical 
context of cause and effect greatly matters.

In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, 
political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. 
Tilly “the founding father of 21st-century sociology.” He particularly 
praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft 
and politics in South Africa.

Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which 
had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.

“It was exhausting keeping up with him,” Dr. Ashforth said. “We’ll now 
have a chance to catch up with our reading.”

Charles Tilly was born on May 27, 1929, in Lombard, Ill., and in 1950 
graduated from Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in sociology in 
1958. He also studied at Oxford and the Catholic University of Angers, 
France. He served in the Navy during the Korean War.

He taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard, the University of 
Toronto, the University of Michigan and what is now the New School 
before joining Columbia in 1996. He taught at many other schools in 
North America and Europe for shorter periods.

Dr. Tilly is survived by his former wife and sometime collaborator, 
Louise Audino, of Evanston, Ill.; his brothers Richard, of Würzburg, 
Germany, and Stephen, of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.; his sister, Carolyn 
Williams, of Serena, Ill.; his son, Chris, of Boston; his sisters Kit 
Tilly of Hamilton, Mont., Laura Tilly of Evanston and Sarah Tilly, of 
Manhattan; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Dr. Tilly received many awards, the latest of which was the Albert O. 
Hirschman Award from the Social Science Research Council this year. He 
liked to brag that he managed never to hold an office in a professional 
association or the chairmanship of a university department — though he 
did head several research institutes.

Dr. Tilly once said his goal was to do sociology, history and political 
analysis at the same time, but he said it with what colleagues said was 
his typical intellectual humility.

“My efforts to harmonize all three have always failed in one way or 
another,” he said in an interview with Contemporary Authors, “but the 
failures, happily, are usually of the kind from which one learns 
something useful.”

On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading 
intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, “One way 
I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes 
or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.”