3/5/08
Charles Tilly, 78, Writer and a Social Scientist, Is Dead
By Douglas MartinThe New York Times
May 2, 2008
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Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and contemporary accounts — including municipal archives, unpublished letters and diaries — that he used to develop theories applicable to many contexts.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.”