Charles Tilly and the Practice of Contentious Politics

Charles Tilly developed the concept of the repertoire of contention over a long and distinguished career. It wasn't easy and it wasn't quick. In addition to being easily distracted, Tilly also needed to develop the analytical tools with which to study repertoires and performances and complete his transformation from what he called "an old structuralist" to what he came to call a "relational realist." This long development came to final fruition in the book he completed shortly before his death, Contentious Performances, which the author of this tribute regards as his masterpiece.     

Charles Tilly as a Theorist of Nationalism

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly’s theory of nationalism emerged from the “bellicist” strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly’s later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist—a source of both its power and its limitations.     

Charles Tilly,German Historicism,and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.” The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time” and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.     

The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly

Chuck Tilly’s late work on coercion, capital, and trust is provocative when applied to changes in urban form. Extending those categories for use in tracing the history of conflicts in cities about how development should be handled highlights the changing roles of economic and physical and cultural power, and the growing importance of trust in these processes. This is a speculative article with a political hope. The speculation is around the potential of using an expanded version of key categories of Charles Tilly’s to create a framework for understanding the nature of change in the form of cities over time. The political hope is to use that framework to illuminate the possibilities of social change in cities today in the direction of social justice.     

Tilly and Bourdieu

The first part of this essay discusses the most important similarities between the sociological visions of Pierre Bourdieu and Charles Tilly; the second part surveys the key differences. The conclusion then offers a critical assessment of these two thinkers’ respective contributions to social science.     

Cities, states, trust, and rule: new departures from the work of Charles Tilly

In the light of his essay “Cities, States and Trust Networks,” contributors to this collection were asked to consider ways of building on or departing from the late Charles Tilly’s work. The authors in this collection addressed four major themes: (1) historicism and historical legacies, (2) trust networks and commitment, (3) city–state relations, and (4) democracy and inequality. Authors concentrating on historicism examined how, despite unanticipated consequences, social action nonetheless produced systematic, durable, social structures; they particularly focused on processes of identity formation and cultural reproduction. In regard to trust networks, contributors discovered a striking variety of forms and relationships and they investigated their origins and their relationship to institutions and culture. Looking at city–state relations, authors uncovered the richness and intricacy of the ties linking cities and states and showed that city–state relations were important not simply in terms of the autonomy or dependence of mutual ties, but also in the quality of these relationships. Besides the ties between cities and states other authors sought to focus on empires and wondered about the degree to which empire formation involved similar processes as state formation. Several authors developed this theme. Authors pursuing themes of democracy and inequality stressed how changes in citizenship and the expansion of parliamentary democratic forms might have complicated effects. The relationship between democracy and inequality was mediated by elites and institutions. Democracy constrained inequality but inequality also constrained democracy. Increased state capacity might enable states to remedy old inequities but it might also allow them to perpetrate new ones. The authors’ varied responses suggest promising directions for research on cities, states, and trust networks.     

Chuck Tilly and Mozart

With Mozart-like versatility, Charles Tilly’s brilliant investigations covered a remarkable range of topics and methodologies. This paper highlights two of Tilly’s lesser-known contributions: as cultural analyst and as feminist scholar. It also introduces his concern with the place of normative arguments in social research.     

Contributions of American Pragmatism to the Sociology of Knowledge

The authors identify and develop the contribution of pragmatic thought to the sociology of knowledge. The argument presented here elucidates the pragmatist position on several controversial issues currently confronting the sociology of knowledge, namely; the issues of rationality, relativism, subjectivism, objectivity, language, truth, and the nature of theory and explanation. The paper concludes that the corpus of pragmatic thought resolves these issues in a timely, relevant, and significant way.     

Pragmatism and the Scientific Validation of Professional Practices in American Special Education

A number of American special educators have recently stated that new professional practices should undergo a process of 'scientific validation' whereby researchers decide the effectiveness or value of the practice. This essay critiques this position by way of the philosophical framework of pragmatism, an American philosophy spanning from the works of Peirce, James and Dewey to the current writings of neo-pragmatists Richard Rorty and Cornel West. Rorty's critique of the representational use of language is explained. Emphasis is placed on the importance of an equal, democratic dialogue in decision-making processes involving professionals, served individuals and families. The essay concludes with a brief illustration of a pragmatist's approach to inclusive education.     

Shibutani and Pragmatism

Tamotsu (Tom) Shibutani was generous in revealing the secrets of his inventive mind with other people. This article, the second in Symbolic Interaction's symposium tribute to this exceptionally creative sociologist, is written by a University of California colleague. The author shares some of Shibutani's creative ideas with those of us who were not fortunate enough to know Shibutani personally.     

Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

Three features of pragmatist thought remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: its call for a return to experience or recovery of concrete practices; its idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem-solving; and its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. Our aim in this article is to show that there exists a long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition in which these pragmatist themes are further developed, albeit in ways the originators might have foreseen only in dimly programmatic form. This research tradition is ethnomethodology. We present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes mentioned above. We show how Garfinkel’s work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. We demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. Finally, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.     

Pragmatism and the study of large-scale social phenomena

Pragmatism has recently gained ground as a theoretical perspective in sociology. The approach is not without its critics, however. One common charge is that pragmatism is oriented toward the micro and not well suited for the explanation of meso- or macro-level events, processes, or outcomes. In this paper—a review essay—I consider whether the charge has merit. I examine four studies that draw heavily on pragmatism and give some indication of its explanatory potential. Taken together, these studies suggest that pragmatism has much to offer analysts of large-scale social phenomena. At the same time, key issues remain to be worked out.     

Natural and Epistemological Pragmatism: Democracy and Environmental Problems

In this analysis, a pragmatic model of the human relationship to nature is presented. Parallels are drawn between the epistemological pragmatism used by humans to experience large-scale environmental problems and the natural pragmatism by which all species evolve to meet the challenges of their environment. It is argued that powerful stakeholders have the ability to shift the short-term consequences of environmental problems to less powerful political entities, thus delaying the pragmatic recognition and remediation of these issues. A synthesis of the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz provides the foundation for a reappraisal of solutions to environmental problems and suggests that rational humanism does not provide realistic solutions to environmental threats.     

Grounded and Indigenous Theories and the Politics of Pragmatism*

Grounded theory (GT): the writing is direct, and immediate, subversive, no big words. To wit:

相似文献   

Durkheim's Pragmatism Lectures: A Contextual Interpretation

This article attempts to understand Émile Durkheim's 1913–14 lectures on pragmatism and sociology by situating them in the socio-intellectual context of the time. An analysis of books and journal articles from the period reveals that the ideas of the Anglo-American pragmatic philosophers Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and F.C.S. Schiller were very popular in pre-World War I France. The French term le pragmatisme , however, was used to refer not only to the thought of these philosophers, but also to the work of French thinkers, such as Henri Bergson and the Catholic Modernists Maurice Blondel and Édouard Le Roy, who wrote extensively about human action. Pragmatism, because of its associations with Bergsonian spiritualism and the theology of the Modernists, came to have religious connotations for many French intellectuals. Durkheim had a similar understanding of pragmatism and his critique of the pragmatists cannot be fully grasped unless these religious connotations are considered. The article concludes by discussing several implications of this interpretation for sociological theory.