Чарльз Тиллі: Жизнь и вклад в социологию

American sociologist (1929–2008)

Charles Tilly (May 27, 1929 – April 29, 2008) was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He has been described as "the founding father of 21st century sociology" He published widely across topics such as urban sociology, state formation, democracy, social movements, labor, and inequality. He was an influential proponent of large scale historical social science research. The title of Tilly's 1984 book Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons is characteristic of his particular approach to social science research.

Tilly was born in Lombard, Illinois (near Chicago). His parents were Naneth and Otto Tilly, Welsh German immigrants. Tilly was a teaching assistant to Pitirim Sorokin, who along with Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans was considered by many in the profession to be among the world's leading sociologists. But every time Sorokin heard Tilly's ideas he would say something like "Very interesting Mr. Tilly but I do think Plato said it better." Tilly eventually turned to Barrington Moore Jr. and George C. Homans to supervise his dissertation. But Tilly never failed to say that Sorokin was a great person (even though Tilly eschewed any great person theory of history). Over the course of his career, Tilly wrote more than 600 articles and 51 books and monographs. His most highly cited books are: the edited volume The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), From Mobilization to Revolution (1978), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990 1990 (1990), Durable Inequality (1998), and Dynamics of Contention (2001).

Tilly's academic work covered multiple topics in the social sciences and influenced scholarship in disciplines outside of sociology, including history and political science. He is considered a major figure in the development of historical sociology, the early use of quantitative methods in historical analysis, the methodology of event cataloging, the turn towards relational and social network modes of inquiry, the development of process and mechanism based analysis, as well as the study of: contentious politics, social movements, the history of labor, state formation, revolutions, democratization, inequality, and urban sociology. At Columbia, along with Harrison White, Tilly played a key role in the emergence of the New York School of relational sociology. In 1968 Tilly presented his report on European collective violence to the Eisenhower Commission, a body formed under the Johnson administration to assess urban unrest amidst the Civil Rights Movement. The report was included in Vol. 1 of Violence in America, a collection edited by scholars on the staff of the commission. As informed by his studies of contentious politics in 19th century Europe, and the present violence in the U. S., his interest in cities and communities became closely linked with his passion for the study of both social movements and collective violence.

One of the themes that runs through a large number of Tilly's work is the collective actions of groups that challenge the status quo. Tilly dedicated two books, on France and Great Britain, to the topics: The Contentious French. Four Centuries of Popular Struggle (1986) and Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (1995). Later on, he co authored two influential books on social movements: Dynamics of Contention (2001), with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow; and Contentious Politics (2006) with Sidney Tarrow. Tilly also provided an overview of social movement, from their origins in the eighteen century to the early twenty first century, in Social Movements, 1768 2004 (2004). Tilly argues that social movements were a novel phenomenon that emerged in the West in the mid nineteenth century and that social movements are characterized by three features: (1) a campaign a "sustained, organized public effort" aimed at making collective demands from public authorities; (2) a repertoire of contention the use of various forms of action, such as public meetings, demonstrations, and so on; and (3) a public display of certain qualities, specifically worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). In his work with McAdam and Tarrow, Tilly seeks to advance a new agenda for the study of social movements. First, he and his co authors claim that various of forms of contention politics, including revolutions, ethnic mobilization, democratization should be connected to each other. Second, he argued for an analysis that puts the focus squarely on causal mechanisms and that the goal of research should be the identification of "recurrent mechanisms and processes." Specifically, in Dynamics of Contention Tilly and his co authors focus on mechanism such as brokerage, category formation, and elite defection.

Charles Tilly died in the Bronx on April 29, 2008, from lymphoma. As he was fading in the hospital, he got one characteristic sentence out to early student Barry Wellman: "It's a complex situation." In a statement after Tilly's death, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger stated that Tilly "literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of political history". Adam Ashforth of The University of Michigan described Tilly as "the founding father of 21st century sociology".