In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Welcoming Remarks
  • Craig Calhoun (bio)

Charles Tilly was born in 1929, a year worryingly echoed in contemporary events. For all of his adult life, he studied the causes, patterns, cycles, changes, and continuities of such events. He focused most on social movements that responded to them and sometimes shaped them and on the states that often drove them and sometimes managed them. He studied the ways that states and others sought to coerce ordinary people and the ways that ordinary people mobilized to try to control their own lives and public affairs. He studied how capital and inequality figured in both the coercion and the struggles. And he studied how we study history, social structure, social action, and social change.

Tilly was among the most distinguished of contemporary social scientists. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is proud, accordingly, to award him its highest honor, the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The prize is named after another of the greatest figures of our era. Hirschman is one of the formative influences on the economics of development, a key researcher in Latin American studies, and a remarkable intellectual historian and social [End Page 385] theorist. He studied what he thought was important, not just what any one discipline habitually addressed. And he gauged importance by public and intellectual criteria without seeing those as conflicting.

When I told Tilly that he had been awarded the Hirschman Prize, he told me that he had long admired Hirschman, and it is easy to see why. Both men remade fields. Both wrote clear books that made complicated and nuanced analyses seem almost obvious—but only after their lucid formulations. Both men combined a passion for social science with a determination not to let it be owned by narrow disciplinary agendas or internal academic debates that lost purchase on the big issues in the larger world. Both Hirschman and Tilly were not only distinguished but distinctive. Each had a voice of his own.

Tilly's voice may have had roots in his early love of language and poetry, but it was also achieved by choice and some struggle. Early in his career he did historical sociology in a discipline where that had not yet become a recognized subfield. He studied conflict in a field dominated by Parsonsian functionalism and indeed at Harvard, where Talcott Parsons held center stage and figures like George Homans and Barrington Moore were pushed a bit to the wings. Tilly might have chosen to exit. He might have decided that he would get a better job as a loyalist. He chose instead what Hirschman indicated was always the third option: voice. Tilly's voice changed several fields, remaining impressively clear despite major contention and more than a little conflict. He both studied how voice could matter and exemplified it.

Tilly's voice animated his numerous books. From his remarkable study of counterrevolution in The Vendée, through major historical studies in France and Britain, to his explorations in Enduring Inequality, his efforts to theorize contentious politics, and his investigation of the very act of giving explanations, Tilly's written work always had style. The style was often slightly impish, with a wink to knowing readers, and always elegant. He was witty without telling many jokes. But as wonderful as his writing was, he was even better in person. His talks were nearly always written out in advance, clear, precise, and timed to the minute. I heard him give dozens of speeches, but he is the only academic I have ever known who never went over the allotted time limit. And you could see him smile slightly to himself when he finished on the dot.

Tilly was also astonishingly prompt, as well as detailed and effective, on the range of collegial chores that demand the time and attention of contemporary academics. Universities are full of professors who teach less, write [End Page 386] less, and have less research basis for what they teach and write yet who claim to be terribly busy when contacted to undertake a review. Tilly was an editor's dream, sending cogent comments almost by return mail. He was also an impressively effective editor, running for decades an Academic Press...

pdf

Share