On the Practice of Originality

I know just how pleased Charles Tilly was to receive the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an institution he cherished, and Hirschman is a person for whom Tilly had almost limitless admiration.

He particularly esteemed the assertive analytic power and intellectual modesty that characterized Hirschman's "Rival Interpretations of Market Society," the brilliant 1982 Marc Bloch Lecture that addressed competing interpretations of modern markets as, respectively, "civilizing, destructive, or feeble." "However incompatible the various theories may be," Hirschman (1982: 1481) argued, "each might still have its 'hour of truth' and/or its 'country of truth' as it applies in a given country or group of countries during some stretch of time," and he concluded by asking whether it is "not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?" (ibid.: 1483). These features, too, were hallmarks of Tilly's audacious originality.

From 1983 to 1990 Hirschman and Tilly served together on the SSRC's Committee on States and Social Structures, perhaps best known for the effort to "bring the state back in" (Evans et al. 1985). Alongside the other founding members—Peter Evans, Peter Katzenstein, Stephen Krasner, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol—I was privileged to sit with these two special colleagues and witness how they worked to renew faith in reason and the promise of social knowledge by homing in on fundamental questions, by taking risks at frontiers where disciplines meet, by performing acts of generous intellectual citizenship, and by committing themselves to making a more decent world.

When Tilly died on April 29, 2008, the calendar said that he was 78 years old, just four weeks shy of the start of his 80th year. Yet even near the end he had more spunk, more imagination, more life than persons half his age. Each time I met him on the Columbia campus during the long, often grueling period of his recurring battles with lymphoma, he brimmed with ideas, inquired about students we had shared at the New School and at Columbia, and asked hard, really hard questions. He invited unvarnished criticism and offered nothing less in return. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to call him an intellectual giant who, in the language he himself used to describe his teacher, Barrington Moore Jr., "towered above ordinary scholars" and "shaped the thinking of an entire generation" (Tilly 2006).

Here I should like to reflect on the practice of originality, on characteristic traits and generative features found in the special craftsmanship of colleagues like Hirschman and Tilly. Standing head and shoulders above the rest of us, such rare scholars permanently shift the vectors of important intellectual conversations and induce the rest of us to inquire more assiduously, record more truly, analyze more deeply.

I know Tilly would have resisted my saying that he was an unconventional genius, but so he was. He possessed the nonreplicable qualities of genius: a gift of nature, the product of daunting aptitude impelled by intellectual biography. But originality in history and the social sciences is not made by genius alone. This is a lesson Tilly taught all of us who were privileged to glimpse how he went about reading, thinking, talking, encouraging, and communicating in seminars and lectures, in working papers, in seemingly endless notes and e-mail messages, and most of all in books and articles. "I want to be a great thinker without doing the work," Norman Mailer (2008), another unconventional genius, wrote in 1957. Tilly's model of originality was just the reverse. He did the work. And in so doing, he revealed that he was a great thinker.

Three months after Moore's death in October 2005, Tilly (2006) admiringly observed that "when Moore worked, he went at it with ferocious energy, never publishing until he had gotten the argument more or less right. For his students, he became a model of intellectual commitment and rigor." Tilly's originality and influence were the products of even more ferocious energy and an unequaled determination to get things...