Remarks on the Awarding of the Albert O. Hirschman Prize to Charles Tilly

The Albert O. Hirschman Prize is the highest award of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). It recognizes academic excellence in international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication in the tradition of the German-born American economist for whom it is named.

It makes sense that the SSRC honors Hirschman in this way, for he was, as one biographical summary puts it, a "maverick economist." The same biography says that Hirschman lived in "the grey zone between economic and political theory," forging connections between them in unusual and extremely creative ways (homepage.newschool.edu/het//profiles/hirschm.htm). His work in development economics insisted on attention to local structures and indigenous resources, arguing against the application of formal models and standard criteria, the dominant approach of modernization theorists. Ever concerned about political democracy, he explored its relationship to economics. And the books he wrote, some of them nominally about economics, like Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) and The Passions and the Interests (1977), found wide readership among historians, political scientists, sociologists, and even literary critics. International, interdisciplinary, wide-ranging, and deep, Hirschman sought to understand the world in order to change it.

The 2008 Hirschman Prize is awarded to Charles Tilly, whose prolific and distinguished career touched many all over the world. Tilly helped bring into being the fields of historical sociology and social history; he was a scholar and an advocate who practiced the institution building and networking that he also studied; and he was a caring, generous teacher. It is good to know that he was told of this honor before he died, and it is sad that he cannot hear the praise justly heaped on him. I would also have liked to listen to the lecture he would have given on the occasion celebrating his award: three or four key analytic points, quantitative data combined with anecdotal evidence at just the right moment, a sly humor barely detectable as the stunning logic of his argument unfolded. For those hearing him for the first time, as well as for the veterans, the clarity, intelligence, and breadth of his thinking would have generated new ideas and probably even enticed some onto different paths of analysis and research.

That is what happened to me when I first met Tilly. He was assigned to be my mentor by the SSRC in 1966. I had been awarded a research training fellowship designed (in the words of the announcement) to foster "interdisciplinary study, or acquisition of special technical skills, or an opportunity for intellectual contact with scholars whose orientation is different from that to which one has been exposed." A graduate student in history, I was to learn sociology.

Looking back over the letters we exchanged in those (for me) formative years from 1966 to 1970, I find not only that he inducted me into interdisciplinarity, pointed me in the direction of technical skills I might need, and introduced me to important areas of study I might otherwise have missed (demography, social mobility, and social movements) but also—and this seems to me the real gift he gave me—that he trained me in a kind of analytic thinking absent from my historian's formation. In one patient letter he wonders (in response to my rejection of rigid sociological categorization) how I plan to "go about sorting the particular from the general," how I will decide what is "essential, incidental and irrelevant" in the events I choose to describe. He suggests that comparison is implicit in those kinds of decisions, that I will need "some version of one or more … analytic devices" to make them, and that such decisions should be made consciously and deliberately (Tilly, pers. com., October 25, 1966). His criticisms of papers and proposals I sent him focused on precisely the analytic frames that were unarticulated, and in that way he made me a more rigorous, self-conscious thinker than I had been.

As Tilly criticized me, he also accepted criticism, and here, too, he taught me that intellectual inquiry was itself a process, an...