Charles Tilly’s Popular Writings and Public Social Science
Charles Tilly developed a passion for reaching a broader audience beyond academia with his writings. His popular writing and public social science are exemplified by his two recent books Why (Princeton 2006) and Credit & Blame (Princeton 2008). Over the last year, Charles Tilly was invited twice by The American Interest to write for a broader, non-academic audience. This new political magazine was founded in the changing political context of 2005, led by Francis Fukuyama and devoted to the broad theme of “America in the World” with respect to policy, politics and culture.
With the permission of the American Interest, the SSRC can reprint these pieces of public social science by Charles Tilly:
- “Memorials to Credit & Blame” (May-June 2008)
- “Grudging Consent” (Sept.-Oct. 2007)
By publishing “Memorials to Credit & Blame” as part of the SSRC’s tributes to Charles Tilly (later to be followed by “Grudging Consent”), we hope to give Charles Tilly greater “credit” for his lifework. Several weeks before his passing, the SSRC “credited” Tilly with the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The republication of “Memorials to Credit & Blame” is a prelude to the conference in honor of Charles Tilly, which the SSRC and Columbia University are jointly sponsoring on October 3-5.
Memorials to Credit & Blame
The more recent of the two articles, which appeared posthumously, is related to Charles Tilly’s book Credit & Blame, drawing on parts of the last chapter.
Tilly’s book Why investigated “what happens as people give other people reasons for things they have done, things they have seen, and things other people have done.” Credit & Blame takes up a question Why deliberately left unsolved: “When we give reasons for someone’s actions that significantly affect someone else’s well-being, what do we do about it?” We try to assign credit and blame. Tilly’s book identifies the “common properties” of instances of crediting and blaming and “shows how they work on a scale that ranges from arguments among friends to the creation of national commissions for the pacification of fierce political disputes” (pp. viii-ix). While the book covers the whole range of social life and interaction, the article “Memorials to Credit & Blame” focuses on the public assignment of credit and blame and its profound implications for democracy.
While Tilly produced the book and the related article with a wider, nonacademic audience in mind, he continued to employ the principles of historical social science, of which he was a leading practitioner. As practiced and formulated most recently in Democracy (Cambridge 2007), Tilly repeatedly relies on statistical information, but the “crucial matching of arguments and evidence will come in the form of analytical narratives” (p. 72).
Grudging Consent
Charles Tilly’s earlier article for The American Interest, “Grudging Consent,” synthesized the arguments he presented in his book Democracy. In just a few pages, Tilly lays out the core of his theory of democratization, de-democratization and democracy promotion. He outlines in layman’s terms the general processes that have caused democratization and de-democratization at the national level across the world over the last few hundred years. In his view, democratization can be understood as the “advancement of grudging consent.”
Notably, Charles Tilly defines “grudging consent” with explicit reference to Albert O. Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Harvard 1970). He likens the process of citizens offer grudging consent (not to be presumed automatic) to Hirschman’s notion of employing “voice” backed by the threat of “exit.” How fitting, then, that Tilly was the recipient of the SSRC’s 2008 Albert O. Hirschman Prize.
–Contributed by Andreas Koller, SSRC
