Tilly was born on May 20, 1929, in Lombard, Illinois (near Chicago).
He graduated
from Harvard University in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and completed
Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in 1958.
Charles Tilly died in the Bronx on April 29, 2008, from lymphoma.
[2]
As he was fading in the
hospital, he got one characteristic sentence out to early studentBarry Wellman: "It's a complex
situation."
[3]
In his obituary, Columbia Universitypresident Lee C. Bollinger stated that Tilly
"literally wrote the book on the contentious dynamics and the ethnographic foundations of
political history".
[1]
Adam Ashforth of Northwestern University described Tilly as "the founding
father of 21st-century sociology".
[2]
Charles Tilly was brother to Richard H. Tilly and husband to Louise A. Tilly, both historians.
Academic career[edit]
Charles Tilly taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, the University of
Toronto, the University of Michigan,The New School, and Columbia University. At Michigan,
Tilly was professor of history from 1969-1984, professor of sociology from 1969-1981, and the
Theodore M. Newcomb Professor of Social Science from 1981-1984. At Columbia, he was the
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science. Over the course of his career, Tilly wrote
more than 600 articles and 51 books and monographs.
[1]
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Sociological Research Association and
the Ordre des Palmes Academiques.
[4]
Academic work[edit]
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 cataloguing, 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, andurban sociology.
State formation[edit]
Further information: State formation
Examining political, social, and technological change in Europe from the Middle Ages to the
present, Tilly attempted to explain the unprecedented success of the nation-state as the
dominant polity on Earth.
[5]
According to his theory, military innovation in pre-modern Europe
(especially gunpowder and mass armies) made war extremely expensive. As a result, only
states with a sufficient amount of capital and a large population could afford paying for their
security and ultimately survive in the hostile environment. Institutions of the modern state (such
as taxes) were created to allow war-making.
Contentious politics[edit]
See also: Contentious politics
In opposition to individualistic, dispositional analyses of contentious politics, Tilly's work
emphasizes how dynamics of social protest are tied to their political, social and economic
context. Where previous studies of collective violence had argued their atypical nature, Tilly
amassed a battery of evidence to show that they typically arise from the organization of
normally non-violent political contentions.
