Routledge Collective Violence, Contentious Politics, and Social Change: A Charles Tilly Reader

Charles Tilly is among the most influential American sociologists of the last century. For the first time, his pathbreaking work on a wide array of topics is available in one comprehensive reader. This manageable and readable volume brings together many highlights of Tilly’s large and important oeuvre, covering his contribution to the following areas: revolutions and social change; war, state making, and organized crime; democratization; durable inequality; political violence; migration, race, and ethnicity; narratives and explanations. The book connects Tilly’s work on large-scale social processes such as nation-building and war to his work on micro processes such as racial and gender discrimination. It includes selections from some of Tilly’s earliest, influential, and out of print writings, including The Vendée; Coercion, Capital and European States; the classic "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime;" and his more recent and lesser-known work, including that on durable inequality, democracy, poverty, economic development, and migration. Together, the collection reveals Tilly’s complex, compelling, and distinctive vision and helps place the contentious politics approach Tilly pioneered with Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam into broader context. The editors abridge key texts and, in their introductory essay, situate them within Tilly’s larger opus and contemporary intellectual debates. The chapters serve as guideposts for those who wish to study his work in greater depth or use his methodology to examine the pressing issues of our time. Read together, they provide a road map of Tilly’s work and his contribution to the fields of sociology, political science, history, and international studies. This book belongs in the classroom and in the library of social scientists, political analysts, cultural critics, and activists. Review Charles Tilly was one of the great sociologists of the last fifty years. He was the most important analyst of social movements and contentious politics, but also shaped inquiry into cities, inequality, and the understanding of social processes. Social change today makes his work all the more important. Castañeda and Schneider clearly present the scope of Tilly’s contributions and make his work accessible to a new generation of social scientists. -- Craig Calhoun, London School of Economics and Berggruen Institute Over the course of several decades, Charles (Chuck) Tilly sent a great many ships (ideas/pieces of scholarship) into a great many seas. Some of us would follow a ship or three. Others would sit in the middle of an ocean or at a port to see what Chuck would send by. "Collective Violence, Contentious Politics and Social Change" serves as an amazing guide/companion/navigation device/travel log as one attempts to fathom all of the journeys taken by our dear friend. From revolutions to narratives, from theories to methods - it is all there. Like the guidebook to "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance," now we can revisit work that we thought we knew, visit works that we have heard about but never fully engaged with as well as see work that we didn’t even know that Chuck was doing. -- Christian Davenport, University of Michigan No scholar in the past half century has more deeply shaped historical and political sociology, and no volume more effectively brings together a better sampling of his prodigious opus. This collection not only demonstrates how Tilly has shaped the agenda in many of sociology’s liveliest themes, but also captures his uncanny ability to seamlessly weave together theory, method, and substance. For the novice or the senior scholar, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand collective violence, contentious politics, and social change. -- William Roy, UCLA Castañeda and Schneider have brought together some of Tilly's most influential and compelling pieces. By reading his analyses of cities, protest, wars, states, democracy and in