Bücher von Charles (New School for Social Research New York) Tilly

Consistently provocative, thoroughly original In its methods and conclusions. The Rebellious Century: 1830-1930 questions virtually every popular or scholarly assumption about the conditions underlying collective violence. Written by a sociologist, an historian, and an economist, the study presents a comparative history of group actions leading to violence In France, Italy, and Germany. The book demonstrates how urbanization, industrialization, and the concentration of political power in these and other Western countries have affected the means ordinary people have had to act together on their grievances and aspirations. The authors' findings not only shed light on the past but have relevance for today.By using violence as a "tracer" of change the Tillys: challenge Durkheim's "breakdown" thesis that identifies protest as the eruption of fragmented, disadvantaged, uprooted social groups; undermine standard characterizations of collective violence as the immediate consequence of hunger, unemployment, inflation, and other forms of material deprivation; and reject the "collective behavior" treatment of violent movements as deviant and irrational.For all three countries, the Tillys relate economic and political transformations to collective action and mass violence. They find that whether people acted to retain group rights (food riots, tax rebellions, land occupations) or to gain them (strikes, demonstrations, coups), the outcome depended on the political positions of the actors and the repressive policies of the government. Active participants in collective violence tended to come from organized groups already in control of significant political resources. The extent and character of violence, however, depended strongly on how governments reacted to challenges.Readable, thoughtful, persuasive, and free of jargon or elaborate theoretical formulations, this work draws on years of research with European newspapers, local studies, and archival materials and builds unobtrusively on the most extensive quantitative analyses of long-run changes in collective action which have ever been done. It contributes to history, to social science, and to everyday thinking about conflict.

In a dazzling new interpretation of four hundred years of modern French history, Charles Tilly focuses not on kings and courtiers but on the common people of village and farm buffeted by the inexorable advance of large-scale capitalism and the consolidation of a powerful nation-state. Tilly, author of The Vendee and many other books, chooses the contention of the masses as his medium in painting this vivid picture of the people's growing ability and willingness to fight injustice, challenge exploitation, and claim their own place in the hierarchy of power. Contention is not necessarily disorder. The more we look at contention, says Tilly, the more we discover order created by the rooting of collective action in everyday social life through a continuous process of signaling, negotiation, and struggle. In seventeenth-century France, ordinary people did not know how to demonstrate, rally, or strike, but they had standard procedures for expelling a tax collector, undermining a corrupt official, and shaming moral offenders. By the end of the eighteenth century, French people were experimenting with delegations, public meetings, and popular justice. Through the nineteenth century, with the growth of an industrial proletariat, they developed an extensive repertoire of strikes, demonstrations, and direct attacks on landlords and capitalists, as well as conflicts setting worker against worker. In the twentieth century, scenarios of protest expanded to even larger-scale forms such as mass meetings, electoral campaigns, and broad-based social movements. Rather than arguing these developments in the abstract, The Contentious French provides lively descriptions of real events, with pauses to make sense of their patterns. The result is a view of politics with the common struggle for power at its core and the changing structure of power as its envelope. The Contentious French is bound to be controversial, and therefore required reading for specialists in European history, social movements, and collective action. Its fresh approach will also appeal to students and general readers.