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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
Debating War, States, and Rights
with Charles Tilly: A Contentious
Conversation
By Sidney Tarrow
Most of the contributions to this symposium have commemorated Chuck’s life, his
warmth and his intellectual contributions. This one will be a little bit different: it
will focus on a contentious conversation he and I had for years. I thought he didn’t
link the two great pillars of his life’s work: contentious politics and war and state
building and urged him to do so. With his tongue deeply implanted in his cheek, he
countered: “I have written many books on contentious politics, It was time I wrote
about something else.”
Chuck’s major work on war and state building, Coercion, Capital, and European States
(1990), which followed his puckish “War Making and State Making as Organized
Crime” (1985), was a bold, adventurous and far-reaching claim that the origins of
the modern European state lay in war and preparations for war. These two works
were explorations in political processes and the mechanisms that constitute them –
mechanisms like extraction, distribution, protection and production. But neither
gave much attention to political contention.
Why did the author of From Mobilization to Revolution (1979) and The Contentious
French (1986) leave contentious politics out of a book that centered on the
processes of state-making? During our ten year collaboration, first with Doug
McAdam on Dynamics of Contention (2001), and then on Contentious Politics (2007),
This puzzle persisted and so did I, but I made little headway with Chuck.
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
When, in the mid-90s, Chuck, Doug and I set out to write Dynamics of Contention,
we wondered how broadly to draw the boundaries around our subject. None of us
wanted to write yet another book just on “social movements”. We all wanted to
embed movements in a broader field of study, as Chuck had been doing since he
wrote The Vendée in 1964. But Doug’s and my ambitions stopped at the water’s
edge. We did want to go beyond the frontiers of the reformist social movements we
had studied, in the past, but our ideas for Dynamics did not go nearly as far as Tilly’s:
he wanted to include war – the most extreme form of contention -- in our repertoire
of contention.
Many of our social movement friends were dubious that we could talk about strikes,
protest waves, nationalism, democratization and revolution in the same breath as the
civil rights movement or the 1968 movements in Italy or France (McAdam 1982;
Tarrow 1989). Chuck, of course, was not afraid. But intellectual democrat that he
was, he bowed to our more modest ambitions, contenting himself with a few
gestures in the direction of the work he had published on war in Coercion, Capital
and European States.
In the last year in his life, in a contribution to the Oxford Handbook of World History
(Bentley, ed., in press), Chuck returned to the theme of war, state building and
what he now called “commitment”. But that essay ended with a strangely unTillian
uncoupling of war from public politics. “We face the prospect,” he wrote, “of a new
world of states, still relying on coercion, capital, and commitment to accomplish
their coordinated work, but no longer so tightly yoked to war” (italics added).
After a decade in which his country had invested mountains of treasure and pools of
blood into its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how could Chuck think states were “no
longer so tightly yoked to war”? When it abandoned its adherence to the Geneva
Conventions by the widespread abuse of prisoners? And when – in the name of the
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
“war on terror” – it rode roughshod over the rights of its citizens? I took Chuck’s
closing aphorism as a provocation, not a conclusion.
But a provocation for what? After his death, there was a natural effort on the part of
his many students and friends to memorialize Chuck’s contributions, passing over
gaps and errors that he himself would have pressed us to remedy. I too contributed
to those encomia1 But Chuck would have wanted a more robust reaction to his
work. The best memorial to this great scholar and teacher is to fill some of the gaps
and address some of the questions he raised.
But which gaps and what questions? The first regards the scope conditions of the
theory he put forward in Coercion, Capital and European States; a second relates to the
theory’s internal validity; a third relates to the role of religion and capitalism in
European state development, and a fourth to the role of rights in state development
– an issue that has come to the fore in the wake of America’s wars of this decade. Let
me touch on each of these issues briefly:
1. The first and most obvious question raised by Chuck’s work on war and state
building surrounds the scope conditions of the theory. Chuck saw war as the prime
mover of early modern European state-making, because its requisites led to processes
of extraction, protection, production, and distribution. But what of non-European
states and states formed more recently – for example, post-colonial states? A whole
literature has developed “correcting Tilly” for being “wrong” about state-building in
the global South and elsewhere (Taylor and Botea 2008).
When we test the scope conditions of Chuck’s theory with contentious politics in
mind, we find something interesting: that the structure of internal contention in
states prior to making war shapes how they make war itself. For example, contention
1
Tarrow 2008a and b.
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
over the Vietnam war left a fear of mass mobilization among the Bush administration
that led it to make major war without conscription, without demanding sacrifice
from its the citizens, and based in part on a return to mercenary warfare.
2. A second gap in Chuck’s work on state building has to do with its internal
validity: In his 1975 introduction to The Formation of National States in Western
Europe, Chuck was critical of Joseph Strayer’s model of state formation (Strayer
1970). In his view, Strayer had wrongly taken France and England as the model for
European state development. Yet when in Coercion, Capital and European States,
Chuck modeled the sequence of processes leading to the modern state, the successful
cases looked remarkably like Strayer’s model. Other forms of state – like the city
state, the segmented commonwealth, or the territorial empire – either imitated the
route of the consolidated national state or were doomed to disappear.
We need to return to those other forms of early modern state formation to
understand whether they describe genuinely distinct routes to the modern world or
merely variants of France and England’s paths, For example, Wayne Te Brake, who is
here, has built on Chuck’s foundations to show that distinct forms of state building
emerged from varying coalitions among nationalizing rulers, local elites, and ordinary
people in the Netherlands and the German states (1998). We ought to give equal
attention to the Italian city-states and to the great territorial empires like the
Habsburgs, the Ottomans and the Romanovs before concluding that the
consolidated national state triumphed.
3. What about the roles of religion and capitalism in state building? In Coercion,
Capital and European States, Chuck was remarkably unconcerned with religious
contention. We know how deeply Catholic/Protestant conflicts divided Europe in
the Hundred Year’s War, and how the settlement of that conflict produced the
European state system after the Treaty of Westphalia. But both religious conflict and
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
the impact of religious settlements on state building are absent from Coercion, Capital
and European States.
And what of capitalism, the third actor in the Tillian trilogy? In general, Tilly tells
us, capitalists gained rights from early modern states in proportion to these states’
need for resources to fight their wars. And in France and England these rights were
extended to municipal corporations, professional associations, and eventually to
whole populations. But not all European states were equally in need of domestic
capital to finance their wars: Gustavian Sweden extracted the resources for its
European wars from its conquered territories (Downing 1992). Yet Sweden extended
rights to ordinary people more completely than either Spain or France. It may be
that the conquest of rights by ordinary people had more to do with their own
contributions to war efforts than to the extension of rights from urban burghers to
the lower classes. We need to sort out the relationships among war-making, state
building and the extension of rights from those who finance wars to those who fight
them.
4. That takes us a final question for our absent friend: the future of the rights
enjoyed by Americans in this decade of the so-called “War on Terror.” Before he
died, Chuck saw his country at risk of abandoning its devotion to its regime of rights.
In Democracy, after describing abuses of citizens by governments in Third World
countries, he warned: “Lest North American readers congratulate themselves
invidiously as they read these descriptions of imperfect democracy, let us remember
that the United States too falls short of perfect breadth, equality, consultation and
protection” (2007:88).
Our regime of breadth, equality, consultation and protection has been tested by the
threats of terrorist wars that do not fit in the traditional patterns of territorial
warfare. While the latter seemed to Chuck to have ultimately advanced citizen
rights, the War on Terror is threatening them. What can explain the difference? I
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
will propose a hypothesis that draws deeply on Tilly’s inspiration: While all wars
have a ratchet effect on state expansion and some wars have positive effects for social
rights because they require resources or sacrifices from citizens, a pseudo-war like the
War on Terror has mostly negative implications for rights because it demands no
visible sacrifices except those that are made by a volunteer army and from our
children and grandchildren when the bills come due .
In a fugitive essay published two years after Coercion, Capital and European States,
Chuck extended his argument about war and state making to the question of rights.
“I think,” he wrote,
that citizenship rights came into being because relatively organized members
of the general population bargained with state authorities for several
centuries, bargained first over the means of war, then over enforceable claims
that would serve their interests outside of the area of war, and thereby helped
to enlarge the obligations of states to their citizens. The leverage broadened
the range of enforceable claims citizens could make on states even more than
it expanded the population who held rights of citizenship…. White-hot
bargaining forged rights and obligations of citizenship” in early modern
Europe (1992: p. 10)
“White-hot bargaining” may be in our immediate future as both our rights and our
economy are under threat from America’s aggressive wars and their costs to the
nation.
In work inspired by Chuck’s heritage, I hope to build a bridge between the two great
foundations he constructed: contentious politics and war and state building, And I
would like to try to link war, state building and political contention to the defense of
citizen rights, as he began to do in 1992. Is this too rich a diet even for a scholar
nourished on Chuck’s work? Maybe so, but we will be less than loyal to his teaching
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
if we fail to ask questions about anything less imposing than Big Structures, Large
Processes, and Huge Comparisons (1984).
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
Sources
Bensel, Richard F.
1990
Yankee Leviathan The Origins of Central State Authority in America,
1859-1877. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2004 American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York And
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Downing, Brian M.
Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in
Early Modern Europe. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
McAdam, Doug
Political Process and the Rise of Black Insurgency. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly
Dynamics of Contention. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Strayer, Joesph R.
1970
On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
Tarrow, Sidney
1989
Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1966-1974.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
2008a “Charles Tilly; a Memoir” in PS: Political Science and Politics. July.
2008b “Charles Tilly and the practice of contentious politics.” Social
Movement Studies 5 (in press)
Taylor, Brian D. and Roxana Botea
“Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third
World. International Studies Review 10: 27-56.
Te Brake, Wayne
1998
Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700.
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1964 The Vendée. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
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1984
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Sidney Tarrow, Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation
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THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly
New York, October 3-5, 2008
1986 The Contentious French, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
1990
Coercion, Capital and European States. Oxford: Blackwell’s.
1992 “Where do Rights Come From?” In Lars Mjøset, ed. Contributions to
the Comparative Study of Development. Oslo: Institute for Social Research, pp.
9-37.
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(in press) “War”. In The Oxford Handbook of World History. Oxford and
New York.
Tilly, Charles, ed.
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The Formation of European National States. Princeton NJ: Princeton
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Tilly, Charles and Sidney Tarrow
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