Abstract
The first part of this essay discusses the most important similarities between the sociological visions of Pierre Bourdieu and Charles Tilly; the second part surveys the key differences. The conclusion then offers a critical assessment of these two thinkers’ respective contributions to social science.
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Notes
Tilly spoke briefly of his family origins and childhood in Tilly (1985), as well as in Stave (1998). Bourdieu discussed those same topics at greatest length in (2007 [2004]).
Tilly once told this author, however, that he made it a point always to take graduate courses that Parsons offered, presumably on the principle that one must know one’s enemy well.
Tilly did not, of course, spend literally nine years “in the archives.” He was in France for about a year (1955–56) while funded by an SSRC Dissertation Fellowship. The reference to “nine long years” is strictly metaphorical.
See also Bourdieu (2000 [1997], 17–24).
For a statement of Bourdieu’s concerns about the potential loss of autonomy of the cultural field, see Bourdieu (2003 [2001]).
As Andreas Koller (personal communication, October 2010) has pointed out, this assertion of Tilly’s “implacable” opposition to modernization theory does not apply as far back as his Ph.D. dissertation, in which the dehistoricized ways of thinking of that approach were still manifest: “Tilly was not as ‘implacable’ as he himself wished to be in retrospect.” Tilly himself said as much in a later interview: “I had a stupid idea, which I refuted in rewriting my doctoral dissertation, but it’s still there in the dissertation[.] . . . I mean I really had a very simple modernization view. . . . By the time I finished the dissertation, I was halfway out of it, but there’s still a lot of that apparatus in it” Stave (1998, 192). It might also be noted that, at least according to one commentator, the eventual published version—The Vendée itself—still bore traces in its conceptual framework of unhistorical, “teleological” reasoning. See Sewell (1996).
“I would be happier if the phrase had never been invented. It implies the existence of a separate field of study—parallel, say, to political sociology or the sociology of religion. . . . I object to having subdisciplines emerge from techniques and approaches rather than from theoretically coherent subject matters” (Tilly 1981b, 100).
Quoted also in Steinmetz (2010, 19).
Tilly immediately went to emphasize, however, that this “by no means implies that governments must figure as the makers or receivers of contentious claims” (Tilly 2008a, 7).
For Bourdieu’s theory of the state, see Bourdieu (1998b).
For Bourdieu’s theory of the field of power, see Bourdieu (1998 [1989], 1996 [1989]).
The occasion of this talk, as the present author recalls well, was a New School for Social Research forum to honor the publication of Cohen and Arato’s fine treatise on civil society (1992). Tilly’s antagonistic remarks stirred up intense controversy.
For one example of such a discussion, see Tilly (1990, ch. 4). Citations to some other works by Tilly on the historical sociology of democracy are given in the subsequent footnote.
Tilly (2004a, 2005a, 2007). Tilly added that the insulation of public politics from categorical inequality and the reduction of autonomous power centers were two other important processes contributing to democratization. For a condensed summary of this view, see the section on “Public Politics: Civil Society and Democracy Revisited,” in Tilly (2009). In sum, trust networks and public politics were Tilly’s alternative means of dealing with civil society.
For an early statement of this concern, see Bourdieu (1987).
He declared, for example, that “in a situation of equilibrium, the space of positions tends to command the space of position-takings.” Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 105); italics in original.
The words “supposedly useless” are a reference to Tilly’s paper, “Useless Durkheim” (1981b, ch. 4).
Charles Tilly, private communication, 1992, quoted from Viviana Zelizer, “Chuck Tilly and Mozart,” in this volume.
One of his mentors at the École normale supérieure, Gaston Bachelard, was also influential in pointing Bourdieu toward a relational way of thinking.
See, e.g., White (1992). At the time this book came out, Tilly remarked to this author that it had made him rethink everything he had learned (or thought he had learned) his past forty years in sociology.
Tilly might also have mentioned the psychoanalyst who draws upon an array of mechanisms of defense to explain specific instances of neurotic behavior.
See also Tilly and Wood (2003). Tilly was always an ardent enthusiast of social network studies.
More complex was their relation to the democratic-participatory side of pragmatist thought, given Tilly’s and Bourdieu’s shared rejection of the civil society concept (and along with it, work on democracy and the public sphere), as discussed above.
See, e.g., Bourdieu (2005, 148).
Bourdieu offers similar criticisms in more impersonal terms in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 114: “In network analysis, the study of these underlying structures has been sacrificed to the analysis of the particular linkages (between agents or institutions) and flows (of information, resources, services, etc.) through which they become visible.” Once, when this author asked White and Tilly for their response to this passage, Tilly replied simply: “metaphysics.”
See Brubaker (2010).
Viviana Zelizer (personal communication, October 2010) has suggested that one of Bourdieu’s early writings—a monograph on photography—constitutes yet another exception to the general rule of privileging structure over interaction. See Bourdieu (1990 [1965]).
The concept of the habitus appears in nearly all of Bourdieu’s writings; it is even anticipated in his earliest writings on Algeria, such as the studies collected in Algeria 1960.
One sees this perhaps most clearly in Tilly (1978).
For an especially illuminating discussion of symbolic violence, see Bourdieu (2001 [1998]).
To capture the difference in sensibility and vision, compare, e.g., Bourdieu (1993 [1984]) with Tilly (1981c).
See, e.g., Bourdieu (1993a, 25); see also the more extended discussion in Bourdieu (1996 [1989], 386–88).
See Bourdieu (1991b, c); see also (1996 [1989], 102–15).
Goldstone’s (2010) contribution to this volume provides a useful overview of this collaborative venture.
By contrast to class, such principles of division as race and gender were deemed “secondary properties”; see Distinction (Bourdieu [1984 (1979)], 114ff). However, in Masculine Domination (2001 [1998]), his study of the space of gender relations, Bourdieu seemed to suggest otherwise, portraying gender as far more central and enduring.
See Bourdieu (1984 [1979]), ch. 6.
See Marx (1990 [1867]).
See Bourdieu (1998c, 2003 [2001], 2008 [2002]).
See Poupeau and Discepolo (2005).
For Weber’s classic formulation of the doctrine of value freedom, see Weber (1949 [1904]). As Zelizer (2010) points out in this volume, Tilly did speak in somewhat greater detail in another work regarding Weber’s idea of the relation between social science and ethical or political ideals. Perhaps interpreting Weber somewhat too narrowly in that passage, he argued that “much more . . . lies beyond” the mere selection of efficient means for realizing pregiven ends: “[S]ocial scientists have much to say about ethically implicated theories of possibility, selections among possible actions, and causal arguments. . . . [T]o the extent that it generates reliable knowledge of causes and possibilities[,] social science obviously bears on ethical and political choices.” Tilly (1996, 596).
In a humorously self-deprecating passage in one of his essays, Tilly once imagined that the active file maintained on him by the Michigan State Police would include “a single sheet saying STOP SURVEILLANCE. THIS GUY IS HARMLESS.” Tilly (1993b, 503).
On the occasion of his final lectures at the Collège de France, he summed it up this way: “It is, it seems to me, because I have, quite modestly, constituted it as a historical problem . . . that I have been able to resolve the problem of the relationship between reason and history or of the historicity of reason, a problem as old as philosophy and one which, especially in the nineteenth century, has haunted philosophers.” Bourdieu (2004 [2001]), 54; italics in original.
Tilly also criticized the fallacy of radical individualism or mentalism—the “assumption that the only significant historical events or causes consist of mental states and their alterations.” See Tilly (2002c, 16).
See, e.g., Tilly (2007).
This theme of reflexivity, so prominent over the entire course of Bourdieu’s career, was crucial to him from the very beginning. As early as The Craft of Sociology, he stressed the importance of “breaking” with “prenotions,” an notion he derived from Durkheim as well as his teacher at the École normale supérieure, Gaston Bachelard. See Bourdieu et al. (1991 [1968]).
See also the discussion of Aristotle’s theory of the emotions in Tilly (1999).
For some reflections on his own writing style, see Bourdieu (1996 [1992], 177-78).
For an example of Tilly’s thoughts on social science writing, see Tilly (1986b).
See, de Tocqueville (1981 [1835/1840]).
This is, of course, an evaluative judgment based in considerable part on scholastic values, as Bourdieu, ever the reflexive sociologist, would have been among the first to emphasize.
For a paper that anticipates this work, see Bourdieu (1993b).
For this analogy, see Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 220); see also Bourdieu (1993a), by Beate Krais, in Bourdieu et al. (1991 [1968], 256).
Martin (2008). The quotation is attributed to Adam Ashforth.
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Emirbayer, M. Tilly and Bourdieu. Am Soc 41, 400–422 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-010-9114-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-010-9114-x