Soc 61.6 Social Movements

I just learned this morning that Charles Tilly, one of the most important social movement theorists, died yesterday. No one has done more important or more engaging scholarly work on the history of protest than Tilly. He influenced a generation of sociologists. He will be sorely missed.

UPDATE
Here is the obituary from Columbia University:
The Columbia University community mourns the loss of one of its beloved
members, Charles Tilly, the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social
Science, who passed away on April 29 after a long battle with cancer. He was
78.

Tilly, who had a joint appointment with the University's Departments of
Sociology and Political Science, is widely considered the leading scholar of
his generation on contentious politics and its relationship with military,
economic, urban and demographic social change.

President of the Social Sciences Research Council Craig Calhoun called Tilly
"one of the most distinguished of all contemporary social scientists,"
adding: "He is the most influential analyst of social movements and
contentious politics, a path-breaker in the historical sociology of the
state, a pivotal theorist of social inequality."

"His intellectual range and level of productivity are virtually unrivaled in
the social sciences," said Columbia sociology Professor and Chair Thomas
DiPrete. Adam Ashforth, professor of anthropology and political science at
Northwestern University, described Tilly as "the founding father of
twenty-first century sociology."

During the course of his 50-year career, Tilly's academic expertise covered
urbanization, industrialization, collective action and state-making, and his
most recent work explored social relations, identity and culture. His
primary interest concerned Europe from 1500 to the present, but his work
extended to North America and other parts of the world as well.

Tilly is well known for his generosity to students. Many recall thanking
Tilly for his mentorship, only to receive the response: "Don't thank me,
just do the same for your students."

One important training ground he offered to students was a succession of
informal seminars, colaunched with his former wife Louise in their living
room 40 years ago when he was a younger professor at the University of
Michigan. Once titled the "Think, Then Drink" workshop, the name changed to
the "Workshop on Contentious Politics" and was held regularly at Columbia
for more than a decade. Many students continued to participate well past
graduation and into their own professorship tenures.

"Much as his own scholarship transcended traditional disciplinary
boundaries, these vibrant discussions brought a diverse array of professors
and students together in an ongoing conversation that represented the best
of historical social science," said former student and close friend Wayne Te
Brake, now a professor of history at Purchase College. Participants enjoyed
Tilly's "egalitarian rules for presentation, critique and intervention," he
added.

Tilly was born May 27, 1929, in Lombard, Ill., and studied at Harvard
University, earning the bachelor's degree magna cum laude in 1950 and the
Ph.D. in sociology in 1958. He also studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and
the Catholic University of Angers, France, and served in the U.S. Navy
during the Korean War. Before arriving at Columbia in 1996, Tilly taught at
the University of Delaware, Harvard, the University of Toronto, the
University of Michigan and The New School for Social Research. In addition,
he held several short-term research and teaching appointments at
universities throughout Europe and North America during the course of his
career.

Tilly 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. In addition to
his theoretical and substantive interests, Tilly wrote extensively on the
subject of research methodology. His writings touched on epistemology, the
nature of causality, process analysis, the use of narrative as a method for
historical explanation, mechanism-based explanations, contextual analysis,
political ethnography, and quantitative methods in historical analysis,
among many topics.

During his lifetime Tilly received several prominent awards, including: the
Common Wealth Award in sociology (1982); the Amalfi Prize for Sociology and
Social Sciences (1994); the Eastern Sociological Society's Merit Award for
Distinguished Scholarship (1996); the American Sociological Association's
Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (2005); the International
Political Science Association's Karl Deutsch Award in Comparative Politics
(2006); the Phi Beta Kappa Sidney Hook Memorial Award (2006); and the Social
Science Research Council's Albert O. Hirschman Award (2008).

In addition, he was awarded honorary doctorates in social sciences from
Erasmus University, Rotterdam (1983); the Institut d'Etudes Politiques,
University of Paris (1993); the University of Toronto (1995); the University
of Strasbourg (1996); the University of Geneva (1999); the University of
Crete (2002); the University of Quebec at Montreal (2004); and the
University of Michigan (2007).

In 2001, Columbia's sociology graduate students named Tilly the Professor of
the Year.

He authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited 51 published books and
monographs and over 600 scholarly articles. His major works include "The
Vendee: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-Revolution of 1793" (1964);
"As Sociology Meets History" (1981); "Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge
Comparisons" (1984); "The Contentious French" (1983); "European Revolutions
1492-1992" (1993); "Cities and the Rise of States in Europe:
A.D. 1000 to 1800" (1994); "Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834"
(1995); "Durable Inequality" (1998); "Transforming Post- Communist Political
Economies" (1998); "Dynamics of Contention" (2001); "Social Movements
1768-2004" (2004); "Trust and Rule" (2005); "Why?"
(2006); and "Democracy" (2007).

"Professor Tilly will be remembered as an extraordinarily generous and
innovative scholar and teacher by a vast network of colleagues, students and
friends around the country and across the globe," said Te Brake.

Tilly is survived by his former wife (and sometimes collaborator), Louise;
his brothers, Richard and Stephen, and sister Carolyn; his children, Chris,
Kit, Laura and Sarah; their spouses Marie, Steve, Derek, and David; his
grandchildren, Amanda, Charlotte, Chris, Abby, Ben, Jon and Becky; and his
great-grandchildren, Jamie and Julian.