On the Practice of Originality

Abstract

I know just how pleased Charles Tilly was to receive the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an institution he cherished, and Hirschman is a person for whom Tilly had almost limitless admiration. He particularly esteemed the assertive analytic power and intellectual modesty that characterized Hirschman's “Rival Interpretations of Market Society,” the brilliant 1982 Marc Bloch Lecture that addressed competing interpretations of modern markets as, respectively, “civilizing, destructive, or feeble.” “However incompatible the various theories may be,” Hirschman (1982: 1481) argued, “each might still have its ‘hour of truth’ and/or its ‘country of truth’ as it applies in a given country or group of countries during some stretch of time,” and he concluded by asking whether it is “not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?” (ibid.: 1483). These features, too, were hallmarks of Tilly's audacious originality.