The People's Two Rhythms: Charles Tilly and the Study of Contentious Politics. A Review Article

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an event-ful in historical sociology and social history. Using new and swifter computational technologies, social scientists are employing systematic empirical methods to analyze population ecologies, social conflicts, and political struggles. This is no surprise-although the advances in computational technology have raised it to a new level of sophistication. But interpretive social scientists are focusing more on agency and actions too, promising a convergence-after years of growing distancebetween cliometrics and interpretation and between social and cultural history. Nowheree more than in the study of contentious politics does the systematic study of events hold the greatest promise for the return of the actor to social historical practice. For classes of events ranging from revolutions to ethnic conflicts to strikes and protests, students of collective action are enumerating and analyzing events to study the scope and dynamics of social movements. But there is a danger of a new bifurcation: While some, like William Sewell, argue for a re-concentration on Great Events (1996a), others, like Susan Olzak, have used events as quantitative markers for structural processes (1989). Unless we are careful, sociologists working with historical materials and historians interested in social processes will proceed on parallel paths to the study of contentious politics with a wall of mutual ignorance between them. In his recent book, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1995), Charles Tilly-who has trodden both paths-works towards a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative, long-term and shorter-term analysis of contention. But it was not always so. In this review, I will trace the progression of Tilly's work on contentious politics from The Vendee in the 1960s through his collaborative books of the 1970s and The Contentious French in the 1980s. I will first sketch the major emerging approaches to contentious politics, which I will call, with Sewell, event-ful history and, with Susan Olzak, event history.' I will then turn to the synthesis of these approaches that I argue Tilly has been moving towards for a number of years. The title of