Tilly Moves On
By Charles Tilly has passed away. Kieran and Dan have posts on his work as writer and teacher; from Dan’s new book:
What can I possibly say about Chuck Tilly that an endless number of his students and peers have not already written in their prefaces? I hope the others I thank will take no offense if I describe him as the most powerful intellect I have ever encountered in the social sciences. I expect that people will still be reading and debating his enormous and varied corpus of work for decades to come. Yet Chuck treats all of his students as members of an intellectual community of equals. He seeks out their opinions; he discusses his own views with humility and an open mind.
I never met Tilly, but I still remember reading his War Making and State Making as Organized Crime as an undergraduate. I found it enormously threatening; it challenged my conception of how and why states exist, and consequently of my own position as citizen of a state. Four years later I’d be assigning his work in my own courses.