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Tilly and BourdieuAuthor(s): Mustafa EmirbayerSource: The American Sociologist, Vol. 41, No. 4, Remembering Charles Tilly (December 2010),pp. 400-422Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40983490 .Accessed: 09/06/2014 18:16

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AmSoc(2010)41:40(M22 DOI 1 0. 1 007/s 1 2 1 08-0 10-911 4-x

Tilly and Bourdieu

Mustafa Emirbayer

Published online: 14 December 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

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.

Keywords Tilly Bourdieu Historical sociology Civil society Modernity Political conflict Collective action Cultural analysis Relational sociology Fields Mechanisms Pragmatism Interaction order Social psychology Social stratification Symbolic violence

Charles Tilly and Pierre Bourdieu: the comparison is irresistible. Born hardly a year apart, raised in families of middling means and in circumstances largely bereft of cultural refinement and sophistication; academically gifted and accomplished, with degrees earned at the most prestigious educational institutions of their respective countries (thanks in large part to scholarships and government aid); imbued from a young age with healthy skepticism regarding the prtentions and self-importance of the scholastic life, a trait that would mark their later work as well, not to mention their relations with peers and students and their whole approach to the institution; oblivious to the pressures of academic specialization and reluctant to confine themselves within the bounds of disciplinary and subdisciplinary domains; innovative and even heterodox in their thinking yet always profoundly committed to the enterprise of social inquiry; exemplary practitioners of their craft in all its dimensions, theoretical as well as substantive; prolific to a degree that astonished even the most accomplished of their contemporaries: these two social thinkers became arguably the foremost sociologists of the late-twentieth century. In this essay, I consider the many remarkable similarities between their respective sociological approaches as well as some of the subtle but important differences. With such comparisons in mind, I also offer some closing reflections on Tilly's life's work in particular.1

^illy 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]).

M. Emirbayer (El) Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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I

Both Tilly and Bourdieu came of age intellectually in the 1950s, at a time when, at least in American sociology - and to a considerable extent in France as well - the scene was dominated by what Bourdieu would later call the "Capitoline triad" of Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and Paul Lazarsfeld, embodiments together of the opposition then extant between theoreticism and empiricism (with Merton as the mediating figure).2 Far away in France, Bourdieu sought deliberately to resist their influence, which he disdained, while Tilly, not afforded the same benefits of geographic distance, nonetheless refrained while at Harvard from having Parsons serve on his dissertation committee.3 Both developed a lifelong aversion to abstract theorizing, even as they also eschewed the positivistic tendencies so prominent in their day. Both plunged into studies of concrete historical processes, studies focused on specific instances of political domination and struggle, all the while evincing no "disdain for patient, painstaking empirical work," as Bourdieu would later put it (Bourdieu 2007 [2004], 103). In his early researches in the midst of the Algerian war of independence, such as those collected in Algeria 1960 (1979 [1963]), Bourdieu invested "the same interest and attention in drawing up a coding schedule or conducting an interview as in constructing a theoretical model" (Bourdieu 2007 [2004], 103), while Tilly spent nine long years in the archives preparing The Vendee, his first major work (Tilly 1964).4 (Ironically, the four core chapters ofthat work - on the "four systems of social relationships within the [southern Anjou] community, essentially political, economic, religious, and affiliational" - nonetheless would closely parallel Parsons 's AGIL schema [Tilly 1964, 82].)

From the beginning, Tilly and Bourdieu shared a profoundly historical - one might better say historicist - sensibility (Steinmetz 2010). As I shall later discuss in greater detail, this sensibility extended even to the problem of sociological concept formation, although in different degrees in the two thinkers. Bourdieu never tired of stressing that social structures were "issued out of the historical work of succeeding generations," while even habitus were nothing if not history embodied and incorporated (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 139). Time was his great obsession, the elaboration of a radically temporalized theory of social life: "The separation of sociology and history," he wrote in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, "is a disastrous division" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 90). Such a division could not be rectified simply by positing grand historical trajectories and then building one's own sociological theories atop them. It is true that Bourdieu conceived of the rise of the modern world as a process of the differentiation and autonomization of fields of practice. "At the very foundation of the theory of fields," he wrote, "is the observation (which is already found in Spencer, Durkheim, Weber . . .) that the social world is the site of a process of progressive differentation. . . . The evolution of

2 Bourdieu (1991a, 378). On mid-twentieth century American sociology, see also Calhoun and VanAntwerpen (2007). 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.

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societies tends to make universes (which I call fields) emerge which are autonomous and have their own laws" (Bourdieu 1998a, 83).5 However, he also stressed that dedifferentiation can easily occur - and was already in danger of occurring in certain realms of contemporary cultural and intellectual life.6

Tilly, too, from the start of his career, was an implacable foe of dehistoricized ways of thinking in sociology. These included a fortiori the various forms of "historical" reasoning then fashionable in the social sciences, such as modernization theory, which he derided as "nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking in a new garb" (Tilly 1984, 48).7 Although differentiation was a highly useful concept, "no process is fundamental," he asserted; "we have no warrant for thinking of differentiation in itself as a coherent, general, lawlike social process" (Tilly 1984, 49, 48; boldface in original). Nor was differentiation irreversible. (Later in his career, he would make the same point in respect of democratization.) As far back as graduate school, Tilly cast his lot with the most historically minded thinkers at Harvard, mentors such as George Homans, Barrington Moore, Jr., Pitirim Sorokin, and Samuel Beer (Steinmetz 2010). And throughout his life, he stressed, as George Steinmetz (2010) has noted in this volume, that the distinction between history and sociology is an artificial one - as is, indeed, the very category of a "historical sociology."8 "To the extent," Tilly wrote in As Sociology Meets History, "that the place and time of the action enter into its explanations, . . . [any] analysis is historical" (Tilly 1981a, 6).9 Sociological analyses "should be concrete in having real times, places, and people as their referents and in testing the coherence of the postulated structures and processes against the experiences of real times, places, and people. They should be historical in limiting their scope to an era bounded by the playing out of certain well-defined processes, and in recognizing from the outset that time matters - that when things happen within a sequence affects how they happen. . . . Outcomes at a given point in time constrain possible outcomes at later points in time" (Tilly 1984, 14; boldface in original).

Both Tilly and Bourdieu directed their analytic attention to the empirical nexus of modern states and classes. (This would lead many later to associate their ideas with Marxian political economy.) "In the case of Western countries over the last few

5 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 Vende itself - still bore traces in its conceptual framework of unhistorical, "teleological" reasoning. See Sewell (1996). 8 "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). 9 Quoted also in Steinmetz (2010, 19).

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hundred years," Tilly remarked in his methodological study, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, "the program [of a concrete and historical social science] begins by recognizing that the development of capitalism and the formation of powerful, connected national states dominated all other social processes and shaped all social structures. The program continues by locating times, places, and people within those two master processes and working out the logics of the processes. It goes on by following the creation and destruction of different sorts of structures by capitalism and statemaking, then tracing the relationship of other processes [to them]" (Tilly 1984, 14-15). Even contentious politics was to be defined by reference to states - as "claim making that somehow involves governments" (Tilly 2008a, 7).10 Bourdieu, likewise, conceived of societies as class- structured - his most famous book, Distinction, spoke of society as itself a field of social classes (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]) - and stressed that societal struggles most often center around states and aspire to influence them, while states in turn massively structure the very terms of (and parties to) those struggles.11 Another of his major works, Pascalian Meditations, ended by identifying the State with society, quoting approvingly the Durkheimian dictum that "society is God" (Bourdieu 2000 [1997], 245).

For both thinkers, this emphasis on states and classes meant a studious avoidance of the idea (and discourse) of civil society. Despite the upsurge of interest in civil society during the 1980s and 90s, a development occasioned largely by the collapse of communism and the successful transitions to democracy in Eastern and Southern Europe as well as in Latin America - and despite also the long and distinguished pedigree of that concept in the history of Western social thought - neither Bourdieu nor Tilly found it to be very compelling analytically. "It is not easy," wrote Bourdieu in a late work on The Social Structures of the Economy, "to determine concretely where the state ends and 'civil society' begins. ... In fact, abandoning the dichotomy, ... we have rather to speak the language of differential access to specifically bureaucratic resources - law, regulations, administrative powers, etc. - and to power over these resources, which the canonical distinction, as noble as it is empty, leads us to forget" (Bourdieu 2005, 163-65). Toward such an end, Bourdieu developed the concept of a "field of power," or a space in which the dominants of society, the preeminent holders of its major assets or varieties of capital, would be arrayed and pitted against one another in a ceaseless struggle for state power.12 He spoke also of coalitions or movements in which the dominated among the dominants would align themselves with actors from outside the field of power in attempts to gain greater shares of resources and influence. Rarely if ever did he speak in a sustained and systematic way of the civil sphere or of democracy.

Similarly, Tilly preferred to speak of societal actors' increasing bargaining power vis-a-vis states faced with a growing need for resources in support of war-making and war-preparation efforts rather than to posit the rise in the modern West of a sphere of social life organized around the principles of solidarity, associationalism,

10 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 1998bi.

12 For Bourdieu's theory of the field of power, see Bourdieu (1998 [1989], 1996 [1989]).

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and citizenship. States needed to extract the means of rule from their subject populations, and this helped to accord the latter a capacity to gain in return new or enhanced rights, privileges, and benefits. Where was civil society in any of this? "The concept of civil society," Tilly once declared, "is normatively admirable but analytically useless" (Tilly 1992).13 Even his (not inconsiderable) contributions to the historical sociology of democracy were pitched more in terms of bargaining processes than of voluntarism or any imputation to citizens of a commitment to the common good.14 In late works such as Contention and Democracy in Europe, Trust and Rule, and Democracy, Tilly argued that the integration of trust networks into public politics was a crucial factor in the growth of democracy.15 But not only did this insight diverge from civil society theory in depicting trust as a property of social ties rather than as an individual attitude, it also retained Tilly's earlier concern with strategic, interest-based interaction: states could be expected to be more accountable to citizens precisely when the latter organized themselves into extensive, politically well-connected networks. Like Bourdieu, Tilly approached many of the same problems as did civil society theory - but in a fashion decidedly unsympathetic to many of its claims.

Tilly and Bourdieu both focused much of their life's work on the study of political conflict. Even when the specific object of Bourdieu 's investigations happened not to be the political field per se, he remained intent on illuminating, not only the respects in which that field was a structure of power and a space of (at least implicit) contestation, but also how politics and the state were (at least indirectly) influential in shaping the field's historical trajectory and present-day dynamics. Not even the most sacralized and lofty realms of high art - one thinks here of Flaubert's literary world - could properly be understood without grasping how they were implicated in

larger and more encompassing scenes of political conflict (Bourdieu 1996 [1992]). As for Tilly, the signature object of his scholarly work was always contentious

politics, the area of study he made his own through such classic, paradigm-shaping works as his primer on collective action, From Mobilization to Revolution (Tilly 1978). Whereas Bourdieu devoted only part of one major work, Homo Academicus (1988 [1984]), to discussing episodes of political conflict (and even then with a

conspicuous emphasis on "maladjusted expectations," precisely the sort of social-

psychological explanation that always made Tilly nervous), Tilly focused in study after study on the structural and organizational elements underlying collective action.

Sympathetic to resource mobilization approaches that underscored the material bases of social movements, he went even further in taking seriously the political structures within which collective action unfolds. One senses that this, too, is the direction

13 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. 14 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. 15 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.

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Bourdieu would have followed had he concerned himself more systematically with the study of social movements and revolutions.

Tilly's similarities with Bourdieu are evident also in their respective approaches to cultural analysis. Both rejected from a young age the structural-functionalist understanding of culture as a system of shared norms and values, as well as approaches that take culture out of social relations and interactions and place it instead inside individuals' heads. Both gravitated toward more practice-based ways of thinking about the topic. From the beginning, Bourdieu was more at home in cultural inquiry than was Tilly, having imbibed Durkheimian thought from his earliest days at the cole normale suprieure and having immersed himself in anthropological and ethnological theory while still in Algeria. He included in nearly all his substantive writings allusions to sacrality and the profane; a core element in his work was the idea of symbolic classification. (This was encapsulated in one of his signature phrases, "principles of social vision and di-vision.") Still more systematically, he showed how what he called position-takings - symbolic produc- tions of various kinds, such as the artistic styles and genres he investigated in The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]) - derive their significance, like positions in a social space, from their relations with and difference from other position-takings in a semiotic system. On the other hand - perhaps also not surprisingly, given his concern to counterpose, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, a materialist perspective to those who would invest high culture with the charisma of the sacred16 - he never worked out a fully satisfactory approach to cultural analysis. Highly inconsistent in his theorization of the relation between the symbolic and social, he vacillated between affirming the analytic independence of cultural formations and arguing reductionistically that social positions are primary.17 In most cases, he treated cultural expressions as reflections of socioeconomic differences; as he put it in Distinction, "tastes function as markers of 'class'" (Bourdieu 1984 [1979], 2).

For his part, Tilly came to cultural inquiry somewhat late in his career and seemingly more out of grudging recognition of the insights and contributions of the cultural turn than from any deep-seated intellectual conversion. His work until roughly the early 1990s was, in fact, marked by a conspicuously materialist sensibility. Not for nothing has William Sewell, Jr. underscored Tilly's "lack of interest in the content of the religious ideas and rituals that did so much to fuel the Vende rebellion," adding wryly that here "the supposedly useless Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life might [well] have come in handy" (Sewell 2010, 312).

18 Nor is Sidney Tarrow off the mark in pointing out that even in the much later Coercion, Capital, and European States, Tilly was "remarkably unconcerned with religious contention" (Tarrow 2008). After the early 1990s, however, Tilly commenced his own cultural and performative turn. As Viviana Zelizer observes in her epilogue to this volume, he began to recognize that even certain of his own signature ideas, such as "repertoires of contention," were "eminently cultural."19 Indeed, he began to produce, in striking

16 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.

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resemblance to Bourdieu- compare, for instance, his essays in Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties to those of Bourdieu in Language and Symbolic Power (Tilly 2005b, Bourdieu 1991b) - powerful accounts of boundary-drawing and of the symbolic construction of groups and identities. He spoke as well, in the spirit of American pragmatism, of how culture is actively and creatively deployed, negotiated, and transformed, as in his late studies of contentious performances. Yet even then, Tilly continued to subordinate his cultural inquiries to a fundamentally social-structural logic. As Rogers Brubaker (2010) points out, he never satisfactorily grasped the analytic importance of discourses, languages, and vocabularies, or, for that matter, of ritual practices.

Perhaps the most remarkable similarity between the sociological visions of Tilly and Bourdieu lies in their passionate commitment - in Bourdieu's case, from early on; in Tilly's, from roughly midway through his career - to what they both called relational thinking. Both made the term a catchphrase for their life's work, and both will forevermore be associated with the idea of a "relational sociology." Drawing explicitly on Ernst Cassirer's distinction between substantialist and relational thinking, Bourdieu developed a relational approach to the study of social fields, or of "spaces offerees and of struggles."20 As he described them in The State Nobility, these are "network[s] of ... objective relations among entities that, like heavenly bodies belonging to the same gravitational field, produce effects upon one another from afar" (Bourdieu 1996 [1989], 132). More specifically, fields, as he conceptualized them, are structures of relations not between concrete substances or entities, but rather, between the nodes those entities happen to occupy, the point being that one must analyze those entities not in isolation, as in the style of a "village monograph," but as occupants of positions within broader relational configurations. In Bourdieu's view, the structural positions themselves of a field, including its dominant and dominated poles, are to be investigated in terms of the distinctive

profiles of capital associated with them. Capitals functions both as weapons and as stakes in struggles for ascendancy. Hence any field (from a synchronie perspective) is a structure or temporary state of power relations within what is also (from a diachronic perspective) an ongoing struggle for domination waged by the

deployment of relevant capitals. For his part, Tilly came to relational thinking through the influence of one of his

contemporaries, Harrison White, who at the time (the 1980s-90s) was elaborating an

expansive networks-based theory of society, one in some respects as ambitious as that of Talcott Parsons.21 Tilly was favorably disposed toward this approach because it led away from both holistic or group-centered ways of thinking, as in the structural-functionalism he had rejected since his youth, and the various forms of individualism (rational-choice theory; phenomenology) which had emerged over time as its paired opposite. As Tilly put it, "Crudely speaking, general descriptions and explanations of social processes divide into three categories. Systemic accounts

posit a coherent, self-sustaining entity such as a society, a world-economy, a

20 One of his mentors at the cole normale suprieure, Gaston Bachelard, was also influential in pointing Bourdieu toward a relational way of thinking. 11 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.

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community, an organization, a household, or at the limit a person, explaining events inside that entity by their location within the entity as a whole. . . . Dispositional accounts similarly posit coherent entities - in this case more often individuals than any others - but explain the actions of those entities by means of their orientations just before the point of action. Competing dispositional accounts feature motives, decision logics, emotions, and cultural templates. . . . Transactional accounts take interactions among social sites as their starting points, treating both events at those sites and durable characteristics of those sites as outcomes of interactions. Transactional accounts become relational - another term widely employed in this context - when they focus on persistent features of transactions between specific social sites" (Tilly 2005c, 14; italics in original). There was no doubt as to where Tilly's own sympathies lay.

For Tilly, the great merit of transactional approaches was that they allowed one to center sociological analysis around the identification and delineation of relational mechanisms.22 Here too one finds a deep commonality between his way of thinking and that of Bourdieu. All the more so in his later years, Tilly insisted that analysts seek to generalize, not through the development of what he called "invariant models" - that is, explanations following the recipe: "(1) assume a coherent, durable, self-propelling social unit; (2) attribute a general condition or process to that unit; (3) invoke or invent an invariant model of that condition or process; (4) explain the behavior of the unit on the basis of its conformity to that invariant model" (Tilly 1995, 1595) - but through the invocation of "recurrent causes" which, singly or in concatenation, produce variable but explicable effects. The proper aim of explanation, he held, was "not to give a 'complete' account (whatever that might be) but to get the main connections right" (Tilly 1990, 36). In different "combinations, circumstances, and sequences," "deep causes" would provide the keys to explanation, the point being to build up an inventory of such mechanisms, to specify their operations "with reflective care and multiple examples," and to invoke them as warranted, much as a hydrologist would invoke mechanisms of water flow to analyze specific instances of flooding (Tilly 1995, 1602).23 In a paper presented the year before he died, Tilly identified Robert Merton as a key progenitor of this mechanismic approach. From Merton, he noted, one learns how to develop "theoretically sophisticated accounts of social processes somewhere between the stratosphere of global abstraction and the underground of thick description" (Tilly 2010, 55).

In Bourdieu 's work, the program of a mechanisms-based social science was propounded less explicitly and insistently than in Tilly's. Yet it is fair to say that Bourdieu's own writings are also fairly brimming with mechanisms of different sorts; sociological inquiry, as he practiced it, seeks to generalize from the particular to the general by invoking an array of field-specific (and often field-spanning) causal processes. As an example of this approach, Bourdieu specified and explored carefully the workings of various mechanisms of vulgarization whereby the

22 Perhaps the works in which Tilly most forcefully presented his mechanisms agenda were: Tilly (1998);

McAdam et al. (2001); Tilly and Tarrow (2007); and Tilly (2008b). lilly might also have mentioned the psychoanalyst who draws upon an array of mechanisms of defense

to explain specific instances of neurotic behavior.

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privileged maintain a certain social as well as cultural distance from the dominated. This was one of the key analytic contributions of Distinction. Or, to take another example, he investigated the subtle and little understood processes of "euphemization," that is, of negation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) and sublimation, so skillfully used by philosopher Martin Heidegger in giving expression to his contempt for the masses and for social welfare, an "imposition of form" emblematic of the way in which any cultural producer gives voice to his or her political stance without seeming to do so. This was a signal contribution of Bourdieu's monograph, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Bourdieu 1991 [1988]). When one interpreter of Bourdieu underscored the close association of his work with critical realism, a school of thought in the philosophy of science that posits the reality of underlying causal structures and mechanisms, Bourdieu fully acknowledged the affinity, affirming that, "like [Roy] Bhaskar, whose work he ha[d] recently discovered, he has been a realist all along" (Vandenberghe 1999, 62).24 (Much the same linkage with critical realism has also been highlighted in the case of Tilly's later writings [Steinmetz 2010].) Again, very late in life Bourdieu also came to realize the hidden similarities in this respect between his sociology and that of Merton (at least in intent), pointing out in a favorable light Merton's abiding concern to "reject . . . both concept-less empiricism and data-less theoreticism" (Bourdieu 2004 [2001], 13).

Strikingly, for both Tilly and Bourdieu, "getting the connections right" meant adhering to a program of broad ecumenicalism with respect to the use of methodological tools and approaches. Bourdieu decried the tendency of research traditions in his day to crystallize around this or that specific technique, lamenting memorably that one often finds in sociology "monomaniacs of log-linear modeling, of discourse analysis, of participant observation, of open-ended or in-depth interviewing, or of ethnographic description. . . . We must try," he added, "in every case, to mobilize all the techniques that are relevant and practically usable, given the definition of the object and the practical conditions of data collection Watch out for methodological watchdogs!" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 226, 227). In his own sociological practice, Bourdieu was unusually wide-ranging in his deployment of different methods, making use over the course of his career of virtually the full

panoply of quantitative as well as qualitative approaches. For his part, Tilly was less explicit about the need for methodological pluralism. Yet he did not have to be: he led powerfully by example. As one commentator has put it, "For him the important thing wasn't the methodology but the object to be explained" (Sewell 2010, 311). From early on, Tilly pioneered the development of quantitative social science

history, as in his coauthored work, Strikes in France (Shorter and Tilly 1994; see also Tilly et al. 1975; Tilly 1986a); he also pursued more conventional archival researches. In later years, he also tried his hand at such formal methods of relational

sociology as network analysis "see Tilly (1997)".25 In fact, both thinkers were drawn

powerfully to the use of relational methods, Bourdieu at one point famously stating that correspondence analysis, one of his favorite approaches, was the relational method par excellence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 96).

24 Bhaskar 's seminal works on critical realism are A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1998). 25 See also Tilly and Wood (2003). Tilly was always an ardent enthusiast of social network studies.

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This "whatever works" aspect of their thinking - and practice - was but one indicator of Tilly's and Bourdieu's profound affinities with American pragmatism. Although they came to realize it only later in life, both acknowledged how close they were to the pragmatists in their concern to return to experience (perhaps again in reaction to Parsons); in their interest in relational thinking (Dewey, James, and Mead had always made this a central theme of their work); in their concern to specify the causal mechanisms behind historical outcomes (as Neil Gross has emphasized in this volume [2010]); in their interest in practical action guided less by means-ends reasoning than by the force of dispositions and (largely unconscious) habits; and in their focus on how people engage in (sometimes creative and experimental) efforts at social, interactional, or organizational problem-solving. Tilly remarked in his preface to Why?: "If this were an academic treatise, I would surely . . . trace my line of argument back through American pragmatism via John Dewey and George Herbert Mead," taking pains also to mention the pragmatism-influenced writers Kenneth Burke and C. Wright Mills (Tilly 2006a, x). In Durable Inequality, Tilly also cited Charles Sanders Peirce as an inspiration for his relational thinking, together with the institutional economist John R. Commons, yet another thinker closely aligned with the pragmatist intellectual tradition (Tilly 1998, 18). For his own part, Bourdieu invoked the pragmatists, especially Dewey, at several points in his life's work, including in Pascalian Meditations, where he connected his critiques of scholasti- cism with the pragmatists' analyses of theoretical knowledge; and in Invitation, where, in even more direct terms, he affirmed that "the affinities and convergences [of his work with pragmatism] are quite striking" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 122). It is no accident perhaps that the sweeping influence of Tilly and Bourdieu in present-day social thought coincides so closely with the worldwide upsurge of interest in classical pragmatist philosophy.26

II

However intriguing may have been the similarities between Tilly and Bourdieu, it is instructive as well to note their significant differences. These may be categorized, roughly speaking, as theoretical, methodological, substantive, and moral-practical, with additional differences as well in terms of intellectual styles and temper. Theoretically, the key difference between Tilly and Bourdieu has to do with their respective understandings of relational sociology. As we have noted, Bourdieu stressed that configurations of objective relations among positions in a social or cultural space were of paramount importance. Interactions between discrete entities or actors (individual or collective) mattered far less. Indeed, Bourdieu never tired of stressing the priority of structure over interaction, declaring repeatedly that "the truth of the interaction is not to be found in the interaction itself."27 Occupants of one or several objective positions could have no direct relations with one another but still

26 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. l See, e.g., Bourdieu (2005, 148).

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be mutually determinative. By contrast, Tilly's relationalism was as much about transactions as about structured patterns of relations. In this regard, it resembled White's thinking more than it did Bourdieu's - and was subject to the same criticisms that Bourdieu, in The Social Structures of the Economy, directed at White and, by extension, at other network analysts: "Though he sees the [field in question] as a 'self-reproducing social structure,' [he] seeks the underlying principle behind [actors'] strategies ... not in the constraints inherent in their structural position, but in the observation and deciphering of signals given out by the behavior of other [actors]" (Bourdieu 2005, 207).28 Tilly never developed the sort of field-theoretic approach that marked the social thought of Bourdieu. As a result, his later work (after his relational turn in the 1980s) could fairly be characterized, as Jack Goldstone (2010) has suggested in this volume, as evincing an interactionist undertow even in its most structuralist moments.

A second theoretical difference between Tilly and Bourdieu is closely bound up with this divergence in their respective understandings of relationality. In several of his final works, Tilly moved explicitly onto interactional terrain, in a way unexpectedly reminiscent of his other great contemporary, Erving Goffinan. Early in his career, he had kept a studied distance from the symbolic interactionists, who, as Randall Collins has observed, were, during his formative period at Harvard, more "associated with Chicago and the West" (Collins 2010, 5). However, in his

posthumous work, Contentious Performances, Tilly paid extremely close attention to "the nuances of human interaction" as displayed in "claim-making performances" (Tilly 2008a, 5). And in related work from his later years, he spoke as well of "contentious conversations" and of "the theatrical side of contention" (Tilly 2002a, 118). The performative turn in the social sciences, a development inspired in considerable part by Goffinan 's writings, here seems to have swept up that most

unlikely of objects: the study of social movements and collective action. (Whether or not Tilly succeeded in overcoming his earlier tendencies is another question, for often he would depict performances in a conspicuously instrumentalist fashion.29) In two paired works written during the closing decade of his life, Why and Credit and Blame, Tilly moved even more energetically into the realm of "the interaction order."30 In the first of these works, he examined reason-giving practices, as well as the ways in which these vary depending on the social relations extant between

reason-givers and reason-receivers and the effects of reason-giving upon those relations. In the second work, he took up questions not of the explanations given for behavior but of the justice or injustice ascribed to it. Having gone two-thirds of the

way toward completing the full Kantian triad, he stopped short of examining those acts involved in the making of specifically aesthetic judgments. Yet these two gems of interactional analysis amounted to some of the most imaginative work on the

topic since the seminal writings of Goffinan himself.

28 Bourdieu offers similar criticisms in more impersonal terms in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 1 14: "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." 29SeeBrubaker(2010). ""

Tilly (2006a, 2008c). The phrase "interaction order" comes trom (iottman (iy3).

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In all fairness, it must be acknowledged that Bourdieu, too, moved subtlety onto interactionist terrain in one of his final publications, The Social Structures of the Economy, in which he devoted a full chapter to examining the conversational interactions between the sellers and buyers of single-family homes. In a forceful statement propounding a dialectical perspective on objectivism and subjectivism, he argued: "Action or interaction cannot be understood either as a mere mechanical effectuation of the structure ... or as a communicative action that could be explained without taking account of the structural necessity expressed in it. ... Far from being a mere ratification of the structure of the economic relation, the interaction is an actualization of that structure - an always uncertain actualization, both in its course, which is full of suspense and surprises, and in its very existence. . ." (Bourdieu 2005, 175). In other words, structure and interaction mutually presuppose one another. Given this interrelation, they are, in principle, equally important to investigate.31 Despite these insights, however, Bourdieu never fully recanted on his formula of the priority of structure over interaction; his acknowledgment here of interaction indicated more an implicit concession on his part than an avowed and explicit shift in his thinking. As Jeffrey Alexander has observed of master theorists in general, "theoretical strains are often unacknowledged [by them.] ... Yet they are privately experienced . . ., and as [these thinkers] confront . . . theoretical criticisms of [their] work [they] may implicitly alter [their] commitments. . . . The problem is that these revisions are ad hoc. . . . They occur inconsistently, and usually in the theoretical interstices. As a result, the categories they introduce will be merely residual to the main line of theoretical argument" (Alexander 1982, 300).

One other theoretical respect in which Tilly differed markedly from Bourdieu was in the lesser significance he accorded the social-psychological level of analysis. For Bourdieu, the key to understanding how domination is perpetuated lay in the habitus, that system of dispositions and taken-for-granted ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling that served, in his view, as the generator of strategies of action (marital strategies, fertility strategies, educational strategies, and so forth). Intentions and choices were not the major wellsprings of action; rather, the important source was to be found in habitual modes of engagement internalized through primary socialization and tweaked or modified, or in rare cases reshaped, through secondary training. Appropriating the idea of the habitus from Aristotelian-Thomistic thought - and from twentieth-century social thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Boudieu devoted so much attention to it that it became perhaps his signature theoretical concept.32 No comparable notion is to be found in Tilly's massive life's work. Although he did speak in some of his later writings of identities, he never developed a systematic account of the social psychology of domination.33 Relatedly, his implicit theory of action always retained a somewhat rationalistic cast - despite his expressed misgivings about rational choice theory.34 And the study of everyday forms of domination, to which the habitus concept lent

31 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.

For Tilly's perspective on the concept of identity, see, e.g., Tilly (2002b); McAdam et al. (2001, eh. 5). " Une sees this perhaps most clearly m Tilly (1978).

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itself especially, never preoccupied him nearly so much as the investigation of large- scale political developments and conflict. Hence an idea such as symbolic violence, perhaps the very linchpin of Bourdieu's sociology - the idea that domination is reproduced in part through the active if unwitting complicity of the dominated - never appeared, explicitly or implicitly, in any of Tilly's voluminous writings.35

So much for the principal theoretical differences between Tilly and Bourdieu. Perhaps the fundamental methodological difference lay, as mentioned earlier, in the respective emphases they placed on the specification of causal mechanisms. For the later Tilly, mechanisms were all-important. Indeed, after the 1980s, his writings were chock full of exhortations to move toward a fully mechanismic social science. His collaborative writings (with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow) on contentious politics centered squarely on this agenda, one mechanism after another, not to mention also compounded sets of mechanisms, which were termed "processes," being identified across those several studies.36 Perhaps the hegemony, at least in American social science, of statistical variable-based analysis prompted this concern (in France, by contrast, quantitative sociology enjoyed nowhere near the same level of prestige and influence); or, somewhat closer to home, perhaps it was the strategic invocation of statistical reasoning in highly acclaimed works of historical sociology such as Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (Skocpol 1979). Whatever the reason, Tilly made causal mechanisms his methodological rallying-cry, while Bourdieu laid considerably less stress upon them, preferring instead to think in terms of field dynamics. (The sense on the part of many readers of Dynamics of Contention and other such mechanism-based works that they feature a disorderly cacophany of mechanisms might be traceable, in fact, to Tilly's not relating mechanisms back to fields.) It might also be mentioned that Tilly focused on "large-n" projects to a far greater degree than did Bourdieu, who sought instead to overcome the universalism/ particularism divide by studying specific fields in depth so as to observe both what made them like other fields and what made them distinct. In Bourdieu, one finds the vision of a general theory of fields; in Tilly, one finds middle-range generalizations based on dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of observations of protest events and other such instances of collective action.37

Substantively speaking, the divergences between Tilly and Bourdieu were considerable. First, and perhaps on account of Tilly's lack of interest in developing a field-theoretic approach, one centered around the idea of relatively autonomous spaces or microcosms of social life, he never elaborated anything like a Weberian theory of societal differentiation - in this respect quite unlike Bourdieu, who was increasingly preoccupied, in his middle and later years, with working out a historical sociology of modernity. (It should be remembered also that Parsons 's own efforts at historical and sociological analysis, like those of his followers and colleagues, such as S.N. Eisenstadt, were explicitly Weberian. On a biographical level, this might well have been an important factor leading Tilly away from any attempt to formulate a sweeping theory of modernity, although in fairness it must also be pointed out that

35 For an especially illuminating discussion of symbolic violence, see Bourdieu (2001 f 19981). 36 See, e.g., McAdam et al. (2001); Tilly and Tarrow (2007). 37 To capture the difference in sensibility and vision, compare, e.g., Bourdieu (1993 [1984]) with Tilly (1981c).

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his own later works of historical analysis, with subtitles such as "1768-2004," "1492-1992," "1650-2000," and even "AD 990-1990," were themselves no less expansive in temporal scope.38) What one finds in Tilly are historically grounded accounts of large-scale shifts in the character and structure of states; in repertoires of contention drawn upon by actors involved in political conflict; and in the extent and scope of processes of democratization. He was far too ambivalent toward grand theorizing to conceive of anything like a comprehensive theory of the modern world.

A second substantive difference between Tilly and Bourdieu has to do with their sharply contrasting modes of engagement with Durkheimian sociology. For Tilly, Durkheim unequivocally signified structural-fiinctionalism, and he responded to the former as negatively as he did to the latter, even penning in the 1970s a vigorously worded critique entitled "Useless Durkheim" (Tilly 1981b). Meanwhile, Bourdieu, like so many others in the French intellectual scene, was deeply influenced by Durkheim and never felt the need to repudiate him. On the contrary, he made frequent empirical use of Durkheimian concepts, from that of habitus itself (deployed by Durkheim in The Evolution of Educational Thought [Durkheim 1977 (1938)]) to such ideas as organic solidarity (Bourdieu characterized the inner life of the field of power as an "organic solidarity in the division of the labor of domination");39 or the sacred and the profane (a crucial idea in his theory of social stratification; indeed, references to "consecration" processes abound in Bourdieu's writings); or the ritual process (in analyses of what Bourdieu termed '*rites of institution," or boundary-formation processes that separate the consecrated from the profanized).40 Their respective attitudes toward Durkheim also had profound consequences for Tilly's and Bourdieu's efforts at cultural analysis. Even as Tilly moved toward a greater appreciation of culture, he tended to emphasize performance (symbolic actions) over systems of classification (symbolic structures). Bourdieu, by contrast, was concerned as early as his youthful exercises in ethnology, inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss, to analyze cultural structures. Indeed, the binary image (in the Elementary Forms [Durkheim 1995 (1912)]) of religious systems of classification proved of lasting importance to him, even as his own later work shifted to the study of modern European societies.

A final set of substantive differences between Tilly and Bourdieu has to do with their markedly contrasting degrees of interest in collective action and societal transformation, on the one hand, and social stratification, on the other. Perhaps wrongly, Bourdieu has been depicted, at least in the Anglo-American scene, as a "reproduction theorist" on account of his relentless focus on the mechanisms whereby dominants in various kinds of social worlds maintain their ascendancy. His work was actually full of engagements with historical processes and social change, and, in particular, Homo Academicus set forth a compelling view of historical ruptures as proceeding from the convergence of (originally causally independent) field-specific developments (Bourdieu 1988 [1984], chs. 4-5). As mentioned earlier, however, this was his only sustained work on an episode of political contention. And clearly, Tilly was far more concerned over the course of his career with studying contentious politics than was Bourdieu. The former's contributions to the sociological under-

38 See Tilly (2004b, 1993a, 2004a, 1990). 39 See, e.g., Bourdieu (1993a, 25); see also the more extended discussion in Bourdieu (1996 [1989], 386-88). see Bouraieu (jyyib, c); see also (lwo Livyj, 102-15).

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standing of revolutions, social movements, and other forms of political conflict were perhaps the most important of those of any social thinker over the second half of the twentieth century. Despite fielding challenges from a number of quarters, most prominently from collective identity approaches during the 1980s, Tilly's way of thinking about collective action attained to a hegemonic status in the field, one only further reinforced by his later collaborations with McAdam and Tarrow, among others, in what came to be known as the "dynamics of contention" program.41

By contrast, Bourdieu was much more engaged across his life's work with the study of social stratification. Indeed, virtually the entirety of his output was concerned in one way or another with how domination works in social life. In Distinction, The State Nobility, and other major writings, he elaborated a vision of modern society as stratified in terms of class, with the different class groupings objectively distinguished from one another by the volume and type of capital they possess, as well as by their trajectory through the social space.42 (The ascendant petit bourgeoisie was by no means to be understood as identical to the declining petit bourgeoisie, even though the asset structures of those two class fractions might be outwardly similar.43) Tilly came to the study of social stratification late in his career, although it can also be argued that he had dealt with issues of power and inequality ever since his earliest work. In Durable Inequality, he sought nothing less than to reorient the entire field. Much like Bourdieu, he set out to understand how

inequitable relations can be so enduring even in the midst of far-reaching structural

change. Rejecting conventional social stratification research (e.g., the status attainment tradition) as insuffiently relational - "These analyses fail ... to the extent that essential causal business takes place not inside individuals] . . . but within social relations among persons and sets of persons" (Tilly 1998, 33) - he

proposed instead a mechanisms-based, social-organizational account of the production and reproduction of categorical inequalities. To date, Tilly's approach has been picked up by more than a few prominent researchers, as Kim Voss (2010) points out in this volume. Nonetheless, it remains more a specification of mechanisms one must consider, a set of tools for exploring substantive topics such as chain migration or

opportunity hoarding by ethnic groups, than a major new historically grounded theory of the stratification structures and processes of modern societies. Why have the mechanisms which Tilly identifies - e.g., exploitation - come to be predominant in modern times? Unlike, for instance, Marx in Capital, he does not say.44

Yet another set of differences between Tilly and Bourdieu concerns their

respective stances on normative, moral-political issues. Bourdieu was more

politically engaged than was Tilly and, by the time of his passing, had become the

leading public intellectual in France. Although some have argued that political engagement was woven deeply into the fabric of his thought from the outset - and let us not forget that the Algerian flag, symbol of the Algerian independence

41 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)], 1 14ff). 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. 43 See Bourdieu (1984 [1979]), ch. 6. 44 See Marx (1990 [1867]).

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movement and of anticolonial resistance to France, was emblazoned upon the cover of his very first book, The Algerians - it is certainly also true that, by the end, he had moved decisively into social commentary and political intervention, as evidenced by the many topical pieces he penned (now collected in Acts of Resistance, The Firing Line; and Political Interventions);45 his leadership of a collaborative inquiry into the effects of neoliberalism in contemporary society (culminating in his best-selling volume; The Weight of the World [Bourdieu et al. 1999 (1993)]; and his involvement in collective efforts by European intellectuals on behalf of progressive societal change.46 For his part, Tilly began very much as a professional sociologist, and he remained one throughout his career. Like Bourdieu, he became more involved later in life in speaking to the key issues of the day, intervening, for instance, in debates on the meaning of 9/11 immediately following those terrorist attacks; warning against demagogic reactions; aiming to "identify errors in the public discussion"; and hoping to "stimulate more creative and constructive thinking about alternatives." However, he also stressed that he "wasn't advocating anything." In a Weberian, value-free spirit, he wrote: "When confronted with momentous political and moral choices, social scientists have a professional opportunity and obligation to distinguish between their preferences for certain actions and outcomes, on the one hand, and [scientific formulations], on the other" (Tilly 200 1).47 It was clear which of these alternatives Tilly favored; engaged scholarship was to be subordinated, as always, to conventional academic thinking.48

Even more important than the sheer volume of their topical writings or political engagements, however, was the fundamental significance of normative reasoning to Tilly's and Bourdieu's intellectual projects. Bourdieu developed a theory of what he called the Realpolitik of reason, in which he staked a claim on behalf of moral and political universalism while suggesting that the universal advances in history, not through the pure intentions of scientists, jurists, civil servants, politicians, and the like, but because, as he put it in Pascalian Meditations, "there are social microcosms which, in spite of their intrinsic ambiguity, linked to their enclosure in the privilege and satisfied egoism of a separation by status, are the site of struggles in which the prize is the universal and in which agents who, to differing degrees depending on their position and trajectory, have a particular interest in the universal, in reason, truth, virtue, engage themselves with weapons which are nothing other than the most universal conquests of the previous struggles" (Bourdieu 2000 [1997], 123; italics in original). Only through such a theory of reason in history, he claimed, could one

45 See Bourdieu (1998c, 2003 [2001], 2008 [2002]). 46 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). 48 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).

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hope to "extend and radicalize the critical intention of Kantian rationalism" (Bourdieu 2000 [1997], 120).49 Tilly was similarly concerned to vindicate the role of reason at least in social thought, arguing strenuously against postmodernist historicism and inveighing in one of his later essays against versions of relativism that question "the intersubjective verifiability of statements about social life," a fallacy leading, in his view, directly to "softcore solipsism" (Tilly 2002c, 16).50 (His heavy stress on generalizable mechanismic explanations stems in part from this very concern about postmodernism.) However, despite the vigor with which Tilly asserted his critiques, the place in his thinking of normative cum philosophical reflection was marginal. He said little or nothing about the progressive role of the universal in history, and even in his writings on democratization, where such issues might well have been raised, he chose instead to proceed strictly as an empirical and historical analyst.51

Likely because of his abiding commitment to the idea of a Realpolitik of reason, Bourdieu was deeply concerned to promote the practice of reflexivity in scientific life, to an even greater degree than was Tilly, who also sounded that theme on occasion. Ideally, critical reflexivity would make visible the effects on one's thinking of occupying a certain position in the social space; of adhering to the doxa that define specific and delimited fields within that space; and of being shaped by life-

experiences marked by distance from practical necessities (skhol), "of which the academic world represents the institutionalized form" (Bourdieu 2000 [1997], 13). The last of these was especially significant, for sociologists were often drawn by the conditions of their intellectual production - and by the intellectual dispositions produced by those conditions - to elaborate thoroughly ahistorical and atemporal ways of thinking. By shedding light on these effects, reflexivity would mark a crucial step toward the opening-up of inquiry and an enlargement, at least to some

degree, of our freedom from determination. Indeed, it would allow scholars to begin gaining control over the unacknowledged forces otherwise working through them and behind their backs. Bourdieu stressed that such reflexive labor might be undertaken most effectively not by the solitary, heroic intellectual but by a

community of inquirers bound together by a logic of peer competition and

"regulated struggle."52 Much as Freud had once declared, "Where id was, there

ego shall be" (Freud 1965 [1933], 71), Bourdieu hoped that this mechanism of collective socioanalysis would help to emancipate social scientists from the structures that constitute their own intellectual and scholarly unconscious. Tilly, too, was aware of the importance of directing a critical gaze back upon the

assumptions guiding social scientific research. Nothing could be more congenial to

49 On the occasion of his final lectures at the Collge 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 [20011), 54; italics in original. 50

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). 51 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 cole normale suprieure, Gaston Bachelard. See Bourdieu et al. (1991 [1968]).

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him, in fact, than the project of radically questioning the "standard stories" we so often tell about the social world and our own interventions within it. However, the theme of reflexivity was nowhere near as developed or as prominent in his thinking as it was in Bourdieu's.53

A final set of differences between Tilly and Bourdieu has to do with their respective intellectual styles. Bourdieu was the more theoretically systematic of the two, while seeking, like Tilly himself, always to avoid falling into theoreticism, which he deplored. Indeed, he devoted several important works, such as Outline of a Theory of Practice, The Logic of Practice, Pascalian Meditations, and An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, to presenting his distinctive theoretical ideas and perspective (Bourdieu 1977 [1972], 1990 [1980], 2000 [1997]; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Perhaps because of having studied philosophy at the cole normale suprieure, he was highly self-conscious about the epistemological underpinnings of his work, the relation of his ideas to established currents in philosophy and social thought, and the philosophy of science implications of his way of doing sociology. Not only were his philosophy teachers, Gaston Bachelard and Geoiges Canguilhem, referenced throughout his writings, but he also alluded frequently - and with startling precision and deftness - to such master thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Wittgenstein. Put simply, Bourdieu's writings were consistently more philosophically rich and subtle than those of Tilly, which, by contrast, hewed close to the less exalted, more down-to-earth, norms of Anglo-American social science writing. Although Tilly later came to see certain lines of continuity between his own insights and those of various philosophers, such as the pragmatists, and although he came also to invoke ideas on occasion from Western philosophy - a discussion of Aristotle's classification of political constitutions appears in Regimes and Repertoires (Tilly 2006b, 8-1 0)54 - he was always far too much the empirical sociologist to devote time and energy to pondering the finer points of connection between his own work and the Western canon.

This discrepancy also sheds light on other notable differences between the two sociologists, specifically in their writing styles and manners of expression. Despite producing notoriously complex and forbidding prose, Bourdieu fashioned himself something of the literary stylist, continually seeking beauty of expression and elegance in his formulations and achieving, at least for those patient and persevering enough to get past the initial difficulties, a certain measure of literary grace. Moreover, one never finds in his prose lengthy strings of citations (although his endnotes were often full of references) or the names of any but the most fundamental of thinkers (Aristotle, Kant, Marx, and Weber frequently appear there but only rarely the most recent authors in AJS or ASK). A classic exemplar of French intellectual aristocratism, Bourdieu raised empirical sociology to a level equal to that of the most exalted academic writing of the twentieth century.55 By contrast, Tilly, something of a literary stylist himself, as evidenced by his lean and vigorous prose interspersed with telling examples and illustrations, preferred instead a more punchy and efficient style.56 He also liked to cite the work of relatively young and unrecognized scholars,

53 See, e.g., (Tilly 2002d, 25-42); Tilly (2006a). See also the discussion of Aristotle s theory of the emotions in Tilly (1999). For some reflections on his own writing stvle. see Bourdieu 1996 F 19921. 177-78 Y

56 For an example of Tilly's thoughts on social science writing, see Tilly (1986b).

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conveying the sense less of timeless profundity than of an evolving and collaborative research program. Among the most striking features of his writing style, moreover -

and one that would become nearly inescapable during his later years- was his

extraordinary reliance upon lists of points. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, would be presented in the form of a list, a mode of expression that, while

surely economical, also detracted from the pleasure of following his complex and careful arguments. Perhaps nowhere was the stereotypical difference between French and American sensibilities, between the Old World and the New, between aristocratic and democratic styles (to invoke the Tocquevillean binary), so clearly marked as in these literary discrepancies.57

Ill

One is tempted to assign Bourdieu to the highest rank of sociological thinkers, alongside such canonical masters as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim - while consigning Tilly to the second tier, alongside such influential and enduring contributors as Merton, White, and Goffinan. In Bourdieu, one encounters a remarkable confluence of qualities - sheer philosophic and analytic depth, substantive scope, and moral-

political insight and relevance - that Tilly simply cannot match, despite his own formidable accomplishments of an empirical and methodological nature.58 Indeed, in reading Bourdieu's work, one feels oneself in the presence of an intellect of

superior rank, one possessed of a degree of subtlety and sophistication that make him all but peerless in twentieth-century social thought. Perhaps the difference can be ascribed to their respective formative milieux, which allowed Bourdieu to

develop intellectually in ways that Tilly could not, to cultivate those added dimensions one fails to discern in his American counterpart. Perhaps the answer lies in the tacit expectations Bourdieu encountered within his own professional context, the peculiar academic consecration (combined with isolation from

graduate students) bestowed upon him by his lofty perch at the Collge de France. Or perhaps it was the special burden, the unique fate or destiny, he felt

(despite himself) to become a matre d penser on the model of a Sartre or a Levi- Strauss, on account of the profound obsession with (intellectual) kingship so distinctive of French cultural life.

There is also the fact that, in one other crucial respect, these two master thinkers evolved in different directions. It is not simply that, in his later years, Tilly produced too much too quickly, as is often said of him partly in admiration

(tinged with envy) and partly in lament. (He probably did produce too much, but the dropoff in quality was nowhere near as significant as his detractors would have it.) Rather, it is that the nature of the work he produced shifted importantly after the early triumph of The Vende, his great masterpiece. In Sewell, Jr.'s words, "Although he never ceased to prowl the archives, his later work was much more in

57 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.

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the mold of previous historical sociology: it reached for broad generalizations about macrohistorical trends, and its archival finds generally served as illustrations of those trends rather than as means of drilling ever more deeply into the operation of social systems. [One misses,] in the later work, the sense of creative tension between the particular and the general" (Sewell, Jr. 2010, 313). Bourdieu's work, too, can be said to have become less vital during his final years, at least by comparison to the astonishing vitality of his middle period, that span of years that yielded such colossal achievements as Homo Academicus, Distinction, The State Nobility, and The Rules of Art. However, Bourdieu was also working on yet another major study at the time of his passing, a book on Manet and the nineteenth- century field of French painting, which was to have been the companion volume to The Rules of Art.59 And he retained his interest in the particular (in relation to the general) and was continuing to do painstaking empirical research. This concern for specificity, which seemed to ebb somewhat in Tilly's last decade as he shifted toward more of a didactic role (even in his written work), stayed with Bourdieu to the very end.

To leave it at that, however, would be grossly inadequate, for we would short- sightedly be underestimating the likely future impact of Tilly's unrivaled pedagogy, an impact that in later years may well surpass Bourdieu's own, much as Merton's has surpassed nearly everyone else's. Even beyond his written oeuvre, Tilly found ways of passing down the craft of sociology he had himself so fully mastered, much as medieval artisans or Quattrocento painters (to borrow a favorite Bourdieuian analogy) handed down the trade in their own workshops.60 Reaching back to the master teachers of the past, one thinks here of no less than Durkheim himself, or of Robert Park, or perhaps of Tilly's old colleague at Michigan, Otis Dudley Duncan. (Closer to our own times, one thinks of Harrison White.) All these figures exerted a lasting influence not merely through their publications but also through their teaching. This is the side of Tilly best remembered in the many compelling testimonials of his students and collaborators - and also in his various pieces, large and small, on research practice. (Even From Mobilization to Revolution, often seen as a scholarly treatise, was written originally as a shop manual for coworkers and apprentices.) It is not for nothing that Tilly has been called "the founding father of twenty-first century sociology."61 In the end, it is difficult, if not meaningless, to seek to prioritize his and Bourdieu's respective contributions and accomplishments. Social thinkers will continue to grapple with their far-ranging insights - and the magnificent bodies of work they left behind - for decades to come. Both belonged to that rare breed: the absolute masters of their craft. Today they stand as indispensable guides to the sociological enterprise. Tilly and Bourdieu both: supreme embodiments of the art of doing good sociology. Their work will be remembered for as long as the enterprise lives on.

59 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). 1 Martin (2008). The quotation is attributed to Adam Ashforth.

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