對於社會史學家來說， Charles Tilly 的幾本大作，幾乎沒有不知曉的。無意間得知大師闔然遺世，令人感到遺撼。私下在上個月中就寫了這篇文，放到現在貼出來。
Social Science Research Council 建立了一個追思網頁，敬悼這位力倡歷史社會學研究的大師，網址於下：
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/
其他的報紙相關報導如下：
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/other-tributes
Calhoun 對於 Tilly 的悼辭一如他的作品一樣清楚扼要，他拿了 Tilly 與 Hirschman 相互比較的說法我很喜歡：
"Both wrote clear books that made complicated and nuanced analyses
seem almost obvious—but only after their lucid formulations."
確然，在這個爭相追求「小題大作」，重覆生產的年代，讓直覺清楚的 articulate 是多麼困難的一件事！
不只為這個世界少一個專家惋惜，更為少了一個學科領域開創者哀悼～
http://tinyurl.com/5wa7tt
Charles Tilly, 78, Writer and a Social Scientist, Is Dead
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: May 2, 2008
Correction Appended
Charles Tilly, a social scientist who combined historical interpretation and quantitative analysis in a voluminous outpouring of work to forge often novel intellectual interpretations — as when he compared nation states to protection rackets — died on Tuesday in the Bronx. He was 78.
Eileen Barroso/Columbia University, 2002
The cause was lymphoma, said John H. Tucker, a spokesman for Columbia University, where Dr. Tilly was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science.
Dr. Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and contemporary accounts — including municipal archives, unpublished letters and diaries — that he used to develop theories applicable to many contexts. A particular interest was the development of the nation state in Europe, which he suggested was partly a military innovation.
In his 1990 book “Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990” (Blackwell), he argued that the increasingly large costs of gunpowder and large armies required big, powerful nation states with the power to tax.
In 1985, he gave early indications of his argument that war made states in an article that said nation states, with their monopolies on violence, function like gangsters’ protection rackets. He said that governments emphasize, create and stimulate external threats, then ask their citizens to pay for defense.
“Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” he wrote in a chapter of “Bringing the State Back In” (Cambridge), which was edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol.
Provocative and profound ideas repeatedly appeared in Dr. Tilly’s 51 books and monographs and more than 600 scholarly articles. Marshaling insights from sociology and political science, both of which he taught, he took on subjects including urban migration, the French Revolution, the dynamics of political contention and the sociology of trusting others.
In “Credit and Blame” (Princeton), published this year, he drew on sources from Dostoyevsky to Darwin and from the office water cooler to truth commissions to examine how people fault and applaud each other and themselves. In “The Contentious French” (Belknap, 1986) he plowed through four centuries of history to describe the French as ordinary people fighting for their interests against implacable state power and advancing capitalism.
In his 2006 book “Why?” (Princeton), he tried to make systematic sense of people’s reasons for giving reasons. Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker said the book “forces readers to re-examine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.”
Dr. Tilly devoted a considerable part of his work to methods used by social science. He parted with some historians by advocating the use of numbers to come up with testable hypotheses, and with some sociologists by insisting — with Marx and Weber, he said — that the historical context of cause and effect greatly matters.
In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. Tilly “the founding father of 21st-century sociology.” He particularly praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft and politics in South Africa.
Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.
“It was exhausting keeping up with him,” Dr. Ashforth said. “We’ll now have a chance to catch up with our reading.”
Charles Tilly was born on May 27, 1929, in Lombard, Ill., and in 1950 graduated from Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in sociology in 1958. He also studied at Oxford and the Catholic University of Angers, France. He served in the Navy during the Korean War.
He taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan and what is now the New School before joining Columbia in 1996. He taught at many other schools in North America and Europe for shorter periods.
Dr. Tilly is survived by his former wife and sometime collaborator, Louise Audino Tilly, of Evanston, Ill.; his brothers Richard, of Würzburg, Germany, and Stephen, of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.; his sister, Carolyn Williams, of Serena, Ill.; his son, Chris, of Boston; his daughters Kit Tilly of Hamilton, Mont., Laura Tilly of Evanston and
Sarah Tilly, of Manhattan; seven grandchildren; and two great- grandchildren.
Dr. Tilly received many awards, the latest of which was the Albert O. Hirschman Award from the Social Science Research Council this year. He liked to brag that he managed never to hold an office in a professional association or the chairmanship of a university department — though he did head several research institutes.
Dr. Tilly once said his goal was to do sociology, history and political analysis at the same time, but he said it with what colleagues said was his typical intellectual humility.
“My efforts to harmonize all three have always failed in one way or another,” he said in an interview with Contemporary Authors, “but the failures, happily, are usually of the kind from which one learns something useful.”
On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, “One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 7, 2008
An obituary on Friday about Charles Tilly, a prolific theorist of social science, misstated his relationship to three survivors — Kit Tilly, Laura Tilly and Sarah Tilly. They are his daughters, not his sisters. Because of an editing error, the name of his former wife and sometime collaborator was rendered incompletely. She is Louise Audino Tilly, not Louise Audino.
Read More......
很久沒有參與這樣大規模的活動，心情淡然不少。和著戰敗後的感想，彷彿有著某種「同仇敵慨」。儘管，妳必需同意，這樣的感覺，缺乏足夠的事實支持。南部來的鄉親，簇擁著夾在龍山寺的大草皮上，開心地拿了手上的標語牌話家常，今個兒，他們自己出了錢，來參加週末這場嘉年華。媒體的偏執，似乎對他們沒有一絲影響，長輩的堅定，真的是不怕檢驗。
