Democracy

by Charles Tilly

Book Overview

Charles Tilly's Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521701538
• ISBN13: 9780521701532
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Thorough and thoughtful perspective on democracy

Prof. Tilly's analysis of democratic theory and practice was insightful and supported by excellent historical examples. I highly recommend it to students and scholars of democratic theory. Steve Parliament University of Wisconsin River Falls

An ambitious but incomplete undertaking

Chuck Tilly's latest book is an ambitious work, and sets out to provide an explanatory account of the emergence of democracy in the modern world. In short, Prof. Tilly argues that there are three key processes crucial to the emergence of democracy - these being the integration of trust-based social networks into public politics, the insulation of public politics from the major inequalities in society, and the reining-in of "autonomous centers of power" by which he means private militias, religious sects and the like. As always, Prof. Tilly's work is highly readable, often entertaining, and chockfull of rich historical details. This relatively slim book is well-organized into 8 intuitive chapters, and amply illustrated with easy-to-understand diagrams and boxes. The book's greatest strengths are its conceptual clarity (succinctly laid out in the opening chapters) and sweeping historical perspective (examples cited range from peasant protests in contemporary China to the failed negotiations in 431 BCE that led to the Second Peloponnesian War). Unfortunately, with regard to the main explanatory objective of the book, the author fails to fully deliver. Part of the problem is the analytical style adopted by the author. While I believe that a rigorous historical analysis can be as compelling as the most sophisticated statistical model, analysis also has to far transcend mere narrative. Consider for instance the chapter on trust. The author provides a colorful narrative of the growth of ethnic/religious social networks in 19th century America and their role as vote-getting mechanisms in the party machines. While the author's argument that such networks helped strengthen American democracy seems plausible, to convincingly establish the point the author would have to address the counter-factual - which is that American democracy would have been weakened if such networks were not integrated into the political machines. Or at least, for those of us who dislike counterfactual speculation, it should be shown that democracies which attempted to segregate such networks proved more fragile. Instead, the chapter went on to a meandering discussion of social networks in Argentina and Mexico, which only gives the impression that despite the integration of trust networks into politics, these countries still went down the authoritarian path. Strictly speaking, the Latin American examples do not refute the original point, which never claims that trust networks are sufficient for democracy. But if these later cases do not strengthen the argument, why bring them in at all? Similar problems also plague the chapters on inequality and non-state centers of power. These issues are related to a more fundamental problem, which is the logical constraint that the author places on his project. From the outset the author firmly declares that no sufficient condition for democracy exists. He also declares that no necessary condition exists although he later concedes