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 | Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition We continue today (May 9, 2000) our book review feature with Charles Tilly's reviews Stephen Sanderson's "Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition." Stephen Sanderson writes a response clarifying his position. Share your thoughts on the book or the reviews by posting a message in the discussion forum. This review will be published in paper form in the Canadian Journal of History. |
Reply to Tilly
Stephen K. Sanderson (SKSANDER@grove.iup.edu)
Charles Tilly is well known as one of the toughest critics around, so it is rare that someone will emerge from one of his reviews unscathed. I, of course, am no exception. In this light, I am gratified that Tilly sees my Social Transformations as a very useful historiographic and synthetic complement to traditional world history. But what are his objections? Let us take them in their order of severity.
Tilly complains most about my failure to show how, in my new theory that I call synthetic materialism, I fail to show how biologically driven individual mechanisms become aggregated into complex systems of stratification and power. Because of this, Tilly concludes that my theoretical ambitions greatly exceed my actual accomplishments. This would be true if the afterword to the expanded edition were the last word on the subject; it is, however, barely the first word and is only intended to establish a link between that work and my latest book, Synthetic Materialism: A Unified Evolutionary Theory of Human Society. In this work, which is virtually finished and should appear in the spring of 2001, the general theory is laid out in much greater detail, mechanisms linking the individual and the aggregate levels are specified, and some 300 manuscript pages are devoted to a basic summary of some of the evidence that supports the theory. With this book I think that the gap between ambition and accomplishment is closed considerably, which is not to say that Tilly would necessarily agree with the book’s arguments. In fact, he probably wouldn't.
There are two less severe criticisms made by Tilly. In the first instance, he criticizes my definition of the state as an organization having a monopoly of violence over a specified territory and claims that no government that could be called a state has ever maintained such a monopoly. Tilly misses the point. As I make clear on pp. 56-57, the argument is not that a state must have a complete monopoly over the means of violence, only that it must control the means of violence to such an extent that it can nearly always crush successful rebellion from below. Of course it is true that in, for example, the contemporary United States, some means of violence are in the hands of everyday citizens. This is probably the case in all states, both modern and premodern. But the means of violence in the hands of the citizenry are extremely feeble relative to those in the hands of the state. As an expert on revolutions and other forms of collective violence, Tilly knows quite well that true social revolutions are relatively rare, and never occurred at all prior to the early modern world.
Tilly's other minor criticism--I guess I would call it minor--is a lament that I chose an academic writing style rather than the more breezy, informal style of a Dan Sperber or a Jared Diamond. The criticism that an academic is using an academic writing style is, I have to admit, rather baffling. I haven't read Sperber, but Diamond's latest book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, is clearly intended for a mass as well as an academic audience (one sees it in popular bookstores). That is a choice an author makes. Social Transformations was certainly not intended for a popular audience, and I plead guilty to using the more academic style of a Gerhard Lenski or an Immanuel Wallerstein. The odd thing about Tilly's criticism is that it is the opposite of that usually made--"vulgar popularization"-- which seems to me a much more serious charge.