Explaining Social Processes

Built upon decades of experience at the frontiers of history and social science, Charles Tilly's newest book offers innovative methods and approaches applicable in a wide range of disciplines: politics, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and more.The book covers approaches to analysis ranging from interpersonal exchanges to world-historical changes-economic, political, and social. He shows how a thoroughgoing relational account of social processes, coupled with the careful identification of causal mechanisms, illuminates variation and change in the ways people live at the small scale and the large. Between an introduction and a conclusion, the three central sections-Concepts and Observations, Explanations and Comparisons, and Historical Analysis-move from adequate observations and descriptions to explanations (with special emphasis on systematic comparison as an aid to explanation), then to applications in historical treatments of social processes. Some of the chapters (for example "Iron City Blues," which reflects on a book by S. N. Eisenstadt) present critiques of particular pieces of work. Others (for example, "Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists") clear up conceptual and explanatory confusion in some current area of dispute. Most, however, address substantial methodological problems in something like the style of an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course on social analysis. The book as a whole sums up broad methodological conclusions from a lifetime of research at the frontiers of history and social science.