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DOI 10.1007/s12108-010-9105-y

Chuck Tilly and Mozart

Viviana A. Zelizer

Published online: 21 August 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract With Mozart-like versatility, Charles Tillys brilliant investigations covered

a remarkable range of topics and methodologies. This paper highlights two of Tillys
lesser-known contributions: as cultural analyst and as feminist scholar. It also
introduces his concern with the place of normative arguments in social research.
Keywords Culture . Gender . Ethics
In his lively biography of Mozart, Peter Gay (1999) tells us about the all-Mozart concert
of March 23, 1783, where Mozart acted as conductor and soloist in the presence of
Emperor Joseph II. Among the ten featured pieces, Mozart included the Haffner
Symphony, number 35, the Aria Se il padre perdei, from Idomeneo, Piano Concerto
in C, No. 13, Aria Parto, maffretto, from Lucio Silla, and Fugue for piano.
What makes this program so stunning, Gay comments, is not just that Mozart
played only his music that evening, or that he inserted a popular showpiece and an
improvisation... but that all numbers except for a couple, were of recent vintage.
His fertility, Gay notes, had become almost legendary... Not even Beethoven or
Schubert would match Mozart in his sheer versatility (Gay 1999: 75; 102).
Sounds familiar? Indeed, as the essays in this volume amply document, Chuck
Tillys sociological versatility was likewise daunting. He relished simultaneous
multiple endeavors. As I read Gays biography, I recalled a conversation with Chuck
from some years ago. We were comparing styles of work in academia with the arts,
when he told me that he liked to think of his own approach to creative work as
somewhat akin to Mozarts. Why? I asked. Because, he confided, of the pleasure he
felt in contributing to so many different fields and varying genres.
This paper is a slightly revised version of my presentation at the Memorial Conference for Chuck Tilly
which took place in October 2008 at Columbia University, New York City. My thanks to Paul DiMaggio,
Michael Katz, Pierre Kremp, Andreas Koller, and Leandro Rotman for helpful comments and suggestions.
Andreas Koller deserves our collective gratitude for his exceptional efforts in organizing the 2009 sessions
honoring Chuck at the Social Science History Association meetings and for editing this volume.
V. A. Zelizer (*)
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
e-mail: vzelizer@princeton.edu

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In the spirit of celebrating Chucks buoyant versatility, his bubbling cornucopia of

ideas, I highlight here two of his less visible yet vital contributions. I will report
briefly on Chuck the cultural analyst and Chuck the feminist scholar. A fair warning:
this essay is by no means a comprehensive analysis of Chucks work in these areas.
It represents only a modest reminder of some less salient Tilly explorations.
Chuck the cultural analyst? The first time I heard Chuck present a paper, he was
speaking to a small Russell Sage seminar about an early draft of his 1990
Transplanted Networks. I raised my hand and asked him, so what about the impact
of culture on the migration chains he was studying? He promptly dismissed my
question, flatly declaring (although tempered with a smile): I dont believe in culture.
By 2008, this fierce structuralist had not fully converted, but he was increasingly
incorporating culture into his analyses, with his own distinctive voice. In the midst
of the transformation from what Sidney Tarrow calls Chucks structural persuasion
to what Chuck himself labeled relational realism culture gradually seeped into his
thinking (Tarrow 2008: 4). In 1992, he wrote in private correspondence about his
opposition to Parsonian notions of society and value consensus:
Ive long been hostile as well to the invocation of culture as (a) an autonomous
force, (b) whats left when you take out class, race, power, and so on, (c) a
characteristic of individual personalities, secreted somewhere among the brain,
the heart, and the soul.
However, he admitted, Ive mellowed on culture... colleagues... [have] made me
appreciate that shared understandings and their objectifications... make a significant
difference to what possibilities of action actors actually consider not to mention how
they interpret the outcomes of their interaction. I finally realized, he wrote, that
my notion of repertoires is an eminently cultural notion.
Six years later, during an interview with Bruce Stave, Chuck told him:
One of my major intellectual projects of the last decade or so has been to build
a more adequate account of identity, agency, and culture. The most obvious
one, and I think the most successful, has been my idea of repertoires of
contention, which is an eminently cultural notion where you have collective
learning going on through interaction and you have the residues of this
historical process of struggle showing up as constraints on how people relate to
each other the next time they make claims (Stave 1998: 203).
Once Chuck stopped warring against the weighty Parsonian Culture that lacked
specificity or causal mechanisms, he began to see new crucial ways in which culture
mattered in explanation. We had long discussions about cultures definition: he opted
for varying versions of culture as shared understandings and their representations in
symbols, objects, and practices (Tilly 2008: 183).
As soon as he emerged from what he once called the world of steely interest
and took culture seriously, Chuck characteristically began asking the hard questions:
where is culture located? How does it produce its effects? How do shared
understandings come into being? How does culture change? Why? Chuck
impatiently rejected any notion of culture as an abstract entity or other conceptions
which came too close to the Parsonian brand of culture as an autonomous guidance

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system for a self-equilibrating society. He likewise remained allergic to postmodernist culturalism. Culture, he insisted, is not an autonomous realm, but an analytically
separable, empirically intertwined feature of social relations that is susceptible to
observation, explanation, and validation (personal communication, 1996).
Not surprisingly, Chuck soon co-opted culture into his increasingly expansive
relational approach. In Chucks hands, far from being an abstract realm, culture
became a social process and product. Cultural content, for Chuck, is to be found
within social ties, not as an external constraint. In consonance with my colleague
Paul DiMaggios (1994) call for understanding culture as constitutive, Chuck
focused on the culturally informed creation, negotiation, and transformation of social
relations. Culture, he argued, is not an autonomous force behind social life but a
constitutive element of social relations (Tilly 2008: 183. On Chucks growing
engagement with culture, see Mische 2011).
Rather than simply adopting categories from the surrounding culture, people, in
Chucks view, create culture relationally, as they navigate their social lives. Cultural
meanings are therefore constantly negotiated and transformed via those social
relations. Chuck often spoke of cultures conversational character to convey this
view of culture as emerging from creative interpersonal negotiation. In his essay on
Contentious Conversation, for instance, he declared:
Conversation in general shapes social life by altering individual and collective
understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural
materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by
establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants
(Tilly 2002:122).
Indeed, he admired Ann Swidlers notion of culture as a tool kit because it
treated people as active agents who refashion culture for their own ends. Yet he
faulted Swidler for focusing too exclusively on the resourcefulness of individuals
without sufficiently taking into account the relational character of culture.
More specifically, over the past 10 years or so, Chuck proposed two strategies for
understanding how culture works: cultural ecology and tunneling under. As he
explored how stories and identities produce their effects, Chuck dismissed twinned
bad answers: the first, alterations of individual consciousness; the second,
systemic society makes me do it accounts. Among possible good answers, he
began to develop the concept of cultural ecology. By that he meant relationally
grounded ways in which large stores of culture became available to any particular
[social] site through its connections with other sites (Tilly 2005: 214, for an earlier
statement, see Tilly 2000). Recognizing that the concept was somewhat mysterious,
implausible, and difficult he provided a more user-friendly translation:
As a practical matter we often assume a simple version of cultural ecology:
challenged by an impending purchase, an intellectual conundrum, or a weighty
personal choice, we turn to a wise friend or colleague not necessarily because
she will have the right answer, but because she will know whom to ask or
where to search. A computer model of cultural ecology would feature
distributed intelligence (Tilly 2005: 214).

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Here Chuck is drawing on his persistent viewpoint: interpersonal exchanges have

a logic that doesnt reduce to individual consciousness or to location within social
structure; interaction produces culture and structure.
What Chuck called tunneling under the post-modern challenge provides a more
specific research strategy. By tunneling under he meant a two-step process. First,
we must recognize that a great deal of social construction goes into the formation of
entitiesgroups, institutions, markets, selvesthat most people take for granted as
real. But then, he insists, instead of stopping there social scientists must go on to
explain how that construction actually works and produces its effects (Tilly 2002:
37-8; for an application of the concept, see Smith 2008).
In a characteristically insightful as well as sympathetic review of Chucks Identities,
Boundaries, and Social Ties, Paul DiMaggio, noting the importance Chuck gives to
identity formation, as well as the diffusion of social forms, repertoires and ideas,
suggests that: If Tilly would only come out as a sociologist of culture, he would be a
very good one (DiMaggio 2007:230). Indeed, although I had been working as a
cultural analyst for years before Chuck and I began our conversation, his developing
insights on how culture works transformed my own understandings and as a result
greatly influenced my more recent explanations of social processes. My views of
culture have been irrevocably Tilly-fied (see e.g. Zelizer and Tilly 2006).
Let me turn now to Chuck the feminist scholar. Both Work under Capitalism
(1998) co-authored with Chris Tilly and Durable Inequality (1998) offer
fundamental insights into salient issues in the feminist agenda. Among other
contributions, Work under Capitalism provides a powerful account and explanation
of why domestic work and other forms of unpaid labor, typically performed by
women, should count as crucial economic activity. In a passage I repeatedly cite in
my own discussions of carework, Chris and Chuck tell us: Only a prejudice bred by
Western capitalism and its industrial labor markets fixes on strenuous effort
expended for money payment outside the home as real work, relegating other
efforts to amusement, crime, and mere housekeeping (Tilly and Tilly 1998:22).
Indeed, Chuck cheered the recent expansion of economic sociology from its earlier
almost exclusive concentration on production markets to the analysis of household
economies, carework, and informal activity.
Published the same year as Work under Capitalism, Durable Inequalitys brilliant
exposition of mechanisms that create and perpetuate various forms of categorical
inequality has already made its mark in feminist thinking. Take for instance Barbara
Reskins 2002 American Sociological Associations presidential address, Including
Mechanisms in Our Models of Ascriptive Inequality where she explicitly draws
inspiration from Chucks mechanism-based explanations (Reskin 2003. See also Epstein
2007:11). So too, Patricia Roos, another expert in gender inequality, not only praised
Durable Inequality in a review essay as a compelling theory of why inequality emerges
and how it reproduces (Roos 1999:27) but adopted its arguments for explaining what
she calls gendered durable inequities in academia (Roos and Gatta 2008). Whats
more, a quick search for Durable Inequality in the Social Science Citation Index (which
reflects only article citations, not books) shows that 51 articleswell over a quarter
of the 180 articles citing Durable Inequalitydeal with gender.1
1

See Kim Vosss essay in this volume for further discussion of Durable Inequalitys impact.

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To be sure, Chucks concern with gender issues was not only intellectual. He was
a practicing feminist. Most notably, he and Louise Tilly raised three spectacular
daughters and an admirable feminist son. When it came to mentoring students, he
encouraged and supported generations of women. Of the 36 students that appear in
his last updatemade on November 20, 2007of graduate students for whom he
was serving as dissertation director or co/director, about half were women (This is
only an approximation because some foreign students names make it difficult to
identify their gender).
There is a third under-the-radar Tilly contribution, which I only mention as
further evidence of his boundless versatility. Thats Chuck the ethicist. His
reflections on how to approach normative arguments might have blossomed at least
into an article, and possibly a book. In Invisible Elbow, for example, Chuck
explains what makes social science a powerful complement to ethics and
politics. Every ethical or political proposal, he observes, imports, however
covertly, a theory of the possible, a selection among alternative actions that theory
names as possible, and causal arguments relating actions to outcomes. Since
social science develops reliable knowledge of causes and possibilities, he reasons,
it obviously bears on ethical and political choices. That is also why social
scientific explanations regularly stir passions rarely seen in discussions of
astronomy and geology: they constitute claims to pronounce on the possibility
assumptions of religious, moral, and political doctrines (Tilly 1996: 596). In his
view, clearer descriptions and explanations would facilitate the development of
normatively superior programs.
Ferruccio Busoni (18661924), the famous pianist, composer, and pedagogue,
once said about Mozart: There are bad composers, there are competent composers,
there are good composers, there are great composersand there is Mozart (Tuan
2008:117). Back to my earlier Mozart analogy, we can extend Busonis assessment
to Chuck. Chuck Tilly, master sociologist, historian, political theorist, and more,
populated our intellectual worlds with his multiple ideas and explanations. It still
remains a daunting challenge for all of us to think about this magical man in the past
tense. How fortunate we are to receive his precious legacy.
References
DiMaggio, P. (1994). Culture and economy. In N. Smelser & R. Swedberg (Eds.), The handbook of
economic sociology (pp. 2757). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
DiMaggio, P. (2007). Review of identities, boundaries, and social ties, by Charles Tilly. Contemporary
Sociology, 36, 229230.
Epstein, C. (2007). Great divides: the cultural, cognitive, and social bases of the global subordination of
women. 2006 ASA presidential address. American Sociological Review, 72, 122.
Gay, P. (1999). Mozart. New York: Penguin.
Mische, A. (2011). Relational sociology, culture, and agency. In J. Scott & P. Carrington (Eds), The Sage
handbook of social network analysis, forthcoming. London: Sage.
Reskin, B. (2003). Including mechanisms in our models of ascriptive inequality: 2002 presidential
address. American Sociological Review, 68, 121.
Roos, P. A. (1999). Revisiting inequality. Contemporary Sociology, 28, 2629.
Roos, P. A., & Gatta, M. L. (2008) Gender (In)equity in the academy: Subtle mechanisms and the
production of inequality. Unpublished paper.

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Smith, T. A. (2008). Remembering and forgetting a contentious past: voices from the Italo-Yugoslav
frontier. In C. H. Tilly, R. Franzosi & M. Kousis (Eds), Special issue: Mediterranean political
processes, 14002006. Part I: Historical perspective. American Behavioral Scientist, 51, 15381554.
Stave, B. M. (1998). A conversation with Charles Tilly. Urban history and urban sociology. Journal of
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(December), 225-246.
Tuan, Y.-F. (2008). Human goodness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Tilly, C., & Tilly, C. (1998). Work under capitalism. Boulder: Westview.
Zelizer, V., & Tilly, C. (2006). Relations and categories. In A. Markman & B. Ross (Eds.), The psychology
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