[movimenti.bicocca] Il nuovo libro di Tilly: Contentious Per…

Contentious Performances
Series: Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics

Charles Tilly
Columbia University, New York
Paperback (ISBN-13: 9780521731522)
Also available in Hardback
Published August 2008
In stock
$24.99 (G)

How can we get inside popular collective struggles and
explain how they work? Contentious Performances presents a
distinctive approach to analyzing such struggles, drawing
especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great
Britain between 1758 and 1834. The book accomplishes three
main things. First, it presents a logic and method for
describing contentious events, occasions on which people
publicly make consequential claims on each other. Second,
it shows how that logic yields superior explanations of
the dynamics in such events, both individually and in the
aggregate. Third, it illustrates its methods and arguments
by means of detailed analyses of contentious events in
Great Britain from 1758 to 1834.

Contents

1. Claims as performances;
2. How to detect and describe performances and
repertoires; 3. How performances form, change, and
disappear;
4. From campaign to campaign;
5. Invention of the social movement;
6. Repertoires and regimes;
7. Contention in space and time;
8. Conclusions.

Reviews

“Addressing the public performances through which crowds
and other collectivities state grievances and make claims,
Charles Tilly adds yet another dimension to his
extraordinary explorations of the dynamics of contention.
He deepens the approach to repertoires of contention which
he made a staple of the field. In this book his cases come
from late 18th and early 19th century Britain but his
approach is important for all students of contentious
politics everywhere. Tilly’s lively voice animates this
book as his intelligence sharpens the analysis.”
-Craig Calhoun, New York University

“Drawing upon a dazzling array of qualitative and
quantitative data, Charles Tilly explains the remarkable
coherence and continuity of protest repertoires in a wide
variety of historical and contemporary settings. This
valuable synthesis, by the acknowledged master of the
study of contentious politics, advances countless
theoretical and methodological contributions to the
field.”
-Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University

“Only one historical sociologist has, for the past half
century, launched so many ships to so many intellectually
valuable destinations, and only one has managed to keep
the massive sea-lane traffic that resulted so firmly in
lucid and critical analytical view. He is Charles Tilly.
It’s hard to know what we, mere navigators by the charts
he invented, will do without him.”
-James C. Scott, Yale University

“Contentious Performances, completed a few months before
Charles Tilly’s untimely death, takes up one of his most
important and fruitful ideas: that contentious politics is
structured by ‘repertoires of contention.’ In this book
Tilly sets out to define repertoires more exactly, to
propose methods for detecting their presence, and to show
how repertoires emerge and change in varying political
contexts. Written with Tilly’s typical verve, this book is
an important addition to the oeuvre of one of the great
social scientists of our era.”
-William H. Sewell, Jr., The University of Chicago