Am Soc (2010) 41:337357 DOI 10.

1007/s12108-010-9110-1

Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism

Neil Gross

Published online: 17 September 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract Charles Tillys work on repertoires of contention and social mechanisms was pathbreaking. In this article, I argue that his understanding of both concepts overlaps with social-theoretical work informed by the philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. There is no evidence that Tilly was influenced by pragmatism, but I argue that the overlap is substantial enough that large portions of his oeuvre can serve as illustrations of the explanatory power of pragmatist social scienceand that Tillys theorization of mechanisms in particular would have been even stronger had he engaged pragmatism directly. Keywords Mechanisms . Repertoires . Tilly . Pragmatism . Habit The philosophical tradition known as American pragmatism has a long history as a font of insight for social-scientific investigation. Born in an era when disciplinary boundaries were still in formation, and conceived of in part as a philosophical response to scientific developments of the day, pragmatism offered ideas about human behavior, consciousness, experience, language, knowledge, community, and the self that soon found their way into psychology, political science, economics, and sociology, among other fields. Although in some cases pragmatisms influence did not endure, in sociology it did, despite attacks lodged against it by Emile Durkheim and others and the general disrepute into which the tradition fell in philosophy itself in the middle years of the twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism, Chicago-style urban sociology, Schutzian phenomenology, Philip Selznicks institutional theory, C. Wright Millss critical sociology, Jrgen Habermass theory of communicative action, social-psychological work on identity, and the sociology of scientific knowledge are just some of the many strands of sociological thought that bear pragmatisms imprint. In a recent article (Gross 2009), I made a case that pragmatisms influence in sociology should be made to run even deeper than this. Drawing on the work of Hans Joas (1993, 1996), I argued that at the core of the tradition lies a conception of human
For their insightful comments on earlier drafts I thank Christopher Bail, Julian Go, Robert Jansen, Andreas Koller, and Andreas Wimmer. N. Gross (*) Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada e-mail: ngross@interchange.ubc.ca

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action from which, for the classical pragmatists, controversial epistemological implications followed.1 This conception holds that human beings act in the service of solving practical problems they confront in the course of their daily lives, and that their action takes the form of an alternation between more or less habituated patterns of response and creative improvisation and experimentation when habit proves inadequate. Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead saw this philosophical anthropology to be consistent with the demands of evolutionary theory, the main scientific advance they felt the need to reconstruct philosophy in light of, because it could account for the human capacity for thought as an evolutionary enhancement of problem-solving abilities present to some degree in all higher organisms. But their view of action and human nature also partook of a broader metaphysics of creativity in which all of pragmatisms founders were invested. Because of these metaphysical commitments, when, over the course of the twentieth century, pragmatist ideas were appropriated by sociologists, it was typically to do battle with deterministic lines of social analysis thought to be insufficiently attuned to agency, emergence, and contingency. To my mind, however, this use of pragmatism, though not unproductive, quickly ran up against its limits. Not for nothing, for example, were symbolic interactionists accused of failing to provide much explanatory leverage over macro-level dynamics or causal relationships more generally. But to view pragmatism, as a theory of action, solely in terms of creativity is ignore the other end of the habituality-creativity continuum. Dewey, after all, noted in Human Nature and Conduct (1922:63) that the primary facts of social psychology center about collective habit, custom. In stressing habit, the pragmatists were not simply following nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social-theoretical convention (Camic 1986); nor were they merely foreshadowing the turn toward habituality found among contemporary theorists of practice like Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. They were also, as it turns out, giving an account of human behavior that anticipated remarkably well psychological work on the twenty-first-century research front, where cognitive scientists emphasize the automaticity of cognition, other psychologists are concerned to document the high degree of repetition in daily life (Neal et al. 2006:199), and behavioral economists see rationality as bounded by, among other things, a wide variety of habitual heuristics (see Brocas and Carillo 2004). Although pragmatists conceive of habits in somewhat broader terms than thisfor instance, understanding instrumental rationality itself as a learned, habituated mode of problem solving, in line with work on the performativity of economics by Callon (1998)my argument was that there is empirical and theoretical warrant for making a pragmatist conception of action the basis for a new, pragmatist-inspired sociology. Rejecting the antistructuralism and anticausalism of many interactionists, this sociology would set its sights on identifying intervening mechanisms and processes by which probabilistic cause and effect relationships obtain in the social world. This it would do by conceiving of social causes as composed of chains or aggregations of actors confronting problem situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses, in conjunction with the various resources at their disposal. Far from representing a dissident reaction against mainstream styles of sociological research, my theory was an attempt to set such research on more solid presuppositional grounds, while also nudging it in slightly different directions, such as toward a greater appreciation of context, wherein habits
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I will not discuss pragmatist epistemology here, focusing instead on pragmatisms contribution to action theory.

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and hence mechanisms arise, and of the degree to which all social causality runs through processes of cultural interpretation, which pragmatists understand in terms of the employment of semiotic and cognitive habits that accompany problem solving. As I set out to write the article, I surveyed a number of other approaches to social mechanisms: those of Jon Elster, Peter Hedstrm, Arthur Stinchcombe, and critical realists like Roy Bhaskar. All seemed problematic. Some were objectionable on actiontheoretical grounds, others because they sought to do less than offer a theory of how and in what ways causality, at multiple levels of analysis, could come to pass among organisms who are, as Parsons saw, fundamentally voluntaristic. But there was one approach to social mechanisms that appeared basically in line with my proposal. In his later writings2 Charles Tilly was an outspoken advocate of mechanisms-based social science. Rejecting covering law approaches to the study of political processes, his main explanatory quarryapproaches which, in his view, were hopelessly nave Tilly refocused attention on mechanisms and processes of politics that operate quite broadly but combine locally as a function of initial conditions and adjacent processes to produce distinctive trajectories and outcomes (Tilly 2008:9). But it was obviously not the mere fact that Tilly wrote on mechanisms that appealed. A key component of his contextualist alternative to positivism is the notion of repertoires of contention. Political dynamics vary cross-contextually, Tilly argued, in part because in different settings claim-making takes different forms. By repertoires of contention, Tilly meant to designate limited set[s] of routines for making claims that shape interaction among pairs or larger sets of actors (Tilly 1995:42) in political space. For Tilly, repertoires specify methods for claim-making that come to have highly specific meanings for the groups that enact them and for broader audiences, and are at least partially emergent from prior experience as to what works given the nature of the regime at hand and other sets of power relations. As he saw it, repertoires constrain and channel political action because they consist of scripts for political performance that become institutionalized, sedimented in actors expectations and in the structure of institutions and intergroup relations. But that is not to say they are enacted unthinkingly. Insisting on the inherent potential for innovation in the political realm, Tilly argued, in Regimes and Repertoires, and elsewhere, that repertoire-based claim-making usually more resembles jazz and commedia dellarte than the ritual reading of scripture (2006a:35), with the specific tactics and strategies actors end up deploying anchored in but not fully determined by repertoires, and with actors having the capacity, actualizable more under some social conditions than others, to invent altogether new repertoires. Where Regimes and Repertoires sought to analyze, at a high level of abstraction, the relationship between various dimensions of political regimes and patterns of repertoire emergence, some of Tillys most important substantive work, such as Popular Contention in Great Britain and The Contentious French, put the notion of repertoires to use to gain new traction on macro-level political dynamics in concrete and well-studied national cases. In my article on mechanisms I interpreted
2

I concentrate on Tillys writings from the mid-1980s on. The question of whether precursors to the concepts of repertoires and mechanisms can be found in his earlier work is interesting, but I do not address it here. I also focus on select strands of Tillys later work, neglecting, because of space constraints, books like Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (Tilly 1984).

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repertoires of contention as a type of habitspecifically as a prime example of what I called a collective habit, a term I explain below3and furthermore suggested that Tilly could be seen as having linked mechanisms to repertoires in a manner broadly similar to that which Id proposed vis--vis habits (with one important difference, to be discussed shortly.) As I did more reading subsequent to the publication of my article, however, I came across Tilly saying things that made me wonder whether his affinities with pragmatism were real or imagined. For example, writing of repertoires, he noted that habit does not explain the pattern of incessant innovation one finds in them (2006a:41). Elsewhere he highlighted the dangers of phenomenological and cultural approaches (McAdam et al. 2001:21) to social science to which pragmatism has historically been linked. In the substantive book of his in which mechanisms are arguably most front and center, Durable Inequality, the connection to repertoires is obscure. Finally, when Tilly did write about pragmatism directly, it was to praise not its philosophical anthropology, but rather its relational bentits focus... on the transaction, interaction, information flow, exchange, mutual influence, or social tie as [the] elementary unit (Tilly 2002:34), which was not central to my account. Had I gotten Tilly wrong? The purpose of this article is to explain in more detail why I interpreted Tilly the way I did, and to defend my interpretation against these and other criticisms. My thesis is that Tilly can indeed be read as a scholar who ended up developing an approach to social science whose core assumptions overlap substantially with pragmatism. Had he been engaged directly with the pragmatist tradition, I argue, his insights might have been even more profound. Randall Collins (2010:7) has recently advanced a version of this same argument, noting that Tillys approach [in his later work] sounds like that of Dewey and other pragmatists, including symbolic interactionists. While I clearly agree about the similarities to pragmatism, I suggest the connection is far stronger to pragmatisms theory of action and sociological perspectives that take it seriously than to symbolic interactionism. The interpretation I offer is unconcerned with authorial intentionalityin this case, the question of whether Tilly saw himself as a pragmatistand ignores related issues of biography and context. While contextualist interpretations are important, here I follow Jeffrey Alexander (1987) and Richard Rorty (1984) in assuming that textually-plausible creative reenvisionings of scholars ideas can be legitimate vehicles for theoretical advance.

A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms In recent years the concept of mechanisms has been much discussed by sociologists. In a posthumously published paper, Tilly (2010) argued that some of this interest is

Those unfamiliar with how pragmatists conceptualize habit may find odd the pairing of habit with contention, since contentious politics, as defined by McAdam et al. (2001), occurs outside routine political circumstances and channels, being both episodic and public (5). There would seem nothing habitual about it. As will become clear, however, the point of the pragmatist model is not to designate certain kinds of social activity as dominated by habit and others by creativity, but rather to show the alternation and interplay between these two polarities in the evolution of all forms of individual and collective action.

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traceable to the long-term impact of Robert K. Mertons call for the development of theories of the middle-range. Although, as Stephen Turner (2009) has noted, the internal logic of that call was questionable, and although Merton himself used the term social mechanism only occasionally, it is hard to see what a theory that lie[s] between... minor but necessary working hypotheses... and the all-inclusive systematic effort... to develop a unified theory (Merton 1968:39) could be other than an account of the workings of more or less general mechanisms, which Merton defined as social processes having designated consequences for designated parts of the social structure (43). I am not sure that Tilly is right about this historical lineage, however. It is no doubt correct that Mertons program has been influential, and that many writers on mechanisms, such as Swedberg and Hedstrm, see themselves as working along Mertonian lines, at least in a programmatic sense (see Hedstrm and Udehn 2009). But where Merton held out at least some hope that empirical research, informed by middle-range theory, might eventually accumulate to the point that a unified theoretical system specifying social laws could be constructed, the major impetus behind work on mechanisms of late has been the philosophical and empirical failure of positivism, by which I mean the epistemological program centered around the demarcation of science from all nonscience... and the effort to achieve a principled reduction or unification of all particular sciences into a singular theory grounded in physics (Zammito 2004:8)an effort involving, inter alia, emphasis on universal, nomothetic knowledge claims. Under attack by philosophers for resting on conceptual distinctions that do not hold, and by historians of science for its unrealistic account of scientific progress, positivism as a philosophy of science has fared poorly in many fields. Its reputation has suffered especially in sociology because, as Phil Gorski (2004) and others have pointed out, it is hard to identify any universal laws of social life discovered by sociologists after more than 100 years of trying. One response to this situation is to ignore the criticism and push ahead with the quest to identify social laws. Scholars like Donald Black and Jonathan Turner have followed this path. Another response is to retreat into postmodern skepticism. A third is to rethink the intellectual project of sociology, and that is what advocates of mechanisms-based social science have done. Coming at the problem from a number of angles, these scholars have converged at least on a definition of social mechanisms, which I sum up in my article in the following terms: a social mechanism is a more or less general sequence or set of social events or processes analyzed at a lower order of complexity or aggregation by whichin certain circumstancessome cause X tends to being about some effect Y in the realm of human social relations. Champions of the mechanisms idea, rejecting positivism, argue that sociology should have as its main goal to identify mechanisms, understand the circumstances in which they operate and combine, and put knowledge of mechanisms to work in formulating causal, though context-specific, explanations of important social phenomena. To the litany of critiques of positivism, they add that we cannot be said to fully understand a causal relationship unless we grasp the intermediary processes that bring it about. The new focus on mechanisms has been a healthy one for the discipline. But while scholarship on mechanisms has converged in a definitional sense, there remains considerable disagreement as to what form the theorization of mechanisms

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should take, and what assumptions should underlie it. Some see rational choice theory or its cognates as offering the most promising way forward. Others conceptualize mechanisms through the lens of more idiosyncratic approaches to theory, or take the stance that there are so many different mechanisms that no single approach will ever be capable of shedding light on all of them. My article steered a different course. Influenced by critiques of rational choice theory that call into question its phenomenological adequacy and empirical purchase, and that point up the contextual limits of its applicabilityand by the arguments of theorists like Alexander that thoroughgoing assumptions about presuppositional matters, such as those to do with to action, are prerequisite for a truly coherent vision of the social worldI sought to develop an alternative approach. Influenced as well by thinkers like Bourdieu, Giddens, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Sherry Ortner, I aimed for a way of proceeding that would also accord with the turn toward practice in contemporary theorythat is, toward the reconceptualization of action as forms of doing or ways of acting and interacting that appear within particular communities or groups; depend on shared presuppositions or assumptions...; and unfold in individuals lives as a result of active, creative, and less than conscious puttings into play of those presuppositions and assumptions in the context of various and intersecting sociobiographical experiences and exigencies. The pragmatist theory of action, in which actors confront problematic situations with cognitive and corporeal habits acquired through individual and social experience (along with resources), engaging in innovative behavior when existing habits prove inadequate, met these desiderata. On the one side, a pragmatist conception of action overcomes the limits of rational choice theory by subsuming it, viewing instrumental rationality as but one type of habit humans may acquire and deploy in certain kinds of situations; and by insisting that assessments of means-ends efficiency, when they do occur, are always suffused with cultural interpretations that go well beyond standard notions of information or belief, and that frequently, in conjunction with emergent situational dynamics, point actors toward new and unexpected goals. On the other side, while retaining practice theorys emphasis on forms or ways or modes of doing, on creativity and improvisation within habituality, and on the shared nature of practices within social groups, pragmatism does not view strategicness as the modal form of practice. This, as I see it, is one of the prime drawbacks of approaches like Bourdieus that, via the notion of strategy, tie practice to social reproduction. But how might pragmatism be turned into a theory of social mechanisms? My argument here was straightforward. Causality in social life, I argued, at any level of analysis and bridging levels, ultimately reduces to individual and/or collective actors deploying habits and resources to muddle through problematic situations. If one were to follow the notation of Hedstrm and Swedberg and think of mechanisms as structures or processes S by which some input I leads to outcome O, then a pragmatist approach to mechanisms would suggest it important to examine all of the actors involved in bringing about the I O relationship, attempting to understand for each why and how, when confronted with some kind of problematic situation, and endowed with certain habits of cognition and behavior and resources, a particular response became the most likely. S would then consist of all the actors, problem situations, habits, and responses that together were generative of O. Thus it

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was that I described mechanisms as A-P-H-R chainsstanding for actor, problem situation, habit, and responseand argued that there are as many different types of mechanisms as there are distinct types of A-P-H-R chains. Thinking about mechanisms in this way, I suggested, might, for a variety of reasons, lead to the development of more robust explanatory accounts.

Tilly as a Pragmatist It was at this point in the article that I engaged the thought of Tilly. To clarify how mechanisms, thus described, could operate at multiple levels of analysis, I distinguished between three types of habits that could underwrite them: individual cognitive-affective habits, or ways individual actors have of understanding and responding emotionally to situations in general; individual behavioral habits, or disposition[s] to enact specific behavioral responses or routines when individual actors are faced with particular kinds of problematic situations; and collectively enacted habits, or ways that groups of individual actors, including those who comprise collective actors of various kinds, have of working together to solve problems. I could think of no better example of a collectively enacted habit than Tillys notion of repertoires of contention. Consider his argument in Popular Contention in Great Britain. Between 1758 and 1833, Tilly argued, the manner in which British citizens made claims on holders of power underwent a fundamental shift. Whereas in the eighteenth century, according to Tillys data on contentious events, vengeance against moral and political offenders occupied a prominent place in the contention of ordinary people, while local people and local issues, rather than nationally organized programs and parties, entered repeatedly into... collective confrontations (1995:5), by the early nineteenth century things were different. There was no less contention, but it now took a different form. More of it centered around pubs and coffeehouses, public meetings, rallies, and marches than had previously been the case. Political associations that could register citizen complaints and petition Parliament for redress grew in size and influence. A larger proportion of claims was national in scope. More or less spontaneous and isolated attacks on employers thought guilty of worker mistreatment gave way to coordinated turnouts and strikes. Violence was not uncommon, but it did not accompany contentious politics as often as before. According to Tilly, these were not disconnected historical facts, but signaled important changes in citizens underlying, organizing repertoires for claim-making. As he put it, over the course of 75 years the practices by which ordinary people made collective claims... underwent a deep transformation; increasingly they involved large-scale, coordinated interaction that established direct contact between ordinary people and agents of the national state (14). At the same time that repertoires of contention changed, so too did repertoires of governance, with officials and notables attempting more and more to anticipate popular reactions, to coopt or repress popular leaders, to prevent demonstrations of opposition, and even to bargain with carriers... of popular demands (14). What brought about the reconfiguration? Tillys basic answer, as any student of historical sociology knows, is capitalist accumulation and the growing administrative

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capacity of the British state. As industry and Parliament loomed larger as centers of social power, citizens from a variety of social positions found that only through coordinated action could they make their demands heard. But repertoire change did not occur ineluctably in response to these pressures. As Tilly portrays it, it was an instance of collective learning born of struggle, trial and error, and the diffusion and eventual stabilization of collective action forms that proved viable given new structural circumstances. With this set of arguments, Tilly charted an innovative course between established lines of sociohistorical analysis. Against Marxists who held that any collective action short of revolution amounted to nothing, and against those who saw growing citizen involvement in national politics as an inevitable outcome of modernization, Tilly insisted that non-revolutionary contentious politics mattered greatly, and was a vital, if contingent facet of the democratization process. I saw Tillys argument to this effectand his parallel argument in The Contentious French (Tilly 1986), a book that examined repertoire change over an even longer stretch of time and used it as the basis for a bold reperiodization of French political historyas speaking to the existence and importance of collective habits. What exactly is a collective habit? Dewey, like the other classical pragmatists, understood habits not as rote, repetitive behaviors, but as arts in the Aristotelian sense, ways of doing things that assimilate objective energies and eventuate in command of environment (1922:15). Some of these ways of doing things are learned and enacted by individuals and remain at the level of the individual, even if they may be diffused through social pathways, but others, like democracy or science or the bureaucratic organization of labor, belong to the community or group in that they have no existence in the absence of social coordination and cooperation; in that they are means groups use to help overcome collective problems; and in that they depend on common understandings and beliefs. For Dewey, habits of the latter variety arise through group experimentation and evolution. In line with later thinkers who would write on practices, Dewey additionally viewed habits, whether of an individual or collective nature, as lodged with sufficient strength within and between organisms that they impel behavior, helping to determine its course, while also allowing for varying degrees of creativity. Repertoires of contention, it seemed to me, have these same qualities. They are ways of making claims that, as the interactional vehicles by which interests are pursued, channel collective behavior down certain paths and not others. They are means for solving collective problems, attach to groups, and involve what Tilly refers to as shared understanding (1995:35). They are acquired through social experience and born of experimentation and creativity. They provide a platform for further innovation at the same time that they are constraining. They are consequential. But while repertoires of contention, thus understood, have as much in common conceptually with diverse strains of practice theory as with pragmatism, there are two ways in which Tillys work points beyond typical practice-based accounts, and in both, I argue, he moves closer to a uniquely pragmatist position. First, Tilly was positively allergic to the idea of system reproduction, a notion with Marxistfunctionalist overtones that haunts the work of practice theorists like Bourdieu, his denials notwithstanding. To be sure, the dynamics of capital figure centrally in Tillys historical work, and in books like Durability Inequality, which I discuss in

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more detail below, he problematized precisely the stickiness of resource differentials between groups. But it is nevertheless the case for Tilly that there are no macro-level functional imperatives that completely predetermine outcomes, no tight rigging of every feature or even most features of society to a singular systemic logic, and hence no historical teleologies. This metatheoretical positionthis commitment to recognizing the plurality of social dynamics and the in-principle openness of historyderived not from a romantic belief in the power of individuals to resist great structural forces, but from an opposition to reductionism learned at the hand of one of his teachers, Barrington Moore, Jr., from a working historians Weberian awareness of the complexity of the historical record and of the violence that must be done to subsume it under any unitary theoretical scheme, and from profound doubts about the methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) that so often accompanies systems approaches. Thus it was that Popular Contention in Great Britain invoked, in different places and to explain different phenomena, the salience of interests, of opportunities for the realization of interests, of coherent groups, of shared beliefs, of social classes, of coalition, of mobilization and organized collective interaction, of repression and facilitation, and, while paying repeated attention to class formation and class conflict, also engaged struggles that bore on political power whether or not they sprang from class antagonisms, class consciousness, or class structure (1995:36). Second, Tilly made mechanisms central to his analysis, and at least immanent in his work is the possibility that mechanisms and repertoires might be connected. In Dynamics of Contention, Tilly, writing with McAdam and Tarrow, defined mechanisms as delimited class[es] of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations (24). They went on to argue that the fundamental difference between this definition and that given by scholars like Hedstrm and Swedberg is that theirs highlights collective processes like the ones involved in contentious politics (25), whereas the methodological individualism of Hedstrm and Swedberg commits them to a focus only on mechanisms that operate at the individual level (25). But in my view the differences are even more profound, and revolve around McAdam, Tarrow, and Tillys use of the word events. Conceiving of mechanisms in terms of action of some kind is not unusual. Hedstrm and Bearman, laying out an agenda for analytical sociology, define it largely by its focus on mechanisms, and follow philosophers of science in defining mechanisms in terms of entities (with their properties) and the activities that these entities engage in (5). Yet given Tillys investment in the repertoire concept, is it wrong to interpret events as leaving the door open to the possibility that the events at the heart of mechanisms could be practices? That would mark the truly significant departure from Swedberg and Hedstrm. For to speak of practices is to assume that action has an historically-emergent and socially-, culturally-, and even place-embedded character, and that no simple typology of acts or their sequences is likely to be found that adequately captures the range of actions variation across human history. To see mechanisms as constituted out of practices is likewise to be attentive to the full range of their variability. For Hedstrm and Swedberg, by contrast, mechanisms are defined in such a way as to be constituted out of generic, less historically- and culturallyembedded actions and social relations. For them, there exist in principle a limited

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number of elementary mechanisms operative wherever human social life can be found, the self-fulfilling prophesy their favorite Mertonian example.4 As I note below, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly also search for mechanisms of an elementary, almost universal nature, those designated by Tilly as robust. But Tillys stress on repertoires, it seems to me, gestures beyond this, to more historicist possibilities, as does the fact that in work where he didnt talk about mechanisms per se repertoires are posited to intermediate causally between variables, as when he argued in Regimes and Repertoires that high capacity democratic states tend toward low levels of violence in contentious politics because of the distinctive repertoires to which they give rise (Tilly 2006a:81), a process that fully meets my definition of a social mechanism. Simultaneously, Tillys very interest in mechanisms represents a move beyond established forms of practice theory. Except for critical realism, theorists of practice have written little about social mechanisms in general, have given disproportionate attention to mechanisms connected to the reproduction of inequality, and have sometimes failed to perceive that historicallyvariable causal mechanisms piggyback on historically-variable practices. How do these features of his work further position Tilly as a pragmatist? On the one side, any pragmatist social theory true to its classical heritage will have a pluralistic temper. James ([1909] 1943:34) put this in metaphysical terms when he wrote, in A Pluralistic Universe, that whereas absolutism thinks that [human substance] becomes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real self in any form but the all-form, the pluralistic view is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable. In terms of the social world, pragmatism commits itself to a distinctive, if inclusive, theory of social action, but rejects the idea that social systems, especially complex ones (no matter how they may be bounded) have overriding logics that, once discovered, provide the key to explaining most social phenomena, and that push history down predetermined paths. Any geographically-delimited grouping of people, particularly in the contemporary world, is subject to pressures arising from a wide array of forces and social imperatives whose degree of coordination is empirically variable and easy to overstate. At the meso- and macro-levels especially this recognition entails an abiding commitment to theoretical pluralism and syncretism, not because pragmatism issues in relativism, but because it correctly sees that when it comes to explaining complex phenomena, any number of theories might in principle make valuable contributions, singularly or more often together, with the extent of their contribution unknowable in the absence of empirical research. All this is consistent with Tillys sensibilitieswith his inductivism, resistance to doctrinaire social science, inveterate falliblism, and puzzle-oriented approach. On the other side, a pragmatist theory of mechanisms takes seriously the idea that both individual and
It is no exaggeration to claim that Hedstrm and Swedberg downplay the embeddedness of mechanisms. Consider Hedstrm and Bearmans (2009) unpacking of Hedstrms earlier attempt to offer a formal description of the self-fulfilling prophesy mechanism: This mechanism scheme has limited scope in that it only is relevant for explaining certain types of phenomena, but it is general in the sense that it makes no reference to time, place, identity of actors, content of beliefs, or type of actions (7).
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collective habits emerge out of specific historical circumstances, are subject to creative modification by actors as they try to adjust to new situations, and may, in the course of time, be replaced by new habits. To the extent that mechanisms are constructed out of habits, as in the notion of A-P-H-R chains, they may change over time as well, and be highly variable in nature.

Defending the Interpretation Does this mean that Tilly can be seen as having pursued a kind of pragmatist social science, at least in strains of his work? My answer remains: yes. Repertoires and mechanisms are at the core of his later project, and while he didnt draw the connection between the two in exactly the same way I would, his understanding of both is not far from the Joas-inspired pragmatist theory of mechanisms Ive tried to develop. But as soon as one advances this claim, a host of objections arises. First, again, Tilly never called himself a pragmatist and never claimed to have been influenced by the pragmatist tradition. Second Tilly often denied that repertoires should be thought of as habits. Third, when he occasionally spoke well of pragmatism it wasnt because of his appreciation for its theory of action. For example, in his chapter Method and Explanation, which appears in Explaining Social Processes, Tilly identified himself with the tradition of relational realism, or the doctrine that transactions, interactions, social ties, and conversations constitute the stuff of social life (2008:6). He noted that American pragmatism had nurtured this doctrine during the twentieth century when it threatened to be displaced by individualism and holismbut he went on to list various versions of network analysis, and some corners of organizational or labor economics as approaches that had also kept relational realisms flame alive. It is certainly the case that many forms of pragmatist sociology put interaction front and center, but few have gone as far as what Tilly seemed to be calling for in the name of relational realism, namely beginning analytically with transactions among social sites, then watch[ing] when and how some transactions bundle into more durable, substantial, and/or consequential relations among sites (8).5 Fourth, the repertoire/mechanism connection, sketchy enough in Dynamics of Contention, appears entirely absent from Durable Inequality, where mechanisms are made to do heavy explanatory lifting. Fifth and finally, Tilly was not much enamored of cultural sociology and its insistence that meaning lies at the heart of social life. He routinely disparaged cultural analysts who attribute causal power to norms, values, beliefs, and symbols that individuals experience, who proceed via the hermeneutic treatment of texts, and who tend to be more interested in meaning than in the topology of social structures (McAdam et al. 2001:21-2). To the extent that pragmatism travels in culturalist circles, it would seem to naturally repulse Tilly. These are reasonable objections, but it is possible to formulate responses to each. As to the fact that Tilly didnt consider himself a pragmatist, my claim once more isnt that he was substantially influenced by the tradition, either directly or indirectly, but simply that some of his key underlying theoretical assumptions are close to those
5

An important exception is the work of Tillys student Ann Mische, discussed briefly below.

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of pragmatism. Another way to put this is to say that while Tilly was clear about which approaches to action he didnt likefor example, rational choice theory of the James Coleman variety (see Tilly 1997)he did not have an explicitly worked out action theory of his own. Had he systematically surveyed available options, I contend, he would have found the pragmatist theory of action closest to his sensibilities. On the second point, habit, Tilly did say that repertoires should not be understood in terms of habits. But he seems to have meant by habit what Weber meant when he defined traditional action by ingrained habituation, insisting that it lies very close to the borderline of what can justifiably be called meaningfully oriented action because it is often a matter of almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli (1978:25). As Joas and others have shown, thats not at all how the pragmatists understood habit, and when habit is taken in its broader pragmatist sense, to indicate not rote activity but more or less ingrained ways of solving problems that always involve some degree of flexibility and creativity, the differences from Tillys conception of repertoires of contention all but disappear. On the third point, relational realism, it is right that transactions, networks, and relations factor centrally in Tillys analysis. Yet they play a different role than they do in the work of some other scholars of a relational bent. To help draw out the difference, consider what Stephan Fuchs, who takes relational realism to its extreme, says in Against Essentialism: I see the most important commonality in systems and network theories as antihumanismbidding farewell to the agency framework and its derivatives, such as intentionality, the unit act, and rational choice. These instead turn into variable attributions or outcomes of social structure... System and network theories start with social emergence and explain persons and actors as constructs that some social structures produce to do certain kinds of work (2001:63-4; emphasis in original). I do not think Tilly would have endorsed such a statement, which expresses a Luhmann-inspired network functionalism that would have bothered him as much as other forms of functionalism. But there is something else about the statement that would have troubled him. Yes, for Tilly relations are real and primary. But they affect historical outcomes by means of the identities, interests, opportunities, and constraints they open up for individual and collective actors, and by means of their consequences for interaction. On my reading, Tillys relational realism is not antihumanistic, and does not weirdly ontologize networks as actors, but rather seeks to show the consequences for agency when it is fully situated in its relational context. I dont think theres anything about pragmatism at odds with that intellectual project. Indeed, in my mechanisms paper I tried to show how pragmatism would understand mechanisms of what I called a formal nature those to do with the formal structure of social relations. My argument was that such structures should simply be seen as creating more or less obdurate features of the problem situations individual or collective actors confront... that enable or constrain lines of activity. Although in his methodological statements Tilly did talk more about relations than actors, perhaps under the influence of Harrison White, and although scholars like Mario Diani (2007) have characterized Tilly as an important figure in the network-analytic tradition, I cant see that in his best empirical work relations do more than help to constitute and position individual and collective actors whose action and interaction, in all its contingency and path dependence, is what ultimately accumulates to historical outcomes.

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I can provide textual evidence in support of this interpretation while also addressing the Durable Inequality chargethat if Tilly were in any way open to thinking about mechanisms in the manner I am suggesting, as linked to habit-bound practices, repertoires would have been far more central in that book. The motivating claim of Durable Inequality is that analysts should dispense with individualistic models that seek to explain differences in the life chances of members of social groups in terms of their experiences, properties, and characteristics, whether these are assumed to be a product of genetic endowments, as in Herrnstein and Murrays (1994) controversial bell curve thesis, or social circumstance, as in some versions of human capital theory. Although the experiences, properties, and characteristics of individuals, such as their levels of schooling, may be the proximate cause of differential returns on the labor market, according to Tilly more fundamental processes lurk in the background. While Tilly draws inspiration in the book from Marx, not least Marxs emphasis on exploitation, he rejects any attempt to conceive of these processes in terms of the operation of social systems, such as capitalism or patriarchy, and their functional, system-maintenance imperatives. Where systems theorists... explain.... differences by their expression of society-wide values or their service to the reproduction of the whole system... it has proved impossible to... assemble convincing evidence for functional explanations of this kind (Tilly 1998:20-1). In their place, Tilly proposes a model centered around the insight that human cultures tend to draw distinctions among people in a categorical fashion, where the term category refers to a set of actors who share a [social] boundary distinguishing all of them from and relating all of them to at least one set of actors visibly excluded by that boundary (62). Tilly offers some obvious examples of these categorical sets: women, a category excluding men; blacks, a category excluding whites; slaves, a category excluding masters and other free persons... noble/commoner, citizen/foreigner... [and] employer/worker (62). Durable inequality, argues Tillypatterns in the distribution of income, wealth, and other resources that persisttends to be pegged to social categories thus understood, with the salient categorical pairs varying from context to context. Why is this the case? Tillys argument is that inequality attaches to categories because, generally speaking, whenever people are arranged in an organizational form to engage in collective labor, they find that working with and incorporating established social categories into their structures and procedures of operation which generates, among other things, the unequal labor market returns of concern to scholars of a more individualist persuasionallows them to satisfy operational exigencies better than if they were to ignore or resist the categories. Lest this be seen as a justification for the perpetuation of inequality on efficiency grounds, Tilly makes immediately clear that among these exigencies, for many organizations, are the desires of elites to exploit others and do so in a manner that will be seen as legitimatewhich they can do more effectively if they hire workers from already disfavored categoriesand the desires of nonelite groups to retain control over whatever share of social goods and opportunities they might have previously carved out for themselves. It is here that social mechanisms enter in, for Tilly conceives of exploitation as a mechanismself-interested actions undertaken when some wellconnected group of actors controls a valuable, labor-demanding resource from which they can extract returns only by harnessing the effort of others (86-7)and sees

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opportunity hoarding by nonelite groups in similar terms. In his view, two other mechanisms, emulation and adaptation, are also at work in durable inequality, helping to make sense of why, for example, racially-exclusionary hiring practices in a firm might diffuse and spread within and across organizational fields. At first glance, Durable Inequality seems to pose a challenge to the pragmatist interpretation of Tilly I am developing here. In it we find him championing relational realism, perhaps more stridently than ever, and using it to good effect. At the same time, while there is much discussion of social mechanisms in the book, there is almost no discussion of repertoires. The latter point does not bear on whether repertoires might be an example of collective habits, but would seem to undercut my assertion that Tillys work is at least implicitly open to the possibility that mechanisms rest on a base of habits or emergent practices. A closer reading, however, yields a different view. Tilly argues that underlying the organizations that reproduce categorical inequality are two elementary forms (49) of network structure: hierarchy and what he terms the categorical pair, which consists of a socially significant boundary and at least one tie between sites on either side of it (47). These are not the only forms of network structure Tilly recognizes, but he thinks it is these that combine to account for the stability of categorical inequality, because their combination produces certain regularities, including the generation of boundary-maintaining beliefs about differences between actors on either side of the boundary and diversion of some returns from exploitation to boundary maintenance (60). In talking this wayof regularities associated with different network configurations and of how elementary structures concatenate into more complex onesTilly is playing the part of network structuralist, his mode of analysis hard to distinguish from that of Martin (2009), say. But where some network structuralists would derive the set of possible relational configurations in social life mathematically, Tilly takes a bottom up approach, claiming they are social inventions, perhaps developed incrementally by trial and error, no doubt reinvented independently many times, but, when recognized, more or less deliberately installed as a means of coordinating social life (48). Elsewhere in the book he notes that humans have devised a limited number of organizational forms that work effectively in a very wide range of situations, and that almost all human beings learn to detect, join, connect, transfer and even create these forms early in life (84). These are remarkable statements. They are to say, in pragmatist terminology, that network structures themselves result from habits, from ways of interacting that are the grooves into which actors come to fall, some perhaps having an evolutionary basis (borrowing from White, Mische (2008) takes a similar approach, examining, among other things, the role of cultural practices in helping to constitute different kinds of network ties.) Whats more, Tilly sees such structures to be consequential for inequality not because networks construct actors to do work for them, as in Fuchss antihumanism (though, again, Tilly does think that social identities attach to structures and locations in them), but because structures constrain flesh-and-blood actors. To give just one example, Tilly observes that managers who borrow structure gain the advantage of low startup costs for new chunks of organization. But they also import meanings, relational routines, and external connections whose features and consequences they cannot always control. Many a store manager has hired a few hard-working immigrants for a particular niche only to discover that part

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of the store has become a patronage network and he or she an unwitting patron (59). Finally, the mechanisms Tilly analyzesexploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptationare, he says, ways of doing things, practices mobilized (though typically not consciously so) around the achievement of goals and the fulfillment of practical exigencies. Categorical inequality persists, Tilly concludes, because the mechanisms and social forms that reproduce it solve a wide variety of organizational problems (85) for actors. The notion that social causes are composed of more or less habitual practices invoked in relation to problem solving thus turns out to be in line with Tillys theorythough, as is the case in Dynamics of Contention, Tillys analytic focus is much more on mechanisms-qua-habits shared widely across social space (again, those that are robust) than on mechanisms linked to habits that are context specific, as my approach would urge, a point to which I return shortly. On the final objection, culture, once more I think theres a reasonable degree of compatibility with pragmatism. Tilly did not think that culture, as norms and values lodged in the heads of individuals, is of much causal significance. But in his later work he became keenly aware of the fact that one cannot think seriously about interests, political identities, or social relations in general without attending to the shared understandings and meanings that underwrite and organize them. Consider how culture is seen to intertwine with other social processes when Tilly asserts of political identities that they are always, everywhere relational and collective; that they... alter as political networks, opportunities, and strategies shift; that they always include the adoption of shared stories concerning we-they boundaries; and that validation both constrains and facilitates collective action by those who share the identity (2002:61). Or consider his assertion in Why? that when actors give accounts of their behavior, they are inevitably saying something about relations between themselves and those who hear their reasons, thereby exert[ing] effects on those social relations, confirming an existing relation, repairing that relation, claiming a new relation, or denying a relational claim (2006b:15). In both statementsas in his analyses of how, at times, repertoires of contention or processes of legitimation foster taken-for-granted views of the political universemeaning matters. This kind of cultural awareness may have been largely absent in books like The Vende, where identities and interests were treated as preestablished and exogenous to the theoretical model, but it crops up repeatedly later, not least in the wake of Tillys attempts to clarify his position in relation to cultural Marxists like E.P. Thompson, and to integrate some of Whites (1992) ideas about networks and culture. Responding to the charge, laid by William Sewell, that Tilly neglects culture, Sidney Tarrow (1996:592) has written, correctly in my view, that the concept of the repertoireperhaps Tillys signature theoretical contributionis only a-cultural if culture is conceptualized as an abstract body of norms... If culture is conceived, instead, as the norms and practices which grow out of sets of social roles and interactions, then Tillys conception of the repertoire is supremely culturalfor example, peoples habits and expectations about how to do collective action; how it should be done, and what forms of collective action are likely to succeed. The pragmatist idea, drawn out most forcefully by Blumer, that symbols and their interpretation are at the heart of social interaction, was not foreign to Tilly, even if, as Viviana Zelizer points out in her epilogue to this special issue, he came to admit this

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rather grudginglyand with the caveat (contra Collins) that the anticausalism of Blumer and some of his contemporary followers would have struck Tilly as an abdication of responsibility.

The Benefits of a Pragmatist Reading To my mind, these considerations increase the plausibility of the claim that Tilly should be seen as a pragmatist, or perhaps better as someone who eventually moved in a more or less pragmatist direction. But while this interpretation is plausible, what are the positive reasons to view him in this light? The main reason concerns the benefit to pragmatism. In the wake of Joass reconstruction of the pragmatist tradition for sociological theory, questions have been raised about empirical utility. Can the notion of action as involving an alternation between habit and creativity really help give new direction to empirical research? To the extent that Tilly can be read as a pragmatist, this question can be answered affirmatively. It was clearly possible for Tilly to be Tilly without invoking pragmatism by name, but his insights about repertoires in particular partake of pragmatist-like assumptions, and much of his substantive research can therefore stand as a powerful illustration of the fecundity of such assumptions for social-scientific explanation. The upshot of the interpretation I offer is that young scholars who find pragmatisms model of action convincing but do not yet see how they can translate it into empirical research need look no farther than to (strands of the later) Tilly as an exemplar. But if Tilly did not require pragmatism to construct the historical explanations he did, why do other scholars need it? In the limited space remaining I try to answer this question by identifying what I see as one relative weakness in Tillys approacha weakness he shares with the analytical sociology movement, that he might have avoided had he been more directly engaged with the pragmatist tradition, and that future scholars might avoid by being so engaged. That weakness concerns precisely his failure to connect the dots between his historicist view of repertoires (as well as his more general historicist orientation, as highlighted in George Steinmetzs paper) and his theory of mechanisms. As I have already argued, Tillys theoretical strategy vis-vis mechanisms was one of reduction. Dynamics of Contention, for example, focuses on a few mechanisms thought to recur widely, including attribution of threat and opportunity, social appropriation, and brokerage (McAdam et al. 2001:92). If these operate differently in different circumstances, argue the authors, there can only be two reasons: initial conditions may vary, and similar mechanisms can yield very different outcomes when they combine with other mechanisms (226). The combination of mechanisms Tilly terms processes, defining processes, in a book written with Tarrow (Tilly and Tarrow 2007:206), as those dynamics that assemble mechanisms into different sequences and combinations, thus producing larger-scale outcomes than any single mechanism, and calling for systematic study of processes alongside mechanisms. There is no doubt benefit to be gained from trying to identify causal mechanisms that can be found across the widest range of settings. Many commentators on Dynamics of Contention, and all the more so on Durable Inequality, have noted that one of the strengths of Tillys approach is that it helps shed light on phenomena

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occurring in diverse institutional and historical circumstances.6 Nevertheless, my general appreciation for Tilly aside, my reaction to both books tracks Michael Manns comment on Durable Inequality: Tillys conceptual reach is so broad it greatly exceeds his grasp (Mann 1999:30). Attribution of threat and opportunity, social appropriation, brokerage, exploitation, opportunity hoarding, and so on may help make some sense of contentious politics and inequality, respectively, but how exactly these mechanisms function in concrete cases, working independently or combining with one another to yield satisfying explanations, is never really made clear. Both books include numerous empirical examples, but in none treated at any length, such as the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya or the rise of apartheid in South Africa, does one get the sense that Tilly or his collaborators has added much explanatory value to existing accounts. This could be because the aims of both books were theoretical and programmatic, with empirical material mobilized mostly to illustrate the conceptual innovations, and therefore necessarily underdeveloped.7 But I think the problem goes deeper. Tillys mechanisms approach, like that of analytical sociology, is destined come up short in empirical application for the reason I gave earlier: the mechanisms he focalizes are simply too general and generic in nature. Consider briefly exploitation. Are we really to believe that one in the same causal mechanism is at play when sixteenth-century French nobles forced their vassals into military service, when factory owners in nineteenth-century London paid their workers miserable wages, when male elders in an African village conspire to ensure the continued subordination of their wives, and when twenty-first-century hospitals force interns to work brutally long hours? One might condemn all of these acts and reasonably use the word exploitation to characterize them in a normative sense. But the nature of the exploitationthe kinds of resources extracted, the degree of power differential between exploiters and exploited, the strategies employed to sustain the unequal arrangements and resist them, the linkages to other institutions and cultural patternswould seem to be very different across the cases. Nor do such differences seem to be a matter of initial conditions or of how the singular mechanism of exploitation interacted with other mechanisms to form a distinctive process; the issue is that there are qualitatively distinct forms of exploitation. Tillys approach to mechanisms is not in a position to recognize this, which means that when particular cases are examined they are bound to be treated in a reductionist way, the important and distinguishing details of the exploitation (or other mechanisms) at hand denuded and ignored. Furthermore, as Mann notes of Durable Inequality, Tillys approach remains strangely silent as to the historical origins of the mechanisms of interest to him. As Mann puts it, since in [Tillys] theory causes obviously concern very long run processes whereby exploitation and hoarding are installed, we require historical analysis of their emergence (Mann 1999:30)which is not forthcoming. Tilly might be excused for saying little in the book about the origins of capitalism, the
Massey (2007), drawing heavily on Tilly, can thus argue that despite the radical transformation of human societies over timefrom foraging societies through agrarian urbanism into industrial urbanism and to our current post-industrial worldthe fundamental mechanisms producing stratification have not changed much (5). 7 As Andreas Koller has reminded me, Tilly wound mechanisms and processes together with richer historical accounts in some of his other work (e.g., Tilly 2007), where he sought to produce analytical narratives.
6

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specific lacuna Mann identifies, since he spent much of his earlier career writing about that topic. But as a general criticism Manns points holds, and the reason it does is because of the tendency, otherwise at odds with Tillys historicist sensibility, to see mechanisms as elementary building blocks of social life, and hence to treat them as nonemergent (even if he simultaneously saw network structures and processes composed of mechanisms to be emergent). I contend that if Tilly had been directly engaged with pragmatism, and been able to recognizein line with the thrust of his practice-oriented work on repertoires that mechanisms rest on a base of habits, he would have been more sensitive to the great variety of mechanisms one finds in social life (where by mechanisms is now meant all manner of intermediary causal processes), attentive to the historical conditions of their emergence, and better able to show their causal effect in concrete cases. A pragmatist perspective would not have condemned him to the conclusion that social variation is such that there are an infinite number of mechanisms; practices qua habits and the causal mechanisms they compose certainly recur, not least through cultural transmission and evolutionary dynamics.8 But it would have forced him to treat such recurrence as an empirical matter, and to assess whether a given mechanism was in operation in a given setting by closely analyzing the degree of similarity between the habits and practices of the actors involved and those of actors in the setting where the mechanism was first identified. This could have increased the precision and explanatory power of his causal accounts. Similar benefits should accrue to other sociologists who look to pragmatism for a theory of social causation.

Conclusion Much discussed though Tilly was in his lifetime, it is upon the death of great and generative thinkers that serious historical and interpretive work usually begins. In the years to come we can expect many more articles examining Tillys thought, attempting to clarify his more obscure ideas, considering the varied influences upon his work, and showing how his approach stands in relation to other theoretical and methodological perspectives. Dissertations and books on Tilly are equally likely, and it will surely not be too long before the first Tilly biography appears, so dynamic was he not just as an intellectual, but also as a person. The aim of this article has not been to contribute to the nascent intellectualhistorical scholarship on Tilly. Once again, it is not my thesis that Tilly was influenced directly or indirectly by American pragmatism, or that he thought of himself as a pragmatist. Instead, my goal has simply been to show that there are important similaritiesalong with some differencesbetween Tillys approach to social science (in his later work) and strains of causal theorizing inspired by Joass reconstruction of the pragmatist perspective on social action. My reason for pursuing this claim has been pragmatic: relatively little empirical research has been carried out on the basis of Joass reconstruction, so showing that key Tillyian ideas overlap
8

Diverging from Tilly, Massey (2007) attempts to ground his account of categorical inequality in evolutionary processes.

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with it allows portions of Tillys vast research enterprise (and the work it spawned) to stand as examples of the empirical benefits of a pragmatist approach, increasing the credibility of the latter. I am well aware, however, that as I write these words representatives from other theoretical camps, from network structuralism to critical realism, are busy claiming Tilly for themselves. An obvious next step for interpretive scholarship on Tilly would be to assess the value of these claims in relation to one another, highlighting their points of agreement and disagreement and coming to some conclusion, perhaps from the standpoint of a more disinterested observer, as to which are plausible and which fanciful. More in line with the spirit of this article, which has sought to contribute more to pragmatism than to Tilly scholarship per se, would be two other future lines of inquiry that build on the claims I have advanced here (leaving aside general, pragmatist-oriented work on social mechanisms that might be buoyed by now being able to count Tilly as an inspiration). The first would take as its jumping off point my argument that Tillys repertoires of contention are collective habits. The notion of repertoires of contention, along with some of the methodological techniques Tilly devised to chart changes in repertoires, has been influential in social movements research (see Taylor and Van Dyke 2004), and among the questions asked by movement scholars, following from Tillys own interests, are those concerning the macro- and meso-level factors associated with the emergence of particular repertoires. The intermediary causal processes by which such factors bring about repertoire change, however, have been given less attention. Recognizing that repertoires are collective habits could be helpful to scholars looking to address this oversight in two ways. First, it would lead them to think about processes of repertoire emergence through the lens of a psychologically-plausible habitualitycreativity schema, which would entail, among other things, a different view of the role of strategicness than can be found in much movement theorizing, and a refiguring of macro- and meso-level factors as establishing features of the problem situations faced by individual and collective actors. Dynamics of experimentation, habit formation, diffusion, aggregation, and institutionalization could then be analyzed in due course (the diffusion and institutionalization of repertoires of contention have already received considerable attention). Second, and relatedly, repertoire emergence in the political sphere, though no doubt subject to distinctive pulls and constraints, would immediately be thrust into comparison with collective habit formation occurring elsewhere: in economic life where firms innovate organizational practices, in the sphere of cultural production and consumption, in the realm of religion, science, and so on. This could lead to the identification of common dynamics and patterns and help give us answers to the general question, strangely neglected by practice theorists, of how exactly new practices arise (again, some of this work has already been done around diffusion and institutionalization of political repertoires [e.g., Soule 1997, which draws on general theories of diffusion], but more is needed.) The other line of inquiry that follows from my argument would consider how some of the specific claims of Tilly and his colleagues about mechanisms might be revised if mechanisms are acknowledged to rest on a base of emergent practices, and to therefore be historically variable in their fundamentals. How would theories of dynamics of contention or durable inequality change if it were recognized that brokerage and exploitation, for example, come in qualitatively different forms? What

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are those forms, what are their origins, and why might mechanisms based on each intermediate between causes and effects in different ways? The goal here would be to revise Tilly by keeping him true to the historicist orientation that characterizes his best work, and by helping lead himhis legacyaway from the trap of explanatory universalism into which even scholarship on social mechanisms occasionally falls.

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