Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties.

Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. By Charles Tilly (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005. viii plus 269 pp.).

In the United States, liberal opponents of racism have often focused on attitudes. Through education, dialogue, and interaction they have hoped to reduce inequalities resulting from racial discrimination by changing the way individuals think and what they believe. No one who reads Charles Tilly's Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties can expect that to happen.

Even historians and social scientists who already accept the inadequacy of individual-level explanations too often remain trapped in a stale debate between the relative influence of structure and agency as explanations for persistence and change in social conditions. Without discussing this shopworn dichotomy directly, Tilly provides a way to transcend it with a far more analytically precise and useful explanatory framework. For him, relationships hold the master key to understanding social processes. This is the message that underlies the fifteen essays, written over a decade, that compose the book's four parts--relational mechanisms, inequality, boundaries, and political boundaries--which are held together by a common intellectual framework and set of concerns. (In some cases, Tilly has elaborated on the topics in individual books, as in Durable Inequality [1998] and The Politics of Collective Violence [2003].)

Tilly begins by skewering prevailing explanations of social processes. At one point (p. 14) he classifies explanations as "systemic," "dispositional," and "transactional." A little later he amends the list (24): "skepticism, covering laws, and dispositional, and system, and mechanism-based accounts." His preference is for the transactional and mechanism-based. Inter-personal transactions, he argues, constitute "the basic elements of social processes." His chapters "show how interpersonal transactions compound into identities, create and transform social boundaries, and accumulate into durable social ties." (xiii) This is, in other words, a relational theory. At their core, every social and political category--class, inequality, citizenship, democracy--embodies the history of relationships that acquire substance through a sequence of identity formation and boundary creation. The causal agents consist of mechanisms-events that change relations between parties in similar ways--and processes--"frequently occurring combinations or sequences of mechanisms." (28) Some of the crystallized relationships that result remain durable, sustained, as in the case of inequality, by a set of self-reproducing mechanisms. Others, like democracy, prove more fragile, their reproductive mechanisms subject to erosion.

Democracy is the issue that underlies all of Tilly's concerns. What is democracy? What brings it about? What causes its erosion? Democracy for Tilly consists of "protected consultation" (35), an arresting definition that stresses its relational core--a set of "relations between agents and subjects of government" which meet specified conditions. Citizenship, a form of contract, which "designates a set of mutually enforceable claims relating categories of persons to agents of government," underpins democracy. (193) "Without broad, relatively equal, binding, well-protected citizenship ... democracy will flourish nowhere." (198) Extreme and growing inequality, however, undermines both citizenship and democracy. Inequality attenuates the ties that bind individuals and groups and the protections that assure their rights and promote their well-being. As Tilly describes the conditions for "de-democratization", it is hard to not to think how they fit the history of the United States since roughly 1973 and how they have accelerated since 2001. The implications are chilling.

For all its persuasive power, in one respect I find Tilly's analysis of inequality--here and in Durable Inequality--incomplete. For Tilly, the mechanisms that reproduce durable categorical inequalities, as between blacks and whites, are relentless. Nothing on the horizon offers a serious challenge. The future, as well as the present, appears bleak. But a paradox underlies the history of group inequality, at least in the United States, because persistent categorical inequality co-exists with individual and group mobility. Individuals and groups have lost and gained in economic and social rank--as the history of African-Americans or women clearly shows. It is this combination of durability and fluidity that Tilly's discussion seems to me to miss. This is not to say that Tilly sees the character of inequality as unchanging. Indeed, he emphasizes the transformation of inequality based on the emergent importance and mal-distribution of information and related resources.

Aside from democracy, Tilly offers sharp insights into other topics such as ethnic cleansing, social movements, chain migration, altruistic behavior in the face of danger, and, as noted, inequality and citizenship. Historians of United States cities will find his method for analyzing boundary change especially helpful for framing the history of ethnic and race relations. All historians, however, can profit greatly from the analytic precision he applies to the explanation of social processes. With the recent emphasis on comparative and global history, his work assumes special importance because it provides frameworks for the systematic analysis of similar events in different temporal and national settings. Indeed, with awe-inspiring erudition, Tilly, as in his other scholarly writings, ranges for examples across continents and centuries to locate an astonishing array of incidents, always apt and treated with subtlety, never flattened to fit abstract theory. His point, moreover, is never obscure. His signature style is the list that parses concepts or sets out the stages in his argument with razor-edged precision.

Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties ends abruptly. The book's last part, "Political Boundaries," is the least unified and fully developed. It needs a strong concluding chapter that weaves its many threads together into a powerful theoretical statement and draws out its implications for making sense of the current political scene. For this is a book for our times, as well as for the academy. Tilly's dissection of the processes undermining citizenship and democracy should be a clarion call, and his explanation of the need to jettison individual-centered explanations for social processes remains crucial for social scientists, public officials, and citizens who want to understand and respond intelligently to racism, inequality, and other ills. Almost any random reading of the current debate on immigration should make this point clear. We should be at once grateful to Tilly for providing a framework for understanding what is happening and hopeful that he will draw out its implications in a form accessible to the wide audience that needs to grasp his message.

Michael B. Katz

University of Pennsylvania