Charles Tilly, German Historicism, and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

Abstract

This paper examines Charles Tilly's relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a "historicist." The "search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics," he argued, was a "waste of time" and had "utterly failed." Tilly's approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on "historical individuals" rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly's program of "relational realism" resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism's argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly's ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.Years of wandering in the no-man's land between history and sociology have filled me with notions of the wonders and dangers to be encountered there.

Tilly and Bourdieu

“…When one interpreter of Bourdieu underscored the close association of his work with critical realism, a school of thought in the philosophy of science that posits the reality of underlying causal structures and mechanisms, Bourdieu fully acknowledged the affinity, affirming that, "like [Roy] Bhaskar, whose work he ha[d] recently discovered, he has been a realist all along" (Vandenberghe 1999, 62). 24 (Much the same linkage with critical realism has also been highlighted in the case of Tilly's later writings [Steinmetz 2010]. ) Again, very late in life Bourdieu also came to realize the hidden similarities in this respect between his sociology and that of Merton (at least in intent), pointing out in a favorable light Merton's abiding concern to "reject .…”

“…From the beginning, Tilly and Bourdieu shared a profoundly historical-one might better say historicist-sensibility (Steinmetz 2010). As I shall later discuss in greater detail, this sensibility extended even to the problem of sociological concept formation, although in different degrees in the two thinkers.…”

“…As far back as graduate school, Tilly cast his lot with the most historically minded thinkers at Harvard, mentors such as George Homans, Barrington Moore, Jr., Pitirim Sorokin, and Samuel Beer (Steinmetz 2010). And throughout his life, he stressed, as George Steinmetz (2010) has noted in this volume, that the distinction between history and sociology is an artificial one-as is, indeed, the very category of a "historical sociology." 8 "To the extent," Tilly wrote in As Sociology Meets History, "that the place and time of the action enter into its explanations, .…”

Field Theory and Interdisciplinarity: History and Sociology in Germany and France during the Twentieth Century

“…Neo-historicism (Beiser 2011; Troeltsch 1922) became so compelling for sociologists that Karl Mannheim, the most prominent German sociologist at the end of the 1930s, was able to argue that the “historical-individualizing” approach was the discipline's “crowning” approach, organizing its work “like an invisible hand” (1932: 9; 1952: 84). Weimar sociological neo-historicism differed from the nineteenth-century form of historicism, which refused explanation and comparison and was usually politically conservative and nationalistic (Steinmetz 2010b). According to Mannheim, sociologists had to combine the “study of singularities” ( Einmaligkeitsforschung )—unique events or singular facts—with attention to causality, however complex and overdetermined, uncovering “the unique complex of determinants” (1932: 9, 10).…”

“… 3 I defend the neo-historicist epistemology associated with interwar German Geschichts-Soziologie , the interwar Annales School, and the mature Bourdieu, in Steinmetz 1998; 2005; and 2010b. …”