Unlike most of Chuck’s students at Michigan, my interests were not in social movements or historical sociology, but rather in urban sociology with an applied focus. Regrettably, I did not participate in the Sunday night gatherings at his house, because I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that the substantive focus of those gatherings was different from my own. I wish now that I had, because I know that I missed something very special, whether it related directly to my substantive interests at the time or not. But it says a lot about Chuck that he never held this against me nor did he chastise me for it; rather he always gave me whatever amount of time and effort it took to advise me and to help me with my work.

Chuck had an amazing ability to know when a graduate student needed pushing and when he or she did not. Shortly after I had passed my prelims (which in my test-fearing mind represented a much bigger hurdle than the dissertation I never doubted I would write), I settled into a sort of “winding down” period where my main focus seemed to be feeling good about thinking that I had somehow convinced my readers that I knew enough about my prelim exam area, demography and human ecology, to pass the exam. One day during this period I ran into Chuck, and said, “Hi Chuck, how are you doing?” I will never forget his reply, “Hi, John, how are you doing. Or rather, WHAT are you doing?” He made it clear that he wanted to see some progress on the dissertation proposal I had told him was coming but had done nothing to produce. I needed that. I got to work on it that day, and Chuck never pressed me about my progress again. Just as important as knowing when someone needed a little push, Chuck also knew when you didn’t, and he didn’t push you unless you needed it.

Instead, he offered me helpful and insightful ideas and advice whenever I asked, something that I came to depend on throughout my life. As others have mentioned, he also had a way of putting people in touch with others who had similar interests or who could be helpful to their careers in some way. I had become interested as an undergraduate student in the research of Bill Michelson at the University of Toronto. When I arrived at Michigan, I learned that Bill had been a student of Chuck’s during his time at Toronto. I was interested in Bill’s use of time budget data to understand the motivations for and consequences of people’s choices to move to different types of neighborhood and housing settings, and was encouraged by Chuck to get in touch with Bill when I expressed interest in his work and the possibility of gaining access to some of his data. I did, the contact with Bill was fruitful, and I was able to dig a dissertation out of an unanalyzed portion of his data. Analysis of time budget data is cumbersome, and can result tables that run for many pages. Early in my dissertation work, Chuck told me that it was not necessary to write a long dissertation, telling me “You ought to be able to say it in about 125 pages.” I was grateful that he never chastised me for turning in a 425-page dissertation, the majority of it consisting of multi-page tables!

What was special about Chuck was that his mentorship was a lifelong process. In the years after I left Michigan, he gave me useful and insightful advice about a wide range of issues. Among these were advice about seeking academic positions and publishing my first textbook, and a lifelong willingness to offer comments and suggestions on manuscripts and advice on where to get them published whenever I asked. The same was true with regard to his willingness to write letters of recommendation, even years after my Michigan days. He also continued to help me network, by such things as asking me to serve on the editorial board of a book series he was co-editing. I think my fellow student from my Michigan days, Bill Roy, is absolutely right in speculating that if data were kept on acknowledgments as it is with citations, Chuck would be right at the top. In fact, what amazes me most about Chuck is that, with one of the most productive careers of any sociologist, Chuck always found the time to help current and former students with their work. I don’t know how he managed it all, but I know that I am better for it, and I know there are many, many others who would say the same about their lives and careers.

John E. Farley
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

My thoughts go back to the first paper I wrote for him as a starting graduate student. I had carefully extricated all the macro structures I claimed led to a revolution. “How do you connect these structures to the specific actors of the revolution?” he asked me, and thus began my journey as an ethnographer, studying processes from the “bottom up”.

We, his students were a privileged lot. He placed so many safety nets for us, with his grueling work ethic, his towering intellect that could cut through many layers of thought to the core of the problem in a few minutes, his incredible integrity and his deep sense of fairness. If he had any favorites, none of us knew it. He celebrated and built on our strengths. We were all equally important. His room was a place of refuge from which we emerged with new energy and inspiration.

Viviana Zelizer speaks of Professor Tilly as the first gift giver, yes, he was always the first giver and yet he gave with such subtlety and grace that I realize the depth of his giving only after his death. The absence and loss comes to me at unexpected moments in a million little ways, sometimes too deep for words.

Deeply beloved mentor and father, what I am and will be intellectually, began with you.

Francesca Bremner (Ph.D. 2005, Columbia University)

The first time that I heard about the Content Analysis method was in a friendly chat the last time that Colombian sociologist Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, emeritus of University of Bonn, visited Bogota in 1997. Gutiérrez Girardot not only mentioned the effectiveness of the method, but also its usefulness in cultural analysis. Coming from him, these comments could not fail to be taken into account and the idea turned over and over in my mind for some time. The method was almost unknown among historians who study Colombian topics and although a few sociologists did know about it in theory, no studies had yet applied it to the history or sociology of Colombia. This lack of knowledge regarding the matter raised doubts and disbelief in me regarding its effectiveness in reaching general conclusions, as well as uncertainty, since research carried out with said method might not be accepted in academic circles.

Nevertheless, the theme of ‘representations’ intrigued me and sparked my curiosity so I mentioned it in various academic centers in New York, with no response, until the magic formula of “Open, Sesame!” was heard as an echo in the office of Charles Tilly in Columbia University in 1998. Given the intellectual respect that Professors Charles Tilly and Louise Tilly both inspired in me, I immediately decided to work with the method and to apply it.

I met Charles Tilly as a student, partly at the New School for Social Research and afterwards at Columbia University. When Louise retired from the New School, I started working almost exclusively with him. He was the principal director of my Ph.D dissertation in historical sociology. And during long discussions in his office, he became my idol. My respect for him came out, not only from his academic admirable capacities, but from his human deepness. Living humanity was a matter that he understood as well as its history. Therefore, a capacity to understand human condition in depth was incorporated in his daily life. I have found a great coherence between his intellectual believes and his daily acts.

I started believing that he had inherited the values from the deepest of the Western tradition that have built a path to democracy, to equality and to friendship through centuries. He was the kind of American that has built the good side of America as it is today. The kind of American that we foreigners admire from outside. The kind of American that we all must follow in order to continue on the Western path based on hard work and on respect for human kind.

That is the kind of human being that has passed away. The human being that I will never forget no matter where I’ll be. The human that I will ever miss.

Victoria Peralta (Ph.D. 2005, New School)
Independent Scholar and Writer, Bogota, Columbia

Often when Chuck would quickly and brilliantly read a paper, make a professional contact, or perform any other numerous acts of generosity, if you asked him what you could do in return, he would always say, go and do likewise. He would want this event to be a gathering that collectively committed ourselves to his example. It’s unlikely any of us will match his prodigious output or the originality, depth, and impact of his scholarship. But we can be inspired to build on the foundation he laid. Ron Aminzade once remarked that Chuck’s example made it impossible for Ron to ever say no to a student, whether reading a paper, serving on a committee, writing a letter, or spending hours in conversation. I don’t know if there has ever been a study of acknowledgments in papers and books, like the ones done on citations, but if there were, I would bet no one has ever surpassed Chuck Tilly. And I’ll bet 90% of us in this room have learned much more from Chuck or had him shape our papers and books more than any ritual acknowledgment can ever capture.

It was at the University of Michigan that Chuck really became the Chuck Tilly most of us know. Though The Vendee was already well known, it was there he wrote From Mobilization to Revolution, edited The Transformation of National States in Western Europe, co-wrote The Rebellious Century with his wife Louise and brother Richard, collected most of the data on collective action in France, and launched the Great Britain Project. Academia often witnesses spurts of great creativity around particular times and places and Michigan in the 70s was one of them. This creative burst was kindled by the energy of three main sources. First was the Center for Research on Social Organization, which resided in an old red brick school house, the Perry School. What had been classrooms were reconfigured as suites of offices, ideally sized to balance interaction and solitude. There were constant discussions about everything from the minutiae of our research projects to the grand questions of social theory. The only place to buy lunch within close walking distance was a greasy spoon called Krazy Jim’s whose uncannily accurate match book covers read “Cheaper than food.” So most of us ate in the center’s bare-bones lunch room where a big old urn supplied the muddy coffee that fueled the place. Chuck would often share with us the mundane details of what he was working on, his negotiation with journal editors over reviewers’ comments, or the subtleties of the job markets. It was in lunch room conversations that we got our professional socialization for the daunting jungle of academic life.

About the closest thing to an academic sanctuary I know is Chuck and Louise’s living room in their big house near fraternity row in Ann Arbor. For those of us who spent our Sunday evenings there, it ranks up there with the National Archives, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, or the Bibliothèque Nationale. Every Sunday evening, one of Chuck’s many acquaintances, either a graduate student, Michigan faculty member or the likes of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Joan Scott would discuss their on-going research. We would dig deep to uproot the underlying assumptions, creatively stretch the ideas to consider specifying conditions and comparisons, and most of all critically interrogate the methods. If there was any theme, it was measurement. When we think about mobilizing resources, how do we know a resource when we see it? Are ideas resources? How do we compare the potency of different resources? On and on and on. I think almost all the Michigan graduate students and perhaps some of the faculty, will tell you that’s where they learned to do scholarship. And when it came time to get married, my wife and I picked the place that most seemed like a sanctuary, the Tilly living room.

And there was even learning in classrooms. Chuck used classrooms to learn and to teach. In all the eulogies that have recalled how much Chuck taught us and gave to us, we need to remember that Chuck learned from us. Of course, it was not that we knew more, but that he had the intelligence and self-confidence to learn from his students. Poring over draft chapters of the books mentioned above, we learned how arguments are constructed, how they build on existing literature, how they are refined to be testable, and how they are crafted to be literate. We saw the process of creative scholarship in the making. But it was more than a pedagogical exercise. Chuck listened to us and took our suggestions to heart. Not that he always agreed with us. But by going toe to toe with one of the smartest people we had ever met, we grew to feel that we too could be real scholars.

Sometimes when people are close to historic events, they later say they didn’t realize at the time how special it was. For me that was never true about Michigan. I knew it was a special time and place and that I was very lucky to be there. But it’s only been since I’ve been teaching that I realize what made Chuck so great. I’ve met other people who are brilliant, erudite, committed to their students, inspirational, generous with their time, original in their thinking, positive in their relationships, and influential in the field, but never have I found these qualities in one individual. He was generous when he didn’t have to be, supportive without any expectation of reciprocity, striving when all the accolades had been won, curious when his knowledge was encyclopedic. That’s not to say he was perfect, as he would freely admit. For instance, in noontime volleyball he was an unconscionable poacher.

One of the themes in Chuck’s prodigious writing over the last decade or so is relational thinking. One of the greatest testimonials to Chuck’s impact is how deep the bonds are among the people in his large research community, not just his students or colleagues, but everyone he touched. When Chuck inspired us to go and do likewise, the responsibility is enduring.

Bill Roy
UCLA

It was thus something of a shock (especially given his grilling of my work in published reviews) to finally meet Chuck and find a completely unpretentious, gregarious, generous and warm soul who welcomed my efforts and invited me join in the “Contentious Politics Group.” It was in this group – in two all-too-brief stints at Stanford – that I finally had a chance to work with Chuck. Seeing him work with graduate students was truly an inspiration, as is completely obvious from the tributes that his legions of students have offered. It was a great joy to be able to continue working with Chuck and seeing him periodically as part of the editorial board of the Contentious Politics series at Cambridge – another vehicle by which Chuck helped advance the work of other scholars.

What all of those who are Chuck’s students may not realize is how unusual it is for a scholar of Chuck’s stature to welcome everyone into his intellectual circle – whether or not they were ever students or colleagues. I can only say how grateful I am for the chance to work with Chuck. Like everyone else has said, he always made my work better.

It is remarkable how Chuck always made time for others. Even this year, when he was trying to finish his own books, he did a special favor for me. He served as the National Academy’s reviewer for a report I had been working on, regarding USAID’s democracy assistance work. I feel guilty now that any of Chuck’s precious time went to this task, but as always, he was the most conscientious and fair critic one could hope for. This was typical of how he was always helping others, just because of his heartfelt commitment to advancing scholarship – everyone’s scholarship – with remarkable energy and selflessness.

Let me close with one personal note: after I presented a paper at Chuck’s workshop at the New School, we went to dinner, and I had brought along my wife and son (then just four years old). Chuck went out of his way to make my wife feel welcome, and he himself picked up my son and helped bundle him into his coat (it was a typical New York winter). My wife was so touched by Chuck’s warmth with our son, she always held a special place in her heart for Chuck among all of my colleagues.

Chuck, we will miss you so much! Future generations will know your scholarship, your penetrating analysis, your brilliant originality. Yet only we who spent time with you will have known and enjoyed you as a human being. For that experience, I am truly grateful.

Jack Goldstone
George Mason University

Personally, I thank Chuck for introducing me to Franzosi’s “words to numbers,” which suddenly clarified how to proceed methodologically in my Cuban revolution research, and for the related opportunity to observe how the many working papers produced at CSSC were transformed into Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834. The sacrifices and gestures made by Chuck for his students also affected significantly the course of my own research.

When I was having what seemed like interminable problems getting official permission in 1993 to carry out dissertation interviews as well as archival research in Cuba, Chuck received an invitation to speak at the University of Havana. When I suggested it might help me get the authorization I needed, he actually took the time to make a short trip to Havana, where he spoke to a packed auditorium at the University’s largest auditorium. The Cuban scholars were honored to have Charles Tilly, and I think Chuck enjoyed the chance to meet for the first time with Cuban colleagues who were familiar with his work. At the end of his visit, I was granted permission for interview research, and the university arranged for research assistants to do their sociological research practicum entering data from the archives with me.

Many others, especially international students, report similar special assistance.

I am very grateful to have had a good talk with Chuck not long before he entered the last super-powered therapy, and I close my abbreviated shared memories with an appeal that we all seek to emulate his: sense of humanity and caring for his students; eagerness to pass along his strengths and skills as a scholar and collaborator; help that allowed us to jump the hurdles, rather than making them more difficult; and his policy of the open door for students who got equal time with high-ranking colleagues.

Eloise Linger (Ph.D. 1999, New School)
SUNY College of Old Westbury

But I had no idea what I was getting into. So many of these tributes attest to Chuck’s extraordinary work ethic, output of scholarly work, willingness to test new ideas, allergy to dogmatism, openness to constructive criticism, and dedication as a teacher and as a mentor. Having been the beneficiary of all of these, I second them heartily. Chuck’s marvelous talent was in modeling this behavior, so that it could spread. And yet, knowing that all of these were meant to be emulated meant a certain amount of pressure. There was nothing more difficult for me than telling Chuck that I had missed a deadline.

What really stands out for me in my interactions with Chuck at Columbia, however, is the concern he showed for setting up an intellectual community. This is no small thing. Columbia’s sociology department could be, at times, a model of anomie. When I arrived, there was no space for students to interact or work. For his part, Chuck argued that advanced graduate students needed at least some office space to work, and that a faculty office (which were large at Columbia) should be allocated to students and configured for sharing. Thus began a steady improvement in the conditions for dissertation writers and with it, a concurrent improvement in their (our) productivity. Some of the most lasting friendships I made at Columbia were with fellow students with whom I shared the office next door to Chuck’s, with its bookshelves stuffed with back issues of Chuck’s journals.

The place that epitomized Chuck’s concern for mutual development of ideas and research was his Workshop on Contentious Politics, which ran, in some form and forum or another for forty years. At Columbia, the Workshop had its ups and downs, additions and subtractions, but there was always a core of people who kept coming back, and who formed intellectual and affective bonds. The Workshop became my intellectual home during my six years at Columbia, and for the six years after that. When I haven’t been able to make it to the workshop, I have felt homesick. When I work on an article, the first place I think of bringing it is the Workshop. The Workshop was special because it was an institution fully infused with Chuck’s ethos of basic generosity and democracy. Everyone is supposed to have done his or her homework, and to have read the paper beforehand. Graduate students are prioritized in the speaker/question queue so that they may join the conversation as colleagues. Criticism is expected to be constructive and to be offered in that spirit. The author is expected to take criticism seriously and not to be defensive or dismissive of critics. When any of these norms is broken, it’s palpable, and Chuck, or someone else, would work to mend the situation. There are not too many forums like this, and where they exist, have often been founded by Chuck’s students or colleagues.

Thus, when I think about Chuck, I will always remember the moments when his own intellectual abilities were on display, such as the time when, in a seminar, he offered trenchant comments and bibliographic references to two students, one of whom wrote on 16th Century Dutch maritime policy, and the other of whom wrote on criminal code reforms in late 19th Century Brazil. And I will think about his many books and articles that I find—and will continue to find—enormously instructive. But even when I don’t think about Chuck directly, but think about my friends and colleagues from graduate school, or how I run a seminar, or comment on student work, Chuck is inevitably involved, too. That the wisest observer of contentious politics was also the ablest facilitator of cooperative scholarship is simply astounding. And for this, in my own less astounding ways, I am bound to try to pass this on, to, in Chuck’s words, “adopt the norm.”

John Krinsky
City College of New York

After the great sadness that overcame me with the news of the death of Chuck Tilly, I can now compose a few considerations which in a very limited way express, in addition to the other tributes, my contribution to how Charles Tilly made the world a better place to be in.

Now it is commonplace to say that Charles Tilly was one of the outstanding intellectuals of the second half of the 20th Century. Just as important is to note that “Chuck” Tilly, in his half century career, projected and defended a model of intellectual mentorship and collaboration often described as ‘generosity’ though it went beyond just an individual desire on his part to give. I believe that what many have called his generosity was in fact Chuck Tilly’s philosophy of a manner of doing social science that he understood as a collective undertaking in which collaboration could only be done in good spirited discussions and debates. Thus his and Louise Tilly’s “Think and then Drink” seminars at the New School or the earlier version on Sunday evenings at their University of Michigan home, always accompanied with wine, cheese and bread to make intellectual exchange congenial, friendly and non-competitive. In short: a brother/sisterhood of scholars. This is what was truly unique in the Chuck Tilly approach to scholarship.

In advising students and colleagues, Chuck always gave freely of his ideas and in presenting his hard reasoned argumentation, he did so in a gentile, often jovial way which is unusual considering his intellectual stature and the behavioral mores of modern academia. Chuck was a formidable challenger of positions, his and others, capable of arguing both sides so as to provoke a more profound reformulation and/or to help in consolidating a good proposition which in his view of science should be defended elsewhere in those customary forums where academics exercise their profession. Thus Chuck was not only an adviser but also a devil’s advocate because he knew that his students must leave the fold and brave the currents of academic life.

I sense that this Chuck Tilly style of doing scholarship was not always appreciated by some of his outstanding colleagues, but like a social scientist that he was, he found confirmation of the effectiveness of this “inclusive and congenial” approach of doing social science in the works of his students and collaborators.

I have lived this Chuck Tilly philosophy since he advised my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan. Because I moved to Brazil and made my academic life in São Paulo, my contacts with Chuck Tilly were irregular, largely restricted to e-mails and occasional trips to New York when Chuck was never to busy to have lunch or dinner as a pretext to discuss what I was doing and what he was researching. Never did I leave these meetings empty handed, carrying away copies of his papers, books and/or reprints, as well as helpful suggestions of other relevant works. In this sense, these visits to New York were always marked by the prospects of seeing Chuck and an occasion for returning, if only briefly, to his seminar. He never failed to extend his invitation to participate in the New School or Columbia seminars, providing copies of the papers under discussion and, once there, introducing me to those present, maybe as a distant intellectual friend. Of course, I shall also keep the memories of the cheerful company of fellow seminar participants at the after-seminar dinners held either at the Indian or Chinese restaurants down the street. For a foreign visitor who came to the city once a year Chuck contributed his share in making the visit more like a homecoming.

In this sense, Chuck had the capacity of converting his place of work into an intellectual home for visitors and friends, whether it was the University of Michigan Perry Building, the Center for Study of Social Change or his office at Columbia University. A home, I mean, in the sense of Robert Frost’s definition of home: “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. Now with Chuck Tilly gone and Louise Tilly no longer in the City, I will always feel a certain emptiness whenever I go to City. Because going to see Chuck Tilly and attending his seminars were not mere coincidences as it might appear, but rather, as Jorge Luis Borges once said: “coincidence is not a coincidence but an appointment in destiny”. If this were the case, then truly the passing of Chuck Tilly has altered destiny.

I will not only no longer find the customary Tilly greeting when I get to his office, but I also can’t expect and look forward anymore to the latest Chuck Tilly article, book or paper: who is Chuck debating, taking issue with or what is he analyzing. This, too, will be another void for me. As an analogy, I am reminded of the death of Tom Jobim, the genius of the Bossa Nova. I remember how his passing marked the end of that expectation of another song or album from the composer of the “Girl from Impanema.” Similarly, the passing of dear Chuck Tilly means the finalization of an expectation of reading yet another work by the author who gave us such a poetic title like “Democracy is a Lake”. I will miss Chuck Tilly.

Salvador A. M. Sandoval
Pontificia Universidade Catolica de São Paulo
Universidade Estadual de Campinas

John K. Glenn
German Marshall Fund of the United States

At first I thought that Chuck’s remark was undue modesty. However, as the years have gone by I have realized the truth in the statement. Chuck’s intellectual agenda was in some senses nothing short of analyzing the dynamic politics of modernity. Over the years I’ve come to more fully understand the extraordinary breadth and complexity of this project, and have developed a much deeper appreciation of Chuck’s remarkable achievements.

For us graduate students Chuck’s capacious agenda mixed with his generosity were remarkable blessings. His peripatetic mind and the scope of his project provided plenty of room for all of us, regardless of our particular interests. When I arrived at Michigan he was deep in the throes of what we at Perry called the “Great Britain Industry,” his pioneering project to analyze the transformation of contentious politics in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I was interested in the cultural dynamics of class conflict, not the focus of the project. However, Chuck readily included me in the project and guided me through several phases of what would ultimately become an analysis of the discourses of class conflict. While his study was national in dimension, I focused on a few towns. While he was honing his theories of large-scale political processes, I was working the small spaces of contentious rhetoric. Nonetheless he openly welcomed me to his research agenda, and enthusiastically provided advice, support and assistance, even from afar when he moved to New York.

My story, of course, is nothing unusual. All graduate students who worked with Chuck can quickly harmonize in a chorus of such reflections. The Perry school was abuzz with the intellectual energy and exuberance that he generated. Many of us who sought Chucks advise recall that his responses often were tripartite. In closing, and recalling his work let me offer my final thought on Chuck Tilly—Big Heart, Large Benefactor, No Comparisons.

Marc W. Steinberg
Smith College