Coercion and Capital: Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology Mixed Relationship to Marxism
What relation does Charles Tilly’s historical sociology, especially as developed in its works on European nation-state formation and the great revolutions, maintain to neo-Marxist historical sociology and more generally to Marxism? This article proposes to evaluate this relation from an analysis of three of Tilly’s most important works in historical sociology, including La Vendée, published in 1964, Les revolutions européennes 1492-1992, published in 1993, and Contrainte et capital dans la formation de l’Europe 990-1990, published in 1992. Its main thesis is that this relation does exist but is distinguished by its mixed character. It is also argued that Tilly should rather be classified as a neo-Weberian author, Marxism’s legacy being assumed but firmly integrated into always multicausal studies of those great sociopolitical transformations.