Charles Tilly

Uh, and, uh, so I was used to counting things, you know.

I worked, uh, with a great sociologist called Charles Tilly.

And so one day, uh, because I was writing a book about our village and, uh, with my daughter, uh, then who was about eleven, I- we heard the bells ring.

There's-- uh, for church.

I noticed that very early, even before the first war, Wyckoff and the other people who were involved in negotiations, they made basic errors speaking about the nuclear issue and the technical details.

I'm not a nuclear scientist.

I knew this stuff much better than they did.

So, you know, I don't think this is why the argument in the article as well, too, by Mohammad Tolahi Tabar, he kind of points out that the disparity of a deal, because they think that America, to put it in the words of the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, America is agreement incapable.

They're hitting each other.

And this, yeah, Russia will have lessness loose.

One last thing, you know, somebody who always talks about Clausewitz, there's also another political scientist, very influential, Charles Tilly.

He had a famous quote about the nature of a state in war.

And in fact, the debate about what makes a modern state a modern state is something that you have a great amount of debate about, and you have leading theorists that have different arguments about it.

So here we can think of Max Weber, we can think of Michel Foucault, we could think of Charles Tilly, we can think of Michael Mann, we can think of Wendy Brown.

There are a number of people who have theorized this.

What I would argue and what's been most helpful to me is to acknowledge that state building is a contingent process and that it can proceed in multiple sequences, right? So there is no one sequence fits all, but there are certain elements that all modern states share.

So I know this will lead to me being accused of Eurocentrism, but if we're going to talk about nation-states in Latin America, we do have to begin in Europe.

Specifically, I want to talk about a controversial theory about how nation-states emerge coming from a book called Coercion, Capital, and European States by Charles Tilly.

It's a pretty dense book, but the basic theory is that some European states were able to transform themselves into what Tilley calls national states between the 16th and 20th centuries because their rulers were able to develop the coercive institutions, you know, like police, and especially the army, that protected their populations from outsiders.

And also to protect from internal revolution, so you have the army that keeps you safe from outside threats, and then the police keeping you safe from inside threats.

But it also reminded me, thinking about these historical arguments, and actually Jane Jacobs in her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she makes the point that cities should sometimes succeed because they're the true units of economic life and actually often nation states sometimes mismanage them and redistribute resources in unfair ways.

And it also reminded me of Charles Tilly's work.

So his famous book on city-states and how cities and states were formed in early modern Europe, he talks about autonomous cities and bargaining cities.

So there are cities that have loads and loads of capital and wealth and banks and merchants, and they can actually function quite autonomously, whereas there are other cities where there's a lot of coercive power of kings and armies, and actually the bankers and the capitalists have to bargain with them to form a state, so they can't be so autonomous.

Or we get Trey Fernand Braudel in the great comparative Annales School in France.

Charles Tilly in comparative historical sociology.

Recently, Peter Turchin of an elite competition using a quantitative comparative method.

The point is that these books have a sweep.