Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere - Social Science ...

THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL Contention, Change, and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly

New York, October 3-5, 2008

Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere By Andreas Koller

The late Chuck was intellectually so open and curious that he was even interested in traditions of thought and research that he previously did not explicitly focus on in his work. He was a master in doing what he encouraged and helped me so much to do as well: “brokerage between previously unconnected traditions,” as he called it. His help and support were so generous. The absolute record was when he once returned a long paper that I sent him by e-mail within less than three hours (!) - with very detailed comments. I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw his reply. The aim of my paper today is brokerage between the later work of Charles Tilly, classic American pragmatism and the study of the public sphere. Chuck did not use to work explicitly with the theoretical language of the public sphere and even explicitly criticized certain usages of the term “public sphere” at certain times in the past.1 But ever since I knew him, he was very interested in this theme and so supportive of my work for a sociology of the public sphere. Last year, this even led to a paper that he wrote for a SSHA panel on the “The Public Sphere and Comparative-Historical Research” that I organized. Drawing on his work on Great Britain, he wrote a paper on “The Rise of the Public Meeting in Great Britain, 1758-1834”, as an indicator of the expansion of the public sphere and as an indicator

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As, for example, when he said at a conference in 1992 that the concepts of civil society and the public sphere are morally admirable, but analytically useless (Emirbayer and Sheller 1999:145). Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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of democratization at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century (Tilly 2009). Unfortunately, because one of the recurrent side effects of his cancer treatment started acting up that week and because of the possibility of an urgent stay in the hospital, he could not actually physically attend the conference in the end. But because he so much wanted to participate in the panel, he waited literally until the last minute to cancel his flight to the SSHA meeting in Chicago, after a last-minute re-assessment of the side effects, early in the morning, just before he would have had to go to the airport. Craig Calhoun read then Chuck’s paper at the conference. This made Chuck very happy when I told him about it. The panel resulted in plans for a special issue of the journal Social Science History on the panel theme “The Public Sphere and Comparative-Historical Research”. For this special issue that I can edit, Chuck asked me for suggestions how he should revise and extend his conference presentation. What a task - making such suggestions to Chuck! But he was very interested in my input. We planned an extensive conversation about this for early spring. Sadly, this conversation could not take place anymore. Let me try to formulate briefly today what I probably would have suggested to him for the revision and extension of his paper: ideas for how to incorporate the theoretical language of the public sphere in his more general theoretical framework, going beyond his specific work on the expansion of the public sphere in the late 18th and early 19th century. I’ll try to do this by an immanent exploration of parts of his later work, making more explicit connections with the theoretical language of the public sphere. Thus, the question is how the theoretical language of the public sphere can be formulated from within his own theoretical framework, on its own terms – and how this, in turn, can advance a historical sociology of the public sphere.

Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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Classic texts on the historical-sociological study public sphere like those from John Dewey, C. Wright Mills or early Jürgen Habermas often deploy an oscillating usage of the term “public sphere”. A feasible definition for research has to distinguish carefully between the public sphere in its broader sense as the sphere of public communication, that is, communication open to strangers at large; and in its narrower sense as the capacity for reasoned public choice (Koller 2009). What Chuck called and studied as “public politics”, “public performances” or “public claim-making” falls into the broader meaning of the public sphere as a sphere of conversation open to strangers. This definition corresponds with the networktheoretical terminology of the public sphere as an „interstitial space“ (Mische and White 1998) in which the “actions of switching-connecting and decoupling of networks take place“ (Ikegami 2000:997). In this sense, Chuck’s work on the transformation of public politics is indeed a contribution for understanding the historical transformation of the public sphere. A closer look at his later work, however, shows that also a notion of the narrower usage of the term public sphere is an integral part of his work – a notion of reasoned public choice. For classic figures like Dewey, Mills or Habermas, this notion refers to the possibility that the basic character of social life may be more or less consciously chosen and not merely inherited, shaped by external determination, or dictated by mere necessity, as Craig Calhoun put it. It means that public communication can be something different than the mirror of mere power politics, mere expression of personal experience, or mere reproduction of cultural traditions (Calhoun 2009). For empirical research, the notion of an unlimited capacity of reasoned public choice serves as a methodological fiction (Koller 2009). In order to see how this notion, this epistemic and critical dimension of the public sphere, is implied in Chuck’s later work, we need to see the connection to the pragmatist formulation of the notion of reasoned public choice. For Dewey, Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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“Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences” (Dewey 1954:126). The identification of the indirect, unintended consequences of social interaction is “an antecedent condition of any effective organization” of the public (Dewey 1954:126). Thus, “we are concerned, not with a bare relation of cause and effect, but with one of means and consequences, that is, of causes deliberately used for the sake of producing certain effects,” as Dewey put it (Dewey 1984:66). Understanding the problem situation, as the pragmatists called it, means understanding the mechanisms. If you understand the mechanisms, you can put things right. Even if he did not directly engage a lot with American pragmatism, there are many analogies in Chuck’s work. For one particular element, the mechanism-process approach, there is an excellent and extensive working paper by sociologist Neil Gross that points out these analogies (Gross 2008). The title of his working paper is “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” Apart from some critique on individual points in the footnotes, Neil Gross’s paper shows how and why Chuck’s mechanismprocess approach is compatible with a pragmatist theory of social mechanisms – while this is much less the case for other approaches in the contemporary discussion on mechanisms. Qua practices mechanisms may change over time, as Chuck recognized - unlike some proponents of a formal mechanism approach. Whether and how mechanisms matter for a particular case depends on the constellation of contingent historical circumstances (Gross 2008). For Chuck, mechanisms “are events that alter relations among some specified set of elements” (Tilly 2001:572) – mechanisms as transforming events. It’s important to see that Chuck took the point that the overtones of the term ‘mechanism’ are unfortunate – as if it had to do with something that happens inside Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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a machine. But he nevertheless preferred this term over other terms like “patterns”, “configurations” or “regularities” because, as he once said, it conveys a little bit of a “shock value” to social scientists who continue to map these other terms into previously prevalent forms of explanation like the covering law model or correlational analysis and variable-based explanations (Tilly 2003:88). One should also note that Dewey and pragmatist thought more generally are not the only precursors of Chuck’s mechanism-process approach. A little more than a year ago, Chuck himself wrote about such another precursor, stimulated by a conference on the work of Robert Merton, organized by Craig Calhoun (Calhoun 2007). In this very room here, Chuck gave a paper which included this confession: “I confess that only in writing this paper did I notice the Mertonian tones of my decade-old argument.” He meant his decade-old argument about causal mechanisms in that middle range which Merton famously recommended. Therefore, Chuck called his paper “Mechanisms of the Middle Range” (Tilly 2007). Among other things, he discussed Merton’s famous “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” as one small bundle of mechanisms, especially inequality-generating mechanisms. The identification of these mechanisms relies on what Dewey called “cooperative intelligence.” Other formulations he used for this notion were “cooperatively organized intelligence”, or “socially organized intelligence” (Dewey 1987, 2000, 1982). By identifying the social mechanisms through cooperative intelligence it is possible to transform the social process, that is, in Chuck’s words, by changing the sequence and combination of mechanisms. In his book Why?, Chuck laid out how the social scientist should bring his knowledge about mechanisms and processes into the larger public sphere: neither in form of technical accounts nor in form of everyday stories, but by what he called superior stories. “Like everyday stories, superior stories simplify their causes and effects. They maintain unity of time and place, deal with a limited number of actors Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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and actions, as they concentrate on how those actions cause other actions. They omit or minimize errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simultaneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects. But within their limited frames they get the actors, actions, causes, and effects right. By the standards of a relevant and credible technical account, they simplify radically, but everything they say is true. Superior stories make at least a portion of the truth accessible to nonspecialists” (Tilly 2006:171f.). “Superior stories” which capture the actual mechanisms and processes better, improve the quality of “public politics.” In other words, superior stories increase reasoned public choice. In this sense, Chuck’s view corresponds with Dewey’s formulation that “the problem of a democratically organized public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem“ (Dewey 1954:126). Intellectual in the broad pragmatist sense of collaborative intelligence. All of this is central to the comparative-historical study of the public sphere as part of studying the social process. The late Chuck arrived at an “image of history” as “a huge series of consequential conversations,” as he called it in one of his last books Explaining Social Processes (Tilly 2008:198). He understood “conversation as continuously negotiated communication” (Tilly 1998:495).2 “Conversation in general shapes social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants” (Tilly 1998:507). One particular way that Chuck suggested to analyze consequential conversation was to analyze standard stories (or everyday stories, as he called it elsewhere) - as one

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Cf. also the reprint (Tilly 2002a).


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(crucial) type of conversation. At the same time, he saw this as “one way to open the way toward a systematic account” of what has been called the “social construction” of reality (Tilly 2002b:8). “The presence of a certain story constrains social interaction, defines an array of possible interactions and their likely outcomes, and thereby limits what can happen next. Stories play a significant part in the pathdependency of conversation and of social interaction as a whole,” as Chuck put it (Tilly 2002b:9). For “the next generation of social researchers” (Tilly 2002b:14), Chuck said, “reflection on conversation as a model and vehicle of social processes suggests (…) fascinating opportunities for research” (Tilly 2002b:7f.).3 This includes analyzing consequential public conversations for understanding history as a huge series of consequential conversation and increasing the impact of cooperative intelligence in this consequential process. In relation to the terminology of Chuck’s work, one quote of Dewey for the notion of reasoned public choice is particularly striking: “the capacity of organized intelligence” (Dewey 1982:90), a formulation Dewey used in an article with the title “A New Social Science.” As we know, Chuck used the term “capacity” often his work, high capacity versus low capacity in his two-by-two tables. “The capacity of organized intelligence” may indicate the stakes here particularly well, a capacity that is different from other “capacities” like “state capacity”, for example. For Dewey, cooperative intelligence is an “operative power” (Dewey 1982:90) of its own. Not least, the vast scholarly network Chuck created is a living proof of a certain capacity of cooperative intelligence in shaping the social process. The same was true for his contentious politics workshop. Here, I can’t spell out further the brokerage between the later work of Charles Tilly, classic American pragmatism and the study

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This introduction to Stories, Identities and Political Change emerged from his paper “Stories of Social Construction“ (Tilly 1997). Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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of the public sphere. But I hope I was able to sketch out the relevance of this brokerage and of the capacity of cooperative intelligence for both explanation and change – and for contention, the keywords of the title of our conference. As I mentioned at the beginning, Chuck was a master in improving our work from within, through immanent exploration and subsequent immanent critique. And he appreciated it very much, if others tried to treat him and his work in the same way. Chuck did not use to promote hermeneutics as the main method of social research, but he was so excellent at practicing hermeneutics in the intellectual and social exchange with us. I think this is a feeling that is so widely shared among his mentees and protégés. Somebody who understood you better than you understood yourself, somebody who was able to express better what you wanted to say or write than you did by yourself. This loss of hermeneutical understanding in particular makes the loss of Chuck so big.


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Bibliography Calhoun, Craig. 2007. "Sociological Theory and the Sociology of Science: The Continuing and Future Importance of the Sociology of Robert K. Merton." Introduction to the Conference "Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociological Explanation", Columbia University. New York. —. 2009. "The Public Sphere as Immediate Opportunity and Distant Ideal." Social Science History, Planned Special Issue on "The Public Sphere and ComparativeHistorical Research". Dewey, John. 1954. The Public and its Problems. Chicago: Swallow Press. —. 1982. "A New Social Science." Pp. 87-96 in 1918-1919 Series: The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Carbondale (IL): Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1984. "Social Science and Social Control." Pp. 64-68 in 1931-1932 Series: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Carbondale (IL): Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1987. "Authority and Social Change." Pp. 130-149 in 1935-1937 Series: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Carbondale (IL): Southern Illinois University Press. —. 2000. Liberalism and Social Action. Series: Great Books in Philosophy. Amherst (NY): Prometheus Books. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Mimi Sheller. 1999. "Publics in History." Theory and Society 28:145- 197. Gross, Neil. 2008. "A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms." Paper presented at the Workshop on "Pragmatism, Practice Theory and Social Change," Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK), New York University, September 13-14. New York. Andreas Koller, Charles Tilly, Pragmatism, and the Public Sphere

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Ikegami, Eiko. 2000. "A Sociological Theory of Publics: Identity and Culture as Emergent Properties in Networks." Social Research 67:989-1029. Koller, Andreas. 2009. "Introduction." Social Science History, Planned Special Issue on "The Public Sphere and Comparative-Historical Research". Mische, Ann, and Harrison C. White. 1998. "Between Conversation and Situation: Public Switching Dynamics across Network Domains." Social Research 65:695724. Tilly, Charles. 1997. "Stories of Social Construction." Lecture for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor (MI). —. 1998. "Contentious Conversation." Social Research 65:491-510. —. 2001. "Historical Analysis of Political Processes." Pp. 567-588 in Handbook of Sociological Theory, edited by Turner, Jonathan H. New York: Kluwer Academic. —. 2002a. "Contentious Conversation." Pp. 111-122 in Stories, Identities, and Political Change. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. —. 2002b. "Introduction." Pp. 3-14 in Stories, Identities, and Political Change. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. —. 2003. "Interventions: Dynamics of Contention: Conversation with Charles Tilly." Social Movement Studies 2:85-96. —. 2006. Why?: What happens when People give Reasons...and why. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.


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—. 2007. "Mechanisms of the Middle Range." Paper presented at the Conference "Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociological Explanation", Columbia University. New York. —. 2008. "Three Visions of History and Theory." Pp. 190-199 in Explaining Social Processes. Boulder (CO): Paradigm Publishers. —. 2009. "The Rise of the Public Meeting in Great Britain, 1758-1834." Social Science History, Planned Special Issue on "The Public Sphere and ComparativeHistorical Research".


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