6 Quotes by Charles Tilly

Collective violence has flowed regularly out of the central political processes of western countries... The oppressed have struck in the name of justice, the privileged in the name of order, the in-between in the name of fear.

War made the state, and the state made war

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat – including men – from reluctant citizens...

War made the state, and the state made war.

Yet in one way or another all of us – readers and writers alike – are ultimately prisoners of the documents. And the chains are hard to see.

Both personal experience and professional studies of social processes, after all, had led me to think that people rarely accomplish exactly what they consciously plan, and constantly find events unrolling differently from what they anticipated. Why, then, do people’s descriptions and explanations of social processes overwhelmingly emphasize conscious deliberation?