Contentious Performances

The book analyzes popular collective struggles, drawing especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great Britain between 1758 and 1834.

Charles Tilly (Author)

9780521515849, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 August 2008

256 pages, 10 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.46 kg

“Contentious Performances, completed a few months before Charles Tilly’s untimely death, takes up one of his most important and fruitful ideas: that contentious politics is structured by ‘repertoires of contention.’ In this book Tilly sets out to define repertoires more exactly, to propose methods for detecting their presence, and to show how repertoires emerge and change in varying political contexts. Written with Tilly’s typical verve, this book is an important addition to the oeuvre of one of the great social scientists of our era.”
-William H. Sewell, Jr., The University of Chicago

How can we get inside popular collective struggles and explain how they work? Contentious Performances presents a distinctive approach to analyzing such struggles, drawing especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The book accomplishes three main things. First, it presents a logic and method for describing contentious events, occasions on which people publicly make consequential claims on each other. Second, it shows how that logic yields superior explanations of the dynamics in such events, both individually and in the aggregate. Third, it illustrates its methods and arguments by means of detailed analyses of contentious events in Great Britain from 1758 to 1834.

1. Claims as performances
2. How to detect and describe performances and repertoires
3. How performances form, change, and disappear
4. From campaign to campaign
5. Invention of the social movement
6. Repertoires and regimes
7. Contention in space and time
8. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB], Sociology [JHB]