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Charles Tilly, "From Mobilization to Revolution"

My friends will recognize this book for what it is: stone soup. Like the downand-out swindlers of the fable, I boiled up a pot of water, tossed in some pebbles, then invited passersby to add whatever soup makings they could spare. They added plenty. Wha!’s more, they performed a miracle: the stones became edible. Whether they actually became tasty as weil, I leave you, the reader, to decide.

Several sections of the book first took shape as memoranda to a lively seminar in the now-defunct left for Research on Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan. Clint Fink, Bob Hefner, Bill Garnson, Joan Lind, Elizabeth Converse, and Dee Wemette pred fruitful feedback at that stage. Others emerged initially as informal written contributions to discussions with friends, students, and collaborators (the three categories are not, I am happy to note, mutually exclusive) at Michigan’s left for Research on Social Organization. Gamson, Lind, and Wemette again badgered me, now joined at different times by Bob Cole, Max Heirich, Louise Tilly, David Snyder, Frank Munger, Bruce Fireman, Bill Roy, and Ron Aminzade. Substantial portions of the book build on unpublished papers which circulated for years under the titles “From Mobilization to Political Conflict” and “Revolutions and Collective Violence.” (One version of the latter paper eventually appeared in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby. eds., Handbook of Political Science, volume III, published by Addison-Wesley, 1975.) Anyone who looks c10sely at the soup will see some familiar ingredients floating around. Yet she or he will also see that I have chopped, blended, trinuned, and spiced the ingredients so that few of them remain in anything like their original condition.

About eighty people have given me reactions to the first draft of this book. Most, alas, were critical, although they tempered their criticism with the lame excuse that praise would do me no good. Ron Aminzade, Lynn Eden, Bruce Fireman, Tony überschall, Bill Roy, Jan Smith, and Mike Useem pred espeeially searching reviews of my arguments. As a result, I have rewritten the entire manuscript, and expanded it from four chapters to eight.

Louise Tilly, in contrast, was so busy with her own projects during the book’s writing that she was unable to give the manuscript her customary devastating line-by-line review. I had to settle for her quick inspirations and peremptory challenges. Perhaps that works to my advantage. I can thank her for letting me get into print several months earlier, and blame her for any remaining errors and obscurities.

Sandra Ahrens, Anne Dolinka, Margaret Grillot, Pam Hume, Ruth Lewis, Mary Nensewitz, Rose Siri, Kathy Vargo, and Barbara White helped produce different versions of the manuscript, while Martha Guest and Bobbi Schweitzer gave me aid with bibliography. For recent research assistance in the studies of France and Britain on which this book draws repeatedly, I have a special debt to Priscilla Cheever, Leila AI-Imad, Elizabeth McDonald, Chantal Bancilhon, Mike Polen, and Bobbi Schweitzer. üh, yes: money. In recent years, the National Seience Foundation has given generous support to the research which lies behind this book. I am grateful to Donald Ploch of the Foundation for his encouragement. A Guggenheim Fellowship and the Hudson Research Professorship of the University of Michigan gave me the leis ure to write the first draft. And the joint support of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Soeiales and the Maison des Seiences de I’Homme gave a great boost to my work in France.

A final note on stone soup. It’s not good to the last drop. At the bot tom of the pot, your ladle sera pes grave!. Even the miraculous ministrations and incantations of my friends did not dissolve all the rocks I star ted with. For the remainder I am doubly responsible: for having posed and answered questions badly; worse still, for having knowingly allowed bad questions and bad answers to remain. Why? Because halfway through the re-drafting I realized that soup was my life. There is the future: spooning out the minestrone, adding a pebble now and then, collecting reeipes and complaints, trying to improve the taste and nutritional value, but never taking the pot off the fire. So long as friends are around, they won’t lack for stone soup.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

January 1978

Charles Tilly

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