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On the Practice of Originality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Ira Katznelson
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Extract

I know just how pleased Charles Tilly was to receive the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an institution he cherished, and Hirschman is a person for whom Tilly had almost limitless admiration.

He particularly esteemed the assertive analytic power and intellectual modesty that characterized Hirschman's “Rival Interpretations of Market Society,” the brilliant 1982 Marc Bloch Lecture that addressed competing interpretations of modern markets as, respectively, “civilizing, destructive, or feeble.” “However incompatible the various theories may be,” Hirschman (1982: 1481) argued, “each might still have its ‘hour of truth’ and/or its ‘country of truth’ as it applies in a given country or group of countries during some stretch of time,” and he concluded by asking whether it is “not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?” (ibid.: 1483). These features, too, were hallmarks of Tilly's audacious originality.

Type
Special Section: The Tilly Fund for Social Science History and Hirschman Prize Remarks
Information
Social Science History , Volume 34 , Issue 3: In Honor of Charles Tilly , Fall 2010 , pp. 389 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2010 

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References

Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds. (1985) Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
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Mailer, Norman (2008) “In the ring: Grappling with the twentieth century.” New Yorker, October 6.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1966) “In defence of jargon.” Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, 178–86.Google Scholar
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