From his earliest publications, Charles Tilly has focused on the relationships between varying sets of agents in civil society, forms of rule, and state formation. Democracy, and the circumstances under which it arises or disintegrates, has been an important aspect of these inquiries. Tilly's fullest, recent examination of these issues is his (2003) Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. There, he argued that what was crucial for democratization over the long period was the insulation of public politics from “categorical inequalities” of class, race, gender and the like; the transformation of public politics in ways that broadened and equalized participation, enhanced collective control of government, and inhibited arbitrary conduct by political actors; and the integration of “trust networks” into public politics. Trust and Rule elaborates the conceptual and historical arguments for this last “necessary” condition for democratization. In doing so the author jousts briefly (but persuasively) with the recent debate over “trust,” social capital, and democracy. He then recasts that debate in the light of older literatures in social history, sociology, and institutional economics on networks as a means of collective action in the presence of various forms of rule, not only democracy.
Tilly objects to “dispositional” accounts of trust that, in his view, dominate political analyses. These stress the importance of an attitude or individual orientation that somehow extends to popular trust of governments and political leaders. Against this view, he sees trust as a property of interpersonal relations and especially of “trust networks.” Within such networks, members' relations to one another put major collective and long-term enterprises at risk from the malfeasance, mistakes, or failures of other network members. Migration chains across states, trade diasporas, kin networks, religious sects, and the like may all illustrate such relations over time—but they also may not. The precise sense in which Tilly defines trust networks excludes most ordinary voluntary associations and routine social networks.
Apart from this work's exploration of the internal dynamics of, and external threats to, trust networks, a key concern is how nonpolitical trust networks politicize themselves, connect with political networks, or give way to politically connected networks. Tilly's response is framed in several ways, and here I set out just one taxonomy. First, totalitarianism, theocracy, and democracy are conceived as exemplars of a “zone of direct rule” in which a central government extends its writ effectively to local communities, including trust networks. Systems of patronage or brokered autonomy typify a “zone of indirect rule” wherein either powerful intermediaries protect trust networks or the latter are granted substantial autonomy. Where highly segregated trust networks persist through evasive conformity, or ad hoc particularistic ties with authorities, then there is merely a “zone of thin political control.”
Second, Tilly asks how trust networks move between these zones. To move into the zone of direct rule, he suggests, segregated trust networks may dissolve, a previously segregated network may be integrated into public politics, or corporatist-like, the state itself may create politically connected trust networks. In the latter case, for instance, veterans benefits might be instituted, thereby tying that constituency directly to the state. Further, in the zone of direct rule, whereas totalitarianism and theocracy involve very extensive integration of trust networks into public politics, democracy always involves only a partial integration of the same. Contingent consent on the part of members of trust networks is also central to democracy, and thus political agents are more likely to rely on shared commitment in order to secure their integration into public politics than on coercion or material resources. For the author, then, it is not associations as such that hold the key to democratic participation but the connections between trust networks and public politics. Where integration of trust networks occurs in a democracy, their members develop a real stake in political processes, and the prospects for both participation and consultation improve. Conversely, he worries that where a withdrawal of trust networks occurs from public politics, whether voluntary or involuntary in character, democracies—present and future—are vulnerable.
If key networks and interests withdraw or are excluded from public politics, democracy may weaken. But equally interesting is a fine-grained assessment of which specific networks and interests never form in the first place, which get to be integrated and/or enjoy state sponsorship to do so, and which gain what degree of power. Tilly's analytical focus is to set out abstract meso-level causal mechanisms affecting the development of all such networks, and the relations between them and other actors. It is not clear to me that a single concept, trust networks, can bear the weight of the vast array of historical material he brings under its rubric.
Further, the conception of trust networks employed here has shades of the predicament of interest-group analysis in a pluralist worldview. The analyses of specific networks are inflected with all kinds of macroinstitutional expressions of power, but these go unexplored. For example, Tilly laments situations where rich, powerful people buy public offices or capture parts of government most affecting them because this represents an effective withdrawal of their trust networks from genuine bargaining and consultative processes (p. 136). Elsewhere, he refers to the way proletarians were integrated into public politics in democracies over the last century in circumstances where it seemed vital that new politically connected trust systems be created through social security policies and the like (pp. 120–24).
This analysis of key economic agents seems to focus on a limited notion of direct power and to lack the type of macroinstitutional understanding of business's power over investment in liberal societies, which is standard in those literatures where the postliberal tradition typified by Charles Lindblom meets the post-Marxist analyses of a Fred Block. Having regard for the constraining and enabling affects of such macroinstitutions, we might grasp better why, on many occasions, business has neither needed to organize directly nor seen fit to connect to public politics. Further, we would gain insight into why workers were especially reliant on forms of political organization and integration sponsored by governments. In short, Tilly's style of meso-level relational analysis risks missing certain broad, albeit historically bounded, macroinstitutional insights (whether economic, symbolic-cultural, or political in character) that would explain better why certain networks sought and/or needed direct integration into public politics in liberal democracies while others did not. While his theses about categorical inequalities were designed to address this kind of criticism, this work makes little effort to connect those concepts to his discussion of trust networks.
This work offers a stimulating, demanding, and provocative argument on trust and forms of rule. It also reveals Charles Tilly again as a fine storyteller. It is, however, best read with a working knowledge of his other recent publications on contention and democracy.
