Charles Tilly Quotes

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

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

This closing chapter takes up three problems about authoritative reason giving that earlier chapters have raised but not resolved: what makes reasons credible, how people who work with specialized sorts of reason giving can make their reasons accessible to people outside their specialties, and what particular problems social scientists face when it comes to communicating their reasons, and reconciling them with the reasons that we as ordinary people give for our actions. Governmental commissions, we will see, offer just one of many ways to broadcast reasons. We will also see that the credibility of reasons always depends on the relation between speaker and audience, in part because giving of reasons always says something about the relation itself.

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.

From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.