Contentious Politics, Nation-state And Democratization:Analysis Of Charles Tilly’s Political Theory

Charles Tilly focused on three key issues in his lifetime, which are nation-state, contentious politics and democratization. In this process, Tilly converted his attention from macro-history to micro-mechanism. In fact, Tilly paid his attention to the formation of nation-state having close relations with the evolution of theories of political transformation after the Second World War. Since the end of the World War II, various theories of political transformation, including modernization theory and political development theory, emerged one after another. Behaviorism is widely used in the field of American social science research as well. On the basis of drawing on the comparative historical analysis and historical institutionalism research method, Tilly pointed out there were numerous trajectories with an unintended procedure for European development.In his opinion, on the one hand, war made modem nation-state; On the other hand, the differences between the development of coercion and capital in Europe resulted in three principal trajectories of the formation of nation-state, which are coercive trajectories, capitalist trajectories and trajectories of capitalized coercion.What has been generally accepted by scholars is that war leaded to the formation of nation-state in Europe. However, the explanatory power of this proposition does have some limitations, which Tilly also admitted. Moreover, Depending on the analysis of these issues, Tilly indicated the origin of modem western civilization.When he was young, and in the process of analyzing the phenomenon of political contentious, Tilly focused his attention on the effect of the formation of nation state and the development of capitalism upon political contentious. Then, Tilly successfully constructed the Political Process Theory and the Contentious Politics Theoiy with his friends, by utilizing John Mill’s rational people presupposition and Alexis Tocqueville’s structuralism analysis method, and criticizing the theory tradition of social psychology of Gustavus Le Bon and the research method of society-centered of Emile Durkheim as well. At the same time, Owing to the utilization of the concept of "mechanism", Tilly criticized the rational choice theory. In this regard, Tilly approaches the theory tradition of Tocqueville. Political opportunity structure and micro-mechanism constitute the political contentious theory. Paying little attention to the importance of culture and historical context is the main shortcoming for contentious political theory. Moreover, the extension of the definition of "opportunity" is too large to verify its falsification.Tilly kept his eyes on democracy in his later years. However, it implied his thought about the origin of representative democracy when he probed into the reason of the formation of nation-state in his early life. At last, He put forward the definition of democracy and the assessment standard of democratization from the standpoint of micro-relationship. We can partly respond the critique about Tilly’s explanation concerning the origin of representative system in his early life by bringing it into the analysis framework which was constituted by coercion and capital.