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Charles Tilly. The Politics of Collective Violence. (Cambridge Studies in

Contentious Politics.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xii,
276. Cloth $65.00, paper $23.0...

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DOI: 10.1086/ahr/109.2.474

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474 Reviews of Books and Films
history, Noble takes pains to explain why he could not
embrace the scholarly presuppositions of the members
of the myth/symbol school of American Studies who
were his contemporaries. Noble's account of the
change in the scholarly stance of Parrington's and
Matthiessen's disciples Henry Nash Smith and Leo
Marx is remarkable for the pathos evident in his
characterization of the profound losses that took place
at this moment of transition. In Noble's opinion, Smith
and Marx knew that Miller and Matthiessen had lost
faith in the progressive values of American culture,
and the myth/symbol school originated out of Smith's
and Marx's desire to enshrine the values in which their
mentors had believed within a timeless realm kept
apart from the incursions of the marketplace.
When they idealized the United States as an excep-
tional nation, myth/symbol scholars drew on the foun-
dational assumptions concerning the national anthro-
pology that distinguished "authentic rational cultures"
from "inauthentic irrational cultures." But by idealiz-
ing the national culture as authentic, myth/symbol
studies scholars dismissed as inauthentic all of the
cultures that had not sprung from the national land-
scape. The members of the myth/symbol school also
constructed literary canons that supposedly repre-
sented the purity of the national identity but that in
fact justified the exclusion of Anglo-Protestant women
from the precincts of authentic national culture as well
as American Indians, African Americans, Mexican
Americans, and Catholic and Jewish Americans.
Following his exposition of the limitations in the
myth/symbol school paradigm, Nobles identifies his
lifelong scholarly project with the questions that their
graduate students addressed to the exponents of the
myth/symbol school. These disenchanted successors
desacralized the myths of the United States as a virgin
land and the national history as a providential errand
into the wilderness. They also fostered a new paradigm
that Noble calls "postnational" American Studies and
that his book aspires to authorize as the dominant
disciplinary perspective in the present configuration of
the field.
As Noble explains it, "postnational" Americanist
scholarship replaces the state of nature anthropology
with a cultural constructivist model that undermines
the aesthetic authority of the national landscape and
subverts the literary canon as an instrument of Amer-
icanization. The new paradigm emerged from inter-
ventions of feminist and gay and lesbian scholars, as
well as students of the black Atlantic and members of
Latin American subaltern studies groups who wrote
out of a powerful sense of the relationship between
their academic projects and their involvement in inter-
national and transnational movements.
Throughout this lucid and broad-gauged account,
Noble writes from the position of a cultural critic who
has grasped the core assumptions and values of the
driving paradigms of the American Studies movement;
he also writes as a scholar for whom these paradigms
matter personally as well as professionally. "Perhaps,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
then, we can finally free ourselves from those meta-
phors that encourage us to flee the timeful complexity
of a locality to find liberty in the timeless abstractions
of the marketplace. Perhaps, then, we will be able to
construct metaphors that will allow us to live at home
in the circle of the earth" (p. 301).
DONALD PEASE
Dartmouth University
CHARLES TILLY. The Politics of Collective Violence.
(Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics.) New
York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 276.
Cloth $65.00, paper $23.00.
In this ambitious new work, Charles Tilly seeks to
account for significant variations in the quantity, char-
acter, and intensity of collective violence across time,
place, and social setting. He also proposes answers to
some important real-world puzzles. Why do people
who have lived in relative peace for years suddenly
start to kill each other? Why do certain kinds of
political regime appear to host different levels and
forms of collective violence? Building on his own and
other scholars' work on large-scale social change,
"contentious politics," and "social inequality," Tilly
sets out to address these questions by proposing an
unusual two-dimensional typology of collective vio-
lence. The key variables in this typology are the
"salience" of violence in the overall interaction among
contending parties, and the degree of "coordination"
among violent actors (pp. 14-16). Using this schema,
Tilly identifies six broad categories of collective vio-
lence, which he names according to their most typical
manifestations: violent rituals, coordinated destruc-
tion, opportunism, brawls, scattered attacks, and bro-
ken negotiations. The unique characteristics of each
type are then examined in separate chapters, each of
which draws fruitfully upon a wide range of historical
examples.
Tilly advances two principal arguments in the book.
The first is that significant variation in the form and
incidence of collective violence can best be explained
by reference to a number of crucial causal "mecha-
nisms" and "processes." The book identifies several
such mechanisms, including, for example, "category
formation," "boundary activation," "polarization," and
"brokerage." It also usefully highlights the key roles
played by "political entrepreneurs" and "violent spe-
cialists" (i.e. soldiers, policemen, gangsters) in these
processes.
The second major argument is that collective vio-
lence varies significantly by regime type. To make this
case, Tilly proposes another two-dimensional typology
in which regimes are categorized according to their
"capacity" (high or low) and whether they are "dem-
ocratic" or "undemocratic" (pp. 41-42). He then seeks
to demonstrate how the character of collective vio-
lence is shaped by different regime types and by
specific regime behaviors. Tilly's main conclusion is
that "the most extensive violence [is found] in the
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 Methods/Theory
low-capacity undemocratic regime ... the least exten-
sive violence in the high-capacity democratic regime
... with the others in between" (p. 75).
This is an important book that accomplishes most of
what it sets out to achieve. It is destined to become
essential reading for any serious scholar of violence,
and it will serve as a valuable guide to new research.
Like every important book, it will also stimulate debate
and criticism. Some readers will ask whether "sa-
lience" and "coordination" really are the most impor-
tant dimensions of collective violence. Others will take
issue with the book's depiction of alternative ap-
proaches to the subject, noting in particular its some-
what dismissive treatment of the role of ideas, norms,
and ideology. Concern will also be raised about the
absence of a sustained discussion on the significance of
international institutions and law in shaping violence.
The most lively controversy, however, is likely to
center on Tilly's argument that there is a significant
relationship between regime type and variations in
collective violence. The claim is repeated often in the
book, but, as Tilly concedes, the evidence is somewhat
ambiguous. By Tilly's own account, the relationship
does not appear to be significant in the cases of
"brawling" and "opportunism," and he accepts that
"scattered attacks" represent a "partial exception" to
the general rule (p. 128). A close reading of the
chapters on "violent ritual," "coordinated destruc-
tion," and "broken negotiations," moreover, suggests
that for those types, too, the similarities across regime
type are sometimes as important as the variations. The
chapter on "violent ritual," for example, highlights
patterns of gang warfare in the United States that are
not easy to distinguish from the patterns observed in
other types of regime.
Even where a significant correlation does appear to
exist, the evidence is not clear cut, and Tilly is able to
save the argument only by introducing a number of
significant qualifications. For example, the proposition
that serious collective violence is least likely to occur in
"high-capacity democratic" regimes is only true, Tilly
notes, if one leaves aside the violence that such
regimes perpetrate "against their external enemies"
(p. 44). This is an important caveat, and Tilly is right to
point it out. Rather than being a mere exception to the
rule, however, it arguably points to a fundamentally
different kind of argument, in which international
power imbalances, imperial ambition, and ideological
difference are at least as significant in shaping collec-
tive violence as regime "capacity" and "democracy."
After all, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, Nic-
aragua, Iraq, and many other countries that have
suffered terrible violence in the past century share not
only a (debatable) status as "low capacity undemo-
cratic" regimes but also the experience of being objects
of violent intervention by some of the world's most
powerful "high capacity democratic" regimes.
GEOFFREY ROBINSON
University of California,
Los Angeles
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
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475
JOHN LEWIS GADDIS. The Landscape of History: How
Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University
Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 192. $23.00.
On May 10, 1941, the French historian Marc Bloch
wrote a letter to his friend Lucien Febvre, in which he
informed him that, amid the "sorrows and anxieties" of
life under German occupation, he resolved to write a
book on what both of them had long been working for:
"a wider and more human history." He believed that
the new critical methodology, which he and Febvre had
devised in order to determine more objectively, even
scientifically, what happened in the past, would enable
his readers to come to terms with what was happening
in the present. The book, which Bloch did not live to
complete, was edited from manuscripts and eventually
published by Febvre under the title Apologie pour
l'histoire; Ou, Metier d'historien (1949). When an Eng-
lish translation appeared four years later, it retained
only the latter part of the title, The Historian's Craft, as
if to indicate that victory in the war had vindicated
history and relieved its scholars from the need to
defend their vocation.
John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished historian of
the Cold War, tries to shake off this complacency.
"Like J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbits," he writes of his
fellow historians, "they're for the most part content to
remain where they are, and are not much interested in
what goes on around them" (p. 92). The audience at
Oxford University, to whom Gaddis presented the
lectures that comprise this book, must have gotten the
message, recalling, no doubt, that Tolkien modeled his
imaginary creatures on his academic colleagues. His-
torians and other readers of this book should likewise
be alert to the acute contentions in its many cute
allusions (to Harry Potter and such like popular novels
and films). Whether it was the apparent failure of
fellow historians and other scholars in the related
disciplines of political science and international rela-
tions to anticipate the end of the Cold War, or, more
generally, the attacks of both hard social scientists and
soft postmodernists on the viability of historical truth,
Gaddis is adamant that historians "might better justify
their own existence. Historians ought to be as adept as
the practitioners of other disciplines are at defending
their methods-but they aren't" (p. 50). Hence his new
apology for history, which he offers as an updating of
Bloch's old book, as well as of another classic of
modern historiography, E. H. Carr's What is History?
(1961 ).
According to Gaddis, modern historians have largely
ignored what these two venerable "methodologists,"
and some contemporary scholars-chiefly William Mc-
Neill, who is repeatedly cited-have argued: that the
study of history is, or at least ought to be, as sturdy in
its theoretical and practical procedures as are the
so-called "hard" physical and biological sciences. Al-
though this claim may seem fairly old-after all, that
ancient historian of war, Thucydides, saw fit to model
his historiography on the hardest science of his time,
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