Trust and Rule

Description

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Trust and Rule asks and answers how and with what consequences members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes. Since different forms of integration between trust networks produce authoritarian, theocratic, and democratic regimes, the book provides an essential background to the explanation of democratization and de-democratization.

Charles Tilly is currently the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He has also taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, and the New School for Social Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow and former member of both the Midwest Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences. Charles Tilly is the author of many books, including three recently published by Cambridge University Press: Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000, Dynamics of Contention (with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow) and The Politics of Collective Violence.

'Charles Tilly is a prolific writer and an authority in modern historical sociology ... Tilly's book does a good job of situating the dilemmas of trust and rule in a rich historical context.' Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding