Charles Tilly's newest book tackles fundamental questions about the nature of personal, political, and national identities and their linkage to big events-- revolutions, social movements, democratization, and other processes of political and social change. In this book, Tilly focuses on the role of stories as a means of creating personal identity and also as explanations-- true or false-- of political tensions and realities. He uses well-known examples...

"Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II,...

Since their invention by Westerners in the 18th century, social movements became vehicles of popular politics across the world. Tilly provides rich insights into the origins of contemporary movement practices, social movements & democratisation, & likelyfutures.