Durable Inequality
1998
First Published
4.01
Average Rating
310
Number of Pages
Charles Tilly, in this eloquent manifesto, presents a powerful new approach to the study of persistent social inequality. How, he asks, do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances arise, and how do they come to distinguish members of different socially defined categories of persons? Exploring representative paired and unequal categories, such as male/female, black/white, and citizen/noncitizen, Tilly argues that the basic causes of these and similar inequalities greatly resemble one another. In contrast to contemporary analyses that explain inequality case by case, this account is one of process. Categorical distinctions arise, Tilly says, because they offer a solution to pressing organizational problems. Whatever the "organization" is―as small as a household or as large as a government―the resulting relationship of inequality persists because parties on both sides of the categorical divide come to depend on that solution, despite its drawbacks. Tilly illustrates the social mechanisms that create and maintain paired and unequal categories with a rich variety of cases, mapping out fertile territories for future relational study of durable inequality.
Avg Rating
4.01
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Author
Charles Tilly
Author · 20 books
Charles Tilly was born on May 27, 1929 in Lombard, Illinois (a Chicago suburb), to an immigrant mother from Wales and into a working class family.Charles Tilly was one of the key figures in the establishment and institutionalization of the subfields of historical sociology, social science history, social movements, and contentious politics within contemporary social science. After a long and prolific career marked by the writing of more than fifty books and around seven hundred academic articles, Charles Tilly died from lymphoma on April 29, 2008 in a hospice in the Bronx.
