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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4 | The History Cooperative
40.4  
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Summer, 2007
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REVIEWS

SECTION 1
ISSUES OF THEORY AND METHOD

Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. By Charles Tilly (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005. viii plus 269 pp.).
In the United States, liberal opponents of racism have often focused on attitudes. Through education, dialogue, and interaction they have hoped to reduce inequalities resulting from racial discrimination by changing the way individuals think and what they believe. No one who reads Charles Tilly's Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties can expect that to happen. 1
      Even historians and social scientists who already accept the inadequacy of individual-level explanations too often remain trapped in a stale debate between the relative influence of structure and agency as explanations for persistence and change in social conditions. Without discussing this shopworn dichotomy directly, Tilly provides a way to transcend it with a far more analytically precise and useful explanatory framework. For him, relationships hold the master key to understanding social processes. This is the message that underlies the fifteen essays, written over a decade, that compose the book's four parts—relational mechanisms, inequality, boundaries, and political boundaries—which are held together by a common intellectual framework and set of concerns. (In some cases, Tilly has elaborated on the topics in individual books, as in Durable Inequality [1998] and The Politics of Collective Violence [2003].) . . .
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