Charles Tilly's study of democracy and contention is itself highly contentious and deservedly so. After reading and writing social and political history for over five decades, its author is well positioned to judge which social scientific understandings of democracy hold up to historical scrutiny and which do not. In his search for the “mechanisms and processes that promote, inhibit or reverse democratization” (p. ix), Tilly identifies a number of false leads. One of his most contentious points is that the quest for democracy's “necessary and sufficient conditions” is futile (p. 39). Democracy, he insists, “does not have a single history … repeated in more or less the same conditions and sequences by each democratizing country” (p. 35). Searching for either uniform conditions or repeated sequences is, thus, a waste of time. In an equally contentious mode, he cautions “culturalists, phenomenologists, behaviorists and methodological individualists” not to “treat individual dispositions as the fundamental causes of social processes.” Democratization and de-democratization cannot be understood through the “reconstruction” and “aggregation” of individual dispositions just before their point of action (p. xi). Nor, he argues, can democratization be understood as a “product of age-old character traits or of short-term constitutional innovations” (p. 9).

Tilly draws an unmistakable line in the sand and leaves hordes of political scientists on the other side, but he never steps across it to engage in sustained individual attacks. Instead, he uses massive blocks of historical evidence to construct an edifice of argument so broad and sturdy that few will dare assault it. The complexity of his argument is an affront to parsimony, but this is precisely what the author intends. He asserts that democratization emerges not from “regular relationships among variables” but from “robust, recurrent causal mechanisms that combine differently with different aggregate outcomes in different settings” (p. 9). Three multifaceted mechanisms drive the democratization process: mechanisms that segregate public politics from inequalities based on social category, mechanisms that integrate trust networks into public politics, and most importantly, mechanisms that increase the breadth, equality, enforcement and security of mutual obligations between citizens and agents of government. Tilly specifies what these (and other) abstractions mean in a series of highly detailed tables. The first mechanisms include activities ranging from the confiscation of church property to the formation of associations that embrace unequal groups. The second mechanisms include activities ranging from government absorption of previously autonomous patron-client networks to the creation of government-backed disaster insurance. The third mechanisms range from the co-optation of regional strongmen through the containment of private military forces, through the formation of coalitions between select regime elites and excluded groups. “For democratization to ensue,” these last mechanisms, involving the expansion of political participation, the enhancement of collective control, and the reduction of arbitrary power, “must occur” and they “must combine” with major changes in the relations between public politics and either trust networks or categorical inequalities (p. 22).

The moving force behind these mechanisms and mandatory changes is “popular contention,” which occurs when “politically constituted actors” make “public, collective claims on other actors, including agents of government.” When popular contention shifts from parochial, particular, and bifurcated interactions based on embedded identities to cosmopolitan and multifaceted interactions based on detached identities, the process of democratization advances (p. 8).

The complexity of Tilly's argument is more than matched by the weight of evidence he brings to its defense. The book contains two chapters detailing the connection between contention and regime types in Europe since 1650; a chapter examining the Low Countries, Iberia, Russia, and the Balkans since 1815; three detailed case studies of France, Switzerland, and the British Isles; and a concluding chapter that draws parallels between the histories of democratization in Europe and elsewhere. Tilly's title does not mislead us. This book truly does embrace 350 years of political history.

Readers who brave the run through the author's dense forest of terms and facts will find themselves breathless but invigorated. Contentious actions do seem to drive the designated mechanisms, and these do seem to propel democratization forward (and backward). This book should encourage scholars who have used a narrow set of variables to understand democratization in the past to now see the process through a wide-angle lens, panning in first on popular contention, and then on its effects.

The points Tilly makes here are not all new. As stated clearly in the introduction, the text sometimes draws on earlier work. But it also draws on a range of evidence he has never assembled before, and it is this that makes the argument stick. Of course, not all its component parts are equally adhesive. One wishes, for example, for more discussion of how the mechanism involving “the expansion of political participation, the enhancement of collective control and the reduction of arbitrary power” differs from democratization itself (p. 22). Tilly is wise enough to address this issue directly and argues that these processes “produce changes in relations among actors outside of government before they exert their impact on relations between citizens and governmental agents” (p. 23). This reasoning helps us separate cause and effect, but whether political scientists will succeed in tracing the before-and-after sequence systematically remains uncertain.

At least two of the conclusions in Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 are certain to affect our research agendas immediately. The first is that both religious and secular private trust networks actually hamper democratization if not outweighed by public trust networks. This conclusion leads Tilly to argue that “recruiting people into voluntary associations with the hope of building ‘civil society’ ” will, in the absence of other changes, “do more harm than good” (p. 257). The second agenda-setting conclusion is that “revolution, confrontation, colonization and conquest repeatedly accelerated and activated democracy-promoting processes” in Europe's past (p. 259). At a time when democratization through conquest looms so large on the U.S. political agenda, the study of past acceleration processes merits careful attention. But so, too, does Tilly's insistence that even “crisis [induced] adoption of democratic forms does not suffice to produce stable democracy in the absence of necessary changes in categorical inequality, trust networks and public politics” (p. 24).