Contention & Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000, Charles Tilly, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. xiv, 305.

A leading historical sociologist, Charles Tilly brings skills from both disciplines to this exercise in democratic analysis. The result provocatively illuminates democracy as it developed in Europe and advances challenging hypotheses for contemporary democratic theory and practice. Tilly applies carefully formulated categories and explanatory hypotheses to his subject in a way atypical of most historians while tempering the often inflexible approaches of sociological theory with an historian's sensitivity to nuance and complexity.