Why the study of political contention needs Durkheim: the case of Charles Tilly’s ‘contentious repertoires’

This paper argues that the sociological study of political contention would be strengthened by adopting insights from the late work of Émile Durkheim. It does so by evaluating Charles Tilly’s account of social performance as a means of conducting politics, focussing on his concept of ‘contentious repertoires’. It finds merit in Tilly’s meticulous historical reconstruction of the contextually limited repertoire of political performance, in his identification of how participants in popular contention improvise upon available scripts, and in his account of how the outcome of prior contentious performances constrains the scope of subsequent ones. However, it argues that Tilly’s approach ultimately fails in realising the full promise of the performance metaphor by offering an insufficiently culturalized account that treats contentious performances as either dependent effects of more profound changes in state-making and economic class relations, or else as a set of pragmatic tools that contending actors deploy in political contestation to meet their instrumental goals. Most importantly, it suggests that Tilly fails to recognise how social performances make meaning through deploying shared symbolic structures capable of exerting autonomous power over social action. The paper traces the source of this problem to Tilly’s hasty dismissal of Durkheim. It therefore suggests returning to Durkheim’s emphasis on the autonomous influence of the internal architecture of shared ‘collective representations’, conceived as ‘performance structures’, showing how these representations both enable and constrain social performance by structuring the form in which meaning can be communicated, limiting the manner in which events and issues can be understood and emotionally responded to, and shaping the normative commitments of actors.