Am Soc (2010) 41:375–381 DOI 10.1007/s12108-010-9107-9 Charles Tilly as a Theorist of Nationalism Rogers Brubaker Published online: 28 August 2010 # The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly’s theory of nationalism emerged from the “bellicist” strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly’s later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist—a source of both its power and its limitations. Keywords Nationalism . State . Nation-state At an SSRC conference honoring Charles Tilly shortly after his untimely death, Viviana Zelizer (2008) talked about two lesser known Tillys: Chuck the cultural analyst, and Chuck the feminist analyst.1 In this spirit, I want to discuss Chuck as a theorist of nationalism. This is an unfamiliar rubric under which to consider Chuck’s work, but an appropriate one. Chuck made a significant contribution to the study of nationalism, yet that contribution remains less well known than it should be. I seek here to explain that contribution and to honor Chuck as I believe he would have liked to be honored: through a critical engagement with his theory of nationalism. Chuck was long uninterested in nations and nationalism. This was not just a matter of his being interested in other things; it was a specific and theoretically justified lack of interest. Chuck’s work on state formation developed in critical reaction to the “nation-building” literature of the 1960s. He sought to escape from the problematic assumptions encoded in the teleological idea of nation-building and in the term “nation” itself—a term he described as “one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in the political lexicon” (1975: 6). He therefore deliberately shifted the focus of analysis from nation to state. The state was the primary reality; “nation” was a mystification. The adjective “national” appears throughout Chuck’s work on state-formation. But it is strictly a term of scale and scope, meaning “statewide.” It has no cultural content, no connection with understandings, representations, or political imagination. 1A revised version of Zelizer’s paper appears as the epilogue to this special issue. R. Brubaker (*) Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: brubaker@soc.ucla.edu