The great and late Charles Tilly (via Duck of Minerva) interviewed and recorded in 8 videos. Well known by many students of IR (who have probably never even read a single book or article by Tilly) for the pithy quote: ‘War makes the state and the state makes war.’ Interview origins, Vendee 1: process itself rather than comparative statics - summing up Emirbayer AJS, Vol.103 No.1, 1997 (PDF) in one sentence? LOL Vendee 2: Regrets over introducing the term ‘political disturbances’. Ah the ‘happy’ problems of the brilliant and the influential. Definite survivorship bias here; lots of academics who actively want to introduce new terms into debates but (thankfully?) don’t succeed. Reminded me how Jack Snyder coming up with and then disowning the term/concept of ’strategic culture’ which has accreted a huge literature around it since his RAND monograph. Causal mechanisms: ‘My first book refuted my doctoral dissertation.’ The third leg of mechanisms in addition to processes, statics; recalling Harrison White on: ‘I’ve never had a good idea that wasn’t already abroad in my network.’ Seek not laws of (insert social phenomena) but recurrent mechanisms e.g. tension between two nodes of coercion in revolutions. Concepts and state formation: It’s been said (Confucius about Yan Hui’s death?) that a great teacher is known by great students he produced: so R Bin Wong, whose China Transformed is a Tillyian! Excellent jibe about how theories of state formation had been formulated and accepted without any basis in the historical record. Definitely something that most IR scholarship can relate to. LOL On teleology in social science, I think the T word has been unfairly used. As I understand it, teleology doesn’t mean that the acorn *must* become an oak tree but that it has the *potential* to grow into an oak tree. Of course humans aren’t acorns that had have predetermined nature but the Weberian ambition, the modern state-building project and the state system seems to have become universalized (largely by co-option of local elites into the core of the core states?) that, at this point, I defer to the sociological institutionalists (John W. Meyer et al).