One of the great virtues of Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality is that it might be wrong. So often attempts at constructing grand theories in sociology turn out, on close inspection, to consist largely of tautologies and vacuous propositions—conceptual frameworks that are so flexible and indeterminate that no empirical observations of the world would ever count as surprising. This is not the case for the central arguments in Tilly's book. Consider, for example, a claim that the author makes early in the book about the relatively limited significance of beliefs in the explanation of durable inequality: