Trust and Rule. By Charles Tilly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 214p. $55.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

From his earliest publications, Charles Tilly has focused on the relationships between varying sets of agents in civil society, forms of rule, and state formation. Democracy, and the circumstances under which it arises or disintegrates, has been an important aspect of these inquiries. Tilly's fullest, recent examination of these issues is his (2003) Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. There, he argued that what was crucial for democratization over the long period was the insulation of public politics from “categorical inequalities” of class, race, gender and the like; the transformation of public politics in ways that broadened and equalized participation, enhanced collective control of government, and inhibited arbitrary conduct by political actors; and the integration of “trust networks” into public politics. Trust and Rule elaborates the conceptual and historical arguments for this last “necessary” condition for democratization. In doing so the author jousts briefly (but persuasively) with the recent debate over “trust,” social capital, and democracy. He then recasts that debate in the light of older literatures in social history, sociology, and institutional economics on networks as a means of collective action in the presence of various forms of rule, not only democracy.