W. G. Runciman - Böcker

These papers bring an interdisciplinary approach to bear on what is arguably the central question in the study of human social evolution: how did the simple hunting and foraging bands of the Upper Palaeolithic evolve into the institutionally complex societies of the so-called Neolithic Revolution? The contributors to this volume are leading experts from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and game theory, all of whom share a common evolutionary perspective. The ideas presented here form a major addition to the widespread current interest in evolutionary theory as applied to human behaviour.

These essays offer penetrating insights into the events and controversies that have dominated the news agenda for the last two years.Never has the path to a British war been mapped so fully and swiftly as the road to Baghdad in 2002-3. Between them, the Hutton and Butler reports lifted the lid on the most intimate workings of Government and those who strive to convert information into a weapon - whether they be a Prime Minister in Downing Street, an MI6 agent in the field, an intelligence analyst in Whitehall, or a journalist attempting to fuse fragments into hard copy.Within days of Lord Butler reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, on British intelligence assessments of their quantity and lethality and on the ingredients of the Blair Cabinet's decision to go to war, the British Academy brought together a distinguished group of scholars and practitioners to probe the deeper themes at play in the rush of events and inquests. The essays examine: the legal issues raised by the manner and content of Lord Hutton's inquiry; the light both Hutton and Butler shed on the Blair style of Government; and the matter of trust between Government, the governed and the news media.This volume will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in current affairs and the realities of decision-making at the highest levels of Government.

These eleven essays look at the current state of sociology in Britain from a number of intriguing perspectives. How important is it for British sociologists to be aware of the historical development of their subject in this country? How is British sociology seen by British scholars working in related fields, such as social history, social anthropology and demography? And how are British sociologists perceived by their colleagues working abroad, in particular in continental Europe? A concluding essay by the President of the British Sociological Association identifies the recurring themes in these reflections.

Very Different, but Much the Same takes as its starting point the distribution of political, ideological, and economic power between English society's constituent roles from the time when Daniel Defoe was writing Robinson Crusoe, and argues that Defoe would find it remarkably similar three centuries later despite all the changes in technology, lifestyles, amenities, beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values by which he would no doubt be astonished. The disjunction between the two is explained by bringing to bear the approach of current evolutionary sociological theory in which the reproduction or extinction of a society's institutional practices is traced to selective environmental pressures which are independent of the personal motives and subjective experiences of the individuals whose practices they are. It is further argued that the rates of high absolute and low relative social mobility that sociologists have documented in detail for the twentieth century are likely to have been much the same during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The conclusion drawn is that for as long as the country was not defeated in a European war, the probability of a radical change in institutional distribution of power was extremely low throughout, however much contemporary observers or later historians would have either welcomed or deplored it.

Mr Runciman studies the relation of sociology to political philosophy, clarifies an number of disputed and often unclear topics in the social sciences, and extends traditional political philosophy in the direction of developments which, in 1969 at the time of this book's publication, were recent. After defining his terms and considering the scope and limits of the social sciences as a whole, he examines the sociological writings of Marx, Max Weber and other sociologists, and then goes on to discuss such contemporary sociological problems as the study of voting behaviour, alternative theories and models of society, and the changing of class structure in industrialized societies. In a final essay he considers whether there is a point at which conflict between rival political philosophies is necessarily unresolvable. For this second edition Mr Runciman has made extensive corrections in the text to take account of further work.

In The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection, W. G. Runciman presents an original and wide-ranging account of the fundamental process by which human cultures and societies come to be of the different kinds that they are. Drawing on and extending recent advances in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Runciman argues that collective human behaviour should be analyzed as the acting-out of information transmitted at the three separate but interacting levels of heritable variation and competitive selection - the biological, the cultural, and the social. The implications which this carries for a reformulation of the traditional agenda of comparative and historical sociology are explored with the help of selected examples, and located within the context of current debates about sociological theory and practice. The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection is a succinct and highly imaginative contribution to one of the great intellectual debates of our times, from one of the world's leading social theorists.

In The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection, W. G. Runciman presents an original and wide-ranging account of the fundamental process by which human cultures and societies come to be of the different kinds that they are. Drawing on and extending recent advances in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Runciman argues that collective human behaviour should be analyzed as the acting-out of information transmitted at the three separate but interacting levels of heritable variation and competitive selection - the biological, the cultural, and the social. The implications which this carries for a reformulation of the traditional agenda of comparative and historical sociology are explored with the help of selected examples, and located within the context of current debates about sociological theory and practice. The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection is a succinct and highly imaginative contribution to one of the great intellectual debates of our times, from one of the world's leading social theorists.

In this first volume of a projected trilogy, the author argues that a methodology adequate to solve the long-standing debate over the status of the social as against the natural sciences can be constructed in terms of a fourhold distinction between the reportage, explanation, description and evaluation of human behaviour. The distinction rests on an analysis of the scope and nature of social theory which is not only original in conception but far-reaching in its implications for the assessment of the results of sociological, anthropological and historical research. In this volume, there are set out the separate and distinctive criteria by which the reports, explanations, descriptions and evaluations put forward by social scientists of rival theoretical schools require to be tested. These criteria will then be applied in Volume II to a substantive theory of social relations, social structure and social evolution, and in Volume III to a detailed analysis of the society of twentieth-century England. Each of the three volumes can be read independently of the others. Thus the trilogy will, when completed, be seen to form a coherent and unified whole.

In this volume, Mr Runciman has selected extracts, from Max Weber's writings which reflect the full range of his major concerns: the nature of domination in human society, the role of ideas in history, the social determinants of religion, the origin and impact of industrial capitalism and the scope and limits of social science itself. He has also included some shorter extracts from Weber's less familiar writings on such diverse topics as the stock exchange and the history of the piano.

This second of three volumes sets out a general account of the structure and evolution of human societies. The author argues first that societies are to be defined as sets of roles whose incumbents are competitors for access to, or control of, the means of production, persuasion and coercion; and second, that the process by which societies evolve is one of competitive selection of the practices by which roles are defined analagous, but not reducible, to natural selection. He illustrates and tests these theses with evidence drawn from the whole range of societies documented in the historical and ethnographic record. The result is an original, powerful and far-reaching reformulation of evolutionary sociological theory which will make it possible to do for the classification and analysis of societies what Darwin and his successors have done for the classification and analysis of species.

This essay is written in the belief that it is possible to say both where Max Weber's philosophy of social science is mistaken and how these mistakes can be put right. Runciman argues that Weber's analysis breaks down at three decisive points: the difference between theoretical pre-suppositions and implicit value-judgements; the manner in which 'idiographic' explanations are to be subsumed under causal laws; and the relation of explanation to description in sociology. The arguments which Weber put forward are fundamental to the methodology of the social sciences, and since his death it has come to be increasingly widely held that with perhaps the sole exception of Mill's System of Logic there is still no other body of work of comparable importance in the academic literature on these topics. Runciman's attempt to correct Weber's mistakes therefore constitutes in itself a valuable contribution to the philosophy of social science.