Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Plato's Republic, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Marx's Communist Manifesto are universally acknowledged classics of Western political thought. But how strong are the core arguments on which they base their visions of the good society that they want to bring into being? In this lively and provocative book, W...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: W. G. Runciman's masterly book sets out the present extent of our knowledge about how human groups, communities, institutions, and societies work and the social forces that act upon people who live within them. In a brief span, Runciman conveys both how fascinating the study of society is and what a particularly exciting time this is for that study, with all the developments being made in the behavioral sciences, whether in demography, linguistics, or economics, or in genetics, biological anthropology, and developmental and cognitive psychology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Now available in paperback as a set is Runciman's acclaimed trilogy on social theory. Volume one applies his methodological distinction between reportage, explanation, description, and evaluation, while volume two outlines the theory of social selection...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The concluding volume of W.G. Runciman's trilogy on social theory applies his theory and methodology.... (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Brings an interdisciplinary approach to an exciting area of behavioural science research. 14 contributions look at the evolution of cultural behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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. (view table of contents)

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)