Abstract
Runciman’s new book embodies the ideas which he has developed over the last two decades, in The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection, The Social Animal, A Treatise on Social Theory and in many articles, including in Sociology (in 1998). Readers familiar with Runciman’s distinctive theoretical approach will know already this means that the new book draws on a Darwinian selectionist framework adapted to interpret cultural and social selection. His purpose here is to undertake an historical analysis of English society from the aftermath of the revolution of 1688 to the present day from a specifically sociological point of view. Has there been a significant change in terms of ‘social evolution’ in this period?
Runciman incorporates a wealth of studies on the theme of the distribution of power in England, within a threefold categorisation of power into the modes of coercion, persuasion and production, which covers respectively political, ideological and economic institutions. This permits him to construct a picture of change and continuity over the past three centuries. One pleasing touch is his use from time to time of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, written in the 1720s, to draw out underlying then and now similarities. Runciman himself suggests that ‘what is puzzling about the structure of English society over the past three centuries is how little has changed in the nature and distribution of power between its constituent roles’ (p. vi), despite familiar appearances which point to the contrary. His material highlights simultaneous contrasts between the awareness of successive generations of ‘the cumulative cultural changes through which they were living’ and the ‘lack of awareness of the forces of social selection which were reproducing much the same structural distribution of power between their society’s political, ideological and economic roles’ (p. 5).
This point helps to bring out a key tenet of evolutionary sociology that the psychological causes of whatever decisions we happen to make as social actors ‘do not and cannot explain their sociological effects’ (p. 2). In line with Darwin’s own concept of ‘natural selection’, there is no ‘designer’ and no master plan dictating outcomes. The concepts and methods of current evolutionary theory are, according to Runciman, free from teleology and ‘the discredited fallacies of so-called “Social Darwinism”’ (p. v).
So, alongside biological evolution through ‘natural selection’, Runciman explicitly incorporates into his interpretive scheme ‘meme’ as introduced by Richard Dawkins to describe information which is in cultural evolution transmitted ‘from mind to mind by imitation or social (as opposed to individual trial-and-error) learning’ (p. 2). In social life, biological evolution explains behaviour that is evoked and cultural evolution explains behaviour that is acquired; social evolution is explained as socially imposed behaviour, ‘transmitted from role to role through rules encoded in the practices by which the roles are defined’ (p. 2).
The different ‘forces’ involved in biological, cultural and social evolution are always in interaction with each other. However, it is the interplay between cultural and social evolution, and the interpretation of their comparative significance as events unfold (perhaps in a co-evolutionary sequence, as on page 35), that forms the most important part of the evolutionary processes in explaining the evolutionary outcomes for the political, ideological and economic institutions and their practices in his case study reported in this book. In this context, Runciman observes that sociologists ‘have long discarded both the one-sided model in which the history of human societies was seen as the working-out of the self-realization of the human spirit and the equally one-sided model in which it was seen as the working-out of the effects of a material base on an ideal superstructure’ (p. 5).
An example of Runciman’s method of handling the changes affecting the modes of coercion, persuasion and production is helpful. When dealing with production and early 20th century welfare services, he refers to the statutory 1911 unemployment insurance benefit scheme, and the ‘mutation’ of 1921 whereby the government permitted, in the face of unusually high unemployment (envisaged as temporary), an extension of the normal period when the insured unemployed could receive benefit. This was ‘uncovenanted’ benefit, a ‘relaxing’ of the rules of the scheme, and a mutation which proved to have an unforeseen and popular social adaptiveness (though not an adaptiveness in financial terms). Runciman’s conclusion is that such changes were ‘changes within a capitalist mode of production whose constituent roles were defined by the same practices and performed in the same ways as previously’ (p. 125). So the changes were changes within the mode, not of it (see also page 75).
By the end of the book you might wonder if even the scale of upheaval involved in the French Revolution would count as a revolutionary transition to a modally different regime (actually he is clear it does). In fact, this is a sign of his commitment to produce explanations of social change free from ideological influence within his selectionist approach. The exposition of the theory in the book is magisterial, undermining standard criticisms of social evolutionary projects of the past. He regards the theory as still under development, and, as he admits, there are colleagues as yet unsure about trying to separate the cultural from the social. But anyone dissatisfied with the current state of theory in sociology, and anyone satisfied come to that, should engage with this new book from Runciman. I just wish he saw that a careful re-reading of Herbert Spencer would show him not to be the incubus he imagines.