Citation
Runciman, Walter Garrison. A Treatise on Social Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Google Books Link
Excerpts
| Page | Quote | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 332 | J. L. Mackie, “Ideological Explanation”, in Stephan Körner, Explanation (1975) | |
| 13 | ”[the sociologist studying ancient Greece and Rome] will recognize, for a start, that they lacked the concept of an ‘economy’ [citation: M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (1973) ✅]. But he will not therefore conclude that theirs was not an economy any more than that because they lacked the concept of ‘malaria’ they never died of it.” | |
| 51 | ”The writings of Marx, on the other hand, could be said to make sense only in relation to his personal reactions to German philosophy, French politics, and British economics” | |
| 32 | ”Sociology, from this point of view, can best be regarded as psychology plus social history, just as biology can be regarded as chemistry plus natural history.” | |
| 111 | Tocqueville 100 years before Cold War: “America and Russia each seemed ‘marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe” | |
| 117 | Citation: N. J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, “IQ: Heritability and Inequality, Part I”, Philosophy and Public Affairs (1974) | |
| 267 | ”without them [ metaphors ] the problem of radical unintelligibility would otherwise be more serious than it already is.” | |
| 303 | Readers will do well “to be as suspicious of protestations of theory-neutrality as of blatantly pre-emptive appeals to conscience.” | …(what are they trying to “hide”?) |
| 311 | Social scientists probably should “confess to their readers what their values are, if only to help them to detect and repudiate their possible effects.” | |
| 312 | Researchers should have “the same mixture of sympathy and detachment appropriate to his position relative to the agents whose behavior he is studying on the one side and the readers to whom he wishes to present his conclusions on the other.” | |
| 317 | ”it is all too tempting to deny the benefit of the doubt to agents who are in no position to answer back” |
Zotero Metadata
Abstract
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.
Metadata
FirstAuthor:: Runciman, Walter Garrison
Title:: A Treatise on Social Theory ShortTitle:: Year:: 1983
Citekey:: runciman_treatise_1983
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Cambridge University Press
ISBN:: 978-0-521-27251-3