Social evolutionism: A reply to Michael Rustin

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 236, 1999, Pages 145-152

  Runciman, W G ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033239930     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Michael Rustin, 'A New Social Evolutionism?', NLR 234, May-June 1999, pp. 106-126.
2. W.G. Runciman, 'On the Tendency of Human Societies to Form Varieties', Proceedings of the British Academy 72, 1986.
3. Subsequently published as 'The "Triumph" of Capitalism as a Topic in the Theory of Social Selection', NLR 210, March-April 1995, pp. 33-47.
4. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago 1962, p. 157.
5. Ibid., p. 48.
6. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge, London 1998.
7. W.G. Runciman and A.K. Sen, 'Games, Justice, and the General Will', Mind 74, 1965.
8. John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games, Cambridge 1982, p. vii.
9. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago 1985.
10. Particularly relevant to Rustin's remarks about the sociology of science is Campbell's 'Evolutionary Epistemology', in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, edited by P.A. Schilpp, La Salle 1974.
11. But see now W.G. Runciman, 'Greek Hoplites, Warrior Culture, and Indirect Bias', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, 1998.
12. I am, however, at a loss to see what Rustin means when he says that, 'Unlike genetic mutation, practices do not seem to refer to a bounded category of social fact which can be related to their larger social context in a consistent way'. On the contrary: it is only because they do, and they can, that I am able to provide the 'power explanations of why specific developments were or were not able to take place' for which Rustin gives me credit.
13. See Robin Dunbar, The Trouble with Science, London 1995.
14. This second proposition is not inconsistent with the sense of 'value' in which, as argued by John R. Searle (The Construction of Social Reality, New York 1995, p. 15), to discover the function of the heart in pumping blood is to assign to the causal process discovered a teleology which implies some prior assignment of value: a heart diagnosed as 'bad' is not 'bad' in the same sense that the person whose heart it is may be judged a 'good' or 'bad' person.
15. A hypothesis which to many contemporary observers seemed all too well supported by empirical evidence: see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Oxford 1971, pp. 85-9.
16. Labour's Lost Chance', Times Literary Supplement, 17 April 1998.
17. Although McKibbin's volume had not yet appeared by the time that I published mine, any reader of mine will see from my references the debt that I owe to McKibbin's earlier writings.
18. The concept of 'description' is used in the semi-technical sense which I took from S. Toulmin and K. Baier, 'On Describing', Mind 61, 1952. It is expounded in detail in Chapter 4 of Volume I, and applied in detail in Chapter 4 of Volume III.
19. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, p. 157.
20. See Christopher Brumann, 'Writing for Culture: Why a Successful Concept Should Not Be Discarded', Current Anthropology 40, Supplement, 1999.