The author explains in his Preface that this short book of only 224 pages is no mere coda to the three volumes of his Treatise on Social Theory (1983-1997) but the culminating synthesis of his efforts over many decades to reorient comparative sociology in the light of neo-Darwinian theories. He acknowledges throughout that he is writing against the grain, in the sense that most sociologists remain resistant to the approaches he recommends. In an Epilogue he engages directly with the opposition from two camps of “die-hards”, Marxists and post-modernists, whose objections he rebuts with “knock-down” arguments. His stance is that of a supreme rationalist theorizing on the basis of evidence, but at the same time one who is aware that he is writing “within a culture”, the master narratives (teleologies) which no longer stand up to scrutiny. Members of other cultures hold different beliefs, which cannot be dismissed as irrational. The sociologist is obliged to pursue truths beyond the consciousness and the comprehension of the actors but, following Kuhn, Runciman concedes that the arbiters of this truth can only be the contemporary intellectual community.
The first thing to be said is that, like all of Runciman’s previous works, this book is wonderfully crafted. He delights in probing anomalies and paradoxes, deploying not only his erudition but also irony and classical rhetorical skills to leaven the jargon of an astonishing range of disciplines, in all of which he seems perfectly at home. Many readers will be repelled by his application of the Darwinian vocabulary of “heritable variation and competitive selection” to the founding fathers of sociology and their themes. The sociology of knowledge, for example, is recast as “meme-practice co-adaptation”. Class struggle is for him a particular variant of “inter-systactic conflict” and Marxism is dismissed as early as the Prologue on the grounds that “Marx ignores, or at best grossly underestimates, the range of observable variation both in the form and the content of the information affecting phenotypic behaviour and in the environmental influences which affect its probability of reproduction and diffusion” (p. 20). But it is worth making the effort to translate this unusual language, if only because the substantive chapters are generously speckled with narrative examples (many of them adapted from the author’s previous publications) requiring no earlier exposure to evolutionary biology or game theory. Runciman has a penchant for the Ancient Mediterranean, but presents material from virtually every type of society ever documented by social scientists, historians and prehistorians.
Use of the definite article in the book’s title stakes a clear claim to be providing the definitive adaptation of Darwinism for the social sciences. An indefinite article would have been more modest and perhaps more consistent with his own epistemological position. As Runciman acknowledges, not all of those who find selectionist models useful are persuaded, as he is, by Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme. The same goes for other notions he uses, including group selection and collective mind. The main distinctive features of his own position are outlined in the first substantive chapter. Contrary to numerous scholars who have argued for some form of co-evolution between the genetic and the socio-cultural, Runciman insists on a rigorous separation between the two components of the latter. The core of the book then addresses the three components of the resulting trinity “natural selection and evoked behaviour”; “cultural selection and acquired behaviour”; and “social selection and imposed behaviour”. The final chapter elaborates “selectionist theory as narrative history” and reflects further on the status of this approach and its commensurability with other approaches in sociology. Spencer, Marx and Durkheim find no place in Runciman’s pantheon, but he identifies a kindred spirit in Friedrich Nietzsche and is ambivalent about Max Weber, whom he sees as a crypto-selectionist, despite his ostensible rejection of the Darwinian vocabulary. Unfortunately, according to Runciman, Weber saddled the embryonic discipline of sociology with numerous misleading metaphors; it is unhelpful to imagine new ideas as railway “switchmen” if we live in a world that knows no tracks or termini; the generations of confusion over causalities caused by the “Fallacy of Elective Affinity” (exemplified by Jaspers’ notion of the Axial Age) can be resolved if we apply ourselves to investigating selective affinity instead.
To sustain his Trinitarianism, Runciman demonstrates his versatility in fields ranging from Anglo-Saxon lawbooks to primatology and statistics. He does not dwell long on the innate, hard-wiring that forms the “primitive base” of all humans. Here he is in broad sympathy with the movement known as evolutionary psychology and its ancestor sociobiology (including E. O. Wilson himself). Among humans, as among other primates, natural selection has long been accompanied by cultural selection and gene-meme co-evolution. But after toying with the re-classification of comparative sociology as a branch of primatology, Runciman asserts that only humans can be truly self-conscious. Furthermore, thanks to language, we are capable of appreciating the aesthetic and the moral in ways denied to other animals. But the accomplishments of speech and cultural transmission (increasingly via imitation, in addition to more costly social learning) do not entail the accomplishment of society. According to Runciman, humanity only made this “primordial transition” a few thousand years ago with the emergence of stratified polities and institutionalized roles. For him, the peoples labeled by early German anthropologists Naturvölker are in fact already Kulturvölker, and the peoples traditionally classified as Kulturvölker are better viewed as distinguished by society rather than culture. “Social selection” is then the rubric under which he comes to discuss the bread and butter topics of most curricula in sociology, including “modes of production, persuasion, and coercion”, the three dimensions of social space.
This chapter, the longest in the book, augmented by numerous substantial footnotes, also provides the most sustained comparative evidence for applications of the theory. Thus a society has to be distinguished from a state. Unlike both, an empire experiences intrinsic problems in sustaining any local fitness peak: “Although no law-like generalization can be framed about such outcomes, it is more than a truism to say that empires are harder to keep under long-term control without absorption or disengagement than they were to acquire in the first place” (pp. 148-149). (It is not clear how disengagement can contribute to long-term control.) Runciman then shows in quick succession the inadequacy of orthodox historical materialist accounts of feudalism and slavery as modes of production. The latter excites him as an elemental form of subjugation and receives extended analysis over 11 pages. Its origins are less significant than the fact that it became well adapted in three regions of the Americas for several centuries. The story of its abolition is quite different in the separate environments. In the southern states of the USA the ultimate cause was military defeat, while in the case of the British Caribbean, Quaker memes spread to other Protestants and eventually led even hard-headed Scottish economists to argue (incorrectly) that slavery was inherently inefficient, thereby adding their own authority to the Abolitionist cause. Runciman then steps back a millennium to interpret Anglo-Saxon England in terms of convergent evolution with Hammurabi’s Babylon. Roles, not memes, were the drivers throughout post-Roman Europe. English systactic structures promoted social mobility and worked to reduce conflict.
In contrast to healthy Anglo-Saxon gradualism, in the section entitled “punctuated equilibrium” Runciman finds that memes rather than social practices are the key to explaining how “vacant design-spaces” were filled in post-1789 France. The French Revolution (and by implication all other schisms to which this term is commonly applied) was an historical contingency; it was sociologically redundant in the sense that its practices were largely maladaptive, while its successful memes were sure to succeed anyway. Runciman then provides an example of collapse at all three levels of selection and in all three dimensions of social space (Easter Island), followed by a sparkling summary of parasitical venality in France. In a second edition, the author might consider adding a comparison with the case of post-Keynesian finance markets. This would fit well with the concluding sections of the chapter, in which he relativizes the concept of modernization (the citizens of Ancient Athens believed firmly in their modernity) and acknowledges that, as a result of globalization, memes and practices can now travel rapidly anywhere. Since “autonomous social evolution has become a thing of the past”, there are no discrete cultures and societies left to be compared. The chief task of the comparative sociologist has thus come to an end in the lifetime of the author.
The message of this theory, summarized in a simple diagram on the last page of the book, is that the co-evolution of genes and memes must be complicated by possibilities of meme-practice, gene-practice and gene-meme-practice co-evolution. In every case, the basic idea is the simple Darwinian one of descent with modification. As with genes, some memes and practices turn out to be more adaptive than others in changing environments. Selection is not a mere metaphor, insists Runciman; it is equally “real” at all three levels, even if the rates of change at the three levels differ greatly. Natural selection is slow, social selection is still “lethargic”, while “horizontal” cultural selection can nowadays proceed so rapidly via imitation that empirical applications of the model become impossible. In actual historical cases, however, the investigator should have no difficulty in distinguishing the three levels. Runciman takes the early history of Christianity as an example of nearly pure cultural selection, since according to his analysis its initial spread depended critically on the presence in Christian doctrines of the meme of disinterested benevolence; but once this religion was institutionalized as the religion of the Roman Empire and bishops exercised institutionalized power, social selection became more significant. The emergence of mercenaries was an exogenous change that revolutionized hoplite warfare and demilitarized the collective mind of the Ancient Greeks, while stagnation and obstruction of change in the Roman Empire before Constantine are attributed to its peculiar concatenation of legal and political institutions and roles. Numerous quandaries concerning the power of ideas or the role of great men in history are thus effortlessly dissolved in the rigorous language of adaptive fitness.
In outlining the theory and elaborating his illustrations, Runciman is careful not to exaggerate the similarities between the three levels. Memes may be designed by innovators and they do not spread by contagion. Cultures and societies are more or less amorphous entities, their “catchments” seldom coinciding; few if any memes are evenly distributed across all members of the population which carries them. Ultra-Darwinians who think that natural selection alone can explain social and cultural differences among humans are as misguided as the dogmatic anti-Darwinians. Runciman distances himself both from extreme cognitivist positions and from the relativism of Geertzian “thick description”. Other prominent ingredients of his cocktail include his rejection of Eurocentric traditions, concepts and chronologies in history and social theory, and his insistence on going beyond the “noise” of multiple sources (he adds literature and the arts to more conventional historical materials) to reach a deeper level of analysis.
The argument remains nonetheless open to fundamental criticisms, beyond those that the author himself engages with. Suspicions about elitist values and politics, which he seems in places to invite (e.g. by selecting for the cover an illustration of “The Queen Bee in her Hive” as an allegory of Victorian social hierarchy in England), are not entirely allayed by his sharp criticism of imperialisms, including that of the British. The most significant problem concerns the operationalizing of the model when so many of the distinctions which he draws are so difficult to specify precisely, e.g. between imitation and social learning, or between formal and informal sanctions. Runciman is surprisingly coy when it comes to dating the “transition to society” on which his theory depends. His argument that humans alone are capable of “meta-representations” is controversial among primatologists. He pays little attention to the vast critical literature on basic terms such as role, function, intention and adaptation. He does not explore the possibilities that certain types of meme may be particularly resilient, while certain kinds of institutionalized roles may change much faster than others.
What Runciman offers in this book is a kind of meta-sociology, far above and beyond the mainstream history of that discipline (though not incompatible with some of its currents). The reader is left free to identify possible genealogies. To my mind, Runciman’s approach bears the imprint of a division of labour which crystallized within the Anglophone social sciences in the middle of the 20th century, and in later philosophical discussions about inter-cultural translation which were pursued mainly in Britain. It was Talcott Parsons who did more than anyone else to establish roles, institutions and structures as the domain of the sociologist, while the cultural (ideational) was assigned primarily to the anthropologist. Runciman’s selectionism requires both, but he is generally more interested in distinguishing between motivations and intentions, in grappling with the mental states of actors who may not have very satisfactory knowledge of their subjective motivations, than he is in elaborating roles and measuring institutional effects. Unlike chimps, only humans face the “perennially troublesome disjunction” between the natives’ and the observers’ accounts of social behaviour. He returns again and again to this anthropological terrain, developing the notion of “telling it like it felt like” (for which he continues to prefer the term “describing”, following Toulmin S. and K. Baier 1952, “On describing”, Mind, 61, pp. 13-38). His conclusion is that, in spite of all the difficulties, translation is always possible; the best way to obtain authentic descriptions is through the mediation of a native who is also familiar with the culture of the visiting anthropologist.
Most of this is anticipated in his Treatise. He has little to say here about the problems involved in reporting social data. Nor does he advance the argument significantly at the level of explanation. His favorite rhetorical device in Volume 1 of the Treatise was the “recording angel”, whose archives are equally open to sociological analysts of all theoretical persuasions. The equivalent device in this book is the “reverse engineer”, who constructs “just-so stories” to account for the data. These stories are by definition retrospective; they do not allow for prediction. There seems to be an inevitable arbitrariness in the way this sociological engineer is called upon to combine the innate, the cultural and the social in explaining any particular historical or contemporary human phenomena. The trinity (like the dimensions of that other trinity with which he defines the space of the social) is presumably to be explored in analysis through what Edmund Leach used to call “inspired guesswork” in order to come up with the most plausible story for each particular case. Perhaps it is an artifact of the way the book is assembled and the lack of space for more detailed accounts, but many of the author’s stories are too brief to be satisfying (e.g. concerning sharecropping or the feud), while even in the longer instances such as slavery one wonders about neglected possible prime causes, such as ecological, demographic or economic variables. On the surface, the author is conspicuously unsympathetic to economic accounts, be they grounded in Marxist political economy or in microeconomic rational choice theory. Yet at the same time he takes for granted notions such as the extraction of economic surplus, and his entire opus would fit comfortably into certain variants of evolutionary economics.
Runciman’s theory is too cautious and sophisticated to be dismissed with a knee-jerk complaint of “reductionism”, as Darwinian models in the social sciences tend to be. It is rather the opposite. Runciman’s version of selectionism leaves far too much open. It allows him to choose and juggle variables at will: here economic or political compulsion, there ideological persuasion; here subjective description, there observer’s explanation; here individual selection, there group selection; here memes, there practices, with primeval instincts omnipresent in the background; and whenever we are not sure which driver is more important, we simply mark down another instance of co-evolution. He needs to insist on that 1950s distinction between society and culture to sustain the whole edifice, yet even he concedes that it is often difficult to disentangle “just what is going on”. This approach precludes the formulation and testing of general sociological theories (let alone “laws”) in favor of relatively short-term, just-so analyses of particular cases, leading to magpie-like juxtapositions of convergent evolution across continents and millennia. If this is the only alternative to the teleologies of Spencer, Marx and the rest, then sociology as a generalizing social science becomes extinct. Historical sociologists such as Barrington Moore or Michael Mann who have not abandoned such ambitions go unmentioned in this book. Of course general terms such as modernization and Axial Age require careful specification. The author who once took such trouble in his seminal study of “relative deprivation” now seems to think that no such general concepts can be defined in non-idiosyncratic ways. For late Runciman, modernity can only be a state of mind. It is hard to reconcile this aristocratic anarcho-nihilist idealism with the author’s Darwinian-Linnaean aspirations and common-sense insistence that archaeologists could not have found a Mozart score in the Lascaux caves.
The reader is occasionally encouraged to apply the selectionist model close to home: to the initial reception of Social Darwinism, and to the history of historical writing and of the social sciences. This boils down to little more than conventional attention to context. Perhaps the author is less than forthcoming about his own intellectual debts in the local context of Cambridge. Be that as it may, I would be surprised if Runciman has not self-consciously reflected on his own position within the history of sociology. The conclusion of this book is that we have no way of knowing what the sociology of the 22nd century will look like. Its author is surely enough of a realist to know that this book is unlikely to bring about an immediate paradigm change. In the era of mass universities, audit cultures, internet bibliometrics, and governments that expect social science to have a payoff for the national economy rather than the other way around, Runciman is an endearing throwback to another era. In order to have an impact today, he would have needed to make many more concessions to readers, write shorter sentences with less jargon, and dwell longer on case materials that were familiar to sociological audiences. Few professional sociologists will have the familiarity that he seemingly takes for granted with Bayesian reasoning, Hamilton’s Rule, S-shaped logistic curves, strong reciprocators, particulate selection and transcranial magnetic stimulation, to list but a few examples. This is the intentional design of the Olympian author, who nonetheless harbors the hope that the memes which have found their repository in this book will one day re-emerge to achieve due recognition and influence. Runciman would then cease to be the Neanderthal of Trinity College. He would resemble Weber’s Calvin, or Freud’s Moses, who each in their different ways propagated memes that were not sufficiently fit to achieve a breakthrough in their time, but which survived their extended incubations to exercise their full impact centuries later, when the environment was more favorable to them. Just-so!
