Rejoinder to “Forgetting the founders?

W.G. Runciman

I find Ossewaarde’s criticisms of my article singularly unconvincing, for the

following reasons:
1. What does he mean by ‘positivist’ science? If he means the belief that the
methods suitable for physics and chemistry are equally suitable for the
self-referential, path-dependent human sciences, it is not one that I share
any more than he does. I do not think, or ever have, that sociologists should
be looking for ‘social laws’. If, on the other hand, he believes that human
behaviour cannot be studied at all in accordance with the standard proce-
dures of observation (whether direct or indirect), hypothesis, and test, then
he is closing his eyes to what is going on around him all the time. I believe,
as the founders did, that explanations can in principle be found for why
human beings behave towards each other as they do in the various groups,
communities, cultures, and societies which they form. Which of many dif-
ferent kinds of explanation has the best prospect of surviving attempted
disconfirmation depends on the question being asked, the evidence neces-
sary to settle it, and the techniques (whether qualitative or quantitative)
which will best enable that evidence to be assembled and assessed. If
Ossewaarde would like the study of human societies to be practised as a
branch of literature or metaphysics or moral philosophy, he is welcome to
proceed accordingly. But the founders set the agenda they did through the
ideas that they had about how ascertainable causes produce demonstrable
effects in the making of divergent patterns of collective human behaviour
into what they are. To suggest that none of them ‘occupied themselves with
such things’ requires a reading of them so perverse as to be baffling. Does
Ossewaarde really expect to persuade readers of this journal that Marx
wasn’t interested in the causes of revolutions in modes of production,
or Weber in the causes of the rise of industrial capitalism, or Durkheim
in the causes of differential rates of suicide under different sociological
conditions?
2. Merton did not mean, and nor do I, that present-day sociologists may not
benefit from re-reading the writings of Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, or that
we ought to be rewriting them as well as re-reading them. In my own case,
I need only draw attention to my article ‘Puritan American Capitalists and
The Sociological Review, 57:2 (2009)
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USA.
W.G. Runciman

Evolutionary Game Theory’ published in the 2005/06 double issue of the

journal Max Weber Studies, in which I argue that although the ‘Weber
thesis’ is untenable in its original formulation, it can be shown that two
features of the Puritan ethos to which Weber drew particular attention did
significantly influence the later diffusion of ‘modern’ capitalist practices in
the United States. The need is to retain from the founders what has con-
tinuing validity and relevance while not hesitating to discard what does not.
As Weber himself explicitly remarked in his celebrated lecture on Wissen-
schaft als Beruf, researchers, unlike artists, have to recognize that their
contributions are bound to be outdated in ten, twenty, or fifty years’ time.
Sociologists, in particular, cannot but be conscious of the extent to which
their successors will be taking account of events and circumstances which
they could not themselves have foreseen. I do not blame the founders for
their Eurocentrism; I merely point out that we can now see where, and why,
they took it too far. Nor do I disagree with Ossewaarde and Raymond Aron
that there are aspects of human relationships and institutions about which
Montesquieu (to say nothing of Hobbes, or Machiavelli, or Aristotle) has
illuminating things to say. But does Ossewaarde seriously look to Montes-
quieu for understanding the impact of industrialization on the societies of
the so-called Third World, or the collapse of communism in the Soviet
Union, or changes in the composition and function of trade unions in
advanced capitalist economies? Even where the topic in question is the
sociology of the ancient rather than the modern world, the combination of
new evidence and improved techniques has meant that Weber has been
overtaken in just the sort of way that he anticipated. For all the influence
on ancient historiography of what came to be known as the ‘Weber-
Hasebroek-Finley School’,Weber’s picture of the Roman world has been as
radically modified as that of Marx by advances in archaeological, epi-
graphic, and papyrological research whose significance he would readily
have grasped but of which he could know nothing.
3. Whether Ossewaarde is aware of it or not, the last few decades have seen
a steady output of findings across the human behavioural sciences, from
behavioural ecology though palaeoanthropology, cognitive archaeology,
and evolutionary and developmental psychology to behavioural economics,
which bear directly on sociology’s traditional concerns. Much of the
research has been conducted within a neo-Darwinian paradigm in which
evolution is seen as driven by the heritable variation and competitive
selection of information, whether genetically or exosomatically transmit-
ted, which affects behaviour in the phenotype. Ossewaarde is free to dispute
the findings (if he can), but not to wish them away. Incorporation where
appropriate and useful of neo-Darwinian concepts and methods into soci-
ology implies no commitment to so-called genetic determinism or socio-
biological reductionism or whatever Ossewaarde may mean by ‘being
immersed in a bio-technological role’. But it does imply that present-day
sociologists will do better to explore the possibilities open to them for

358 © 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Rejoinder to Ossewaarde

constructive interdisciplinary collaboration than to assume without thought

that they have nothing to learn about the study of human behaviour from
colleagues in neighbouring departments.
4. Nobody disputes that the findings of sociologists, as of the practitioners of
any of either the natural or the human sciences, are liable to be used, or
misused, by politicians and their acolytes in accordance with their self-
interested persuasions and purposes. Likewise, the practitioners themselves
will always have views of their own about how their research should be
funded, disseminated, and applied. Nor does any reader of this journal need
to be reminded that ‘advanced technology is dangerous in the hands of the
human species’ or that sociologists, like intellectuals in general, are at risk
of succumbing to the temptation of becoming ‘servile to power’. But these
are themselves matters which call for sociological explanation – always
provided that the proffered explanation can be tested against publicly
available evidence and is not just a story put together to support the
personal prejudices of the sociologist proffering it.

Trinity College, Cambridge

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 359