Forgetting the founders*

W.G. Runciman

Abstract

The inability, or unwillingness, of 20th-century sociologists to move beyond the

agenda bequeathed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim is remarkable in view not only
of the now outdated presuppositions shared by all three but of the increasing
likelihood that the more important influence on the human behavioural sciences in
the 21st century will turn out to be Darwin’s. Not only has the coming together of
evolutionary theory, population genetics, and molecular biology shown that signifi-
cantly more of human behaviour can be explained by the theory of natural selection
than was previously recognized, but non-reductionist explanations of cultural and
social evolution from within a neo-Darwinian paradigm can be framed in terms no
longer vulnerable to the criticisms previously levelled against the application to
sociology of Darwin’s original insight about ‘descent with modification’.

Introduction

Whitehead’s dictum that ‘A science which hesitates to forget its founders is

lost’ was quoted by Robert K. Merton at the head of his Introduction to the
influential set of papers which he brought together under the title Social
Theory and Social Structure in an enlarged and revised edition in 1957. But it
is something which many of his colleagues of the second half of the twentieth
century found it difficult to do. The agenda of Anglo-American sociological
theory continued to be dominated by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and much
discussion of their writings in the secondary literature took the form of engag-
ing with them as if they were contemporaries rather than as predecessors
whose ideas had been either absorbed or superseded and who were therefore
of interest to historians of sociology rather than to practitioners at the fore-
front of current research. It was only to be expected that many of their
conclusions would be invalidated by events which they could not foresee. But
they also shared with many of their contemporaries two presuppositions
of which both had, by the end of the twentieth century, been radically
undermined.
To look back at the period in the history of Western thought when Marx,
Weber, and Durkheim were in their heyday is to be reminded of the confident
sense of rapid and cumulative advance then manifest across the whole range of
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 Forgetting the founders

Wissenschaft. Old orthodoxies were being toppled not only in physics, chem-
istry, geology, biology, geography, and engineering but in what were to become
the 20th-century disciplines of psychology, economics, and anthropology. What
is more, practitioners of the traditional disciplines of history, linguistics, and
archaeology were studying the past – including not least the past as depicted
in the Christian Bible – with a hitherto unprecedented professionalism. There
seemed every reason to expect that the hopes of the savants of the Enlight-
enment were on the way to being realized and that natural science, as what had
previously been spoken of as ‘natural philosophy’ was by then called, would
soon be complemented by a no less authoritative science of (as they thought
of it) man.
The first presupposition which they shared was that this emerging science
would lead to the discovery of regularities and trends from which the future
of human societies could be predicted – not, of course, predicted exactly,
any more than economists could be expected to predict exactly what stock
exchange prices would be in twelve months’ time, but predicted in the way that
Marx predicted the inevitable supersession of capitalism by socialism. Weber,
to be sure, disagreed with Marx about that, and was always conscious of the
contingencies of human history and the limited distance that our weak eyes
can peer into the mists of the future. But he too saw human history as follow-
ing an underlying pattern and proceeding in a definite direction – in his case,
that of progressive rationalization – and Durkheim equally was, as Lukes
(1973: 140) put it, ‘not free of an evolutionary perspective’. All three are now
routinely criticized for a Eurocentrism which took it too readily for granted
that progress, as they conceived of it, was the achievement of the West. But
they were not mistaken in seeing around them a reversal in the direction of
cultural and social influence which in earlier centuries had been from East to
West rather than West to East. The presupposition which it did not occur to
them to discard was that there must be a teleological process at work in this
which sociologists should be able to understand. They would surely have been
surprised, could they have known, that by the beginning of the 21st century it
would have become a virtual commonplace that there is no master narrative of
human history, no law of social development, and no privileged vantage-point
from which progress (or the lack of it) in social evolution can be assessed.
Their second presupposition was of a different, although not unrelated,
kind. They saw themselves as not merely investigators but preceptors whose
understanding of how societies function and change entitled them to tell other
people how they should lead their lives. Weber, again, may seem an exception
to this, with his well-known insistence that sociological research, although it
cannot but be ‘value-relevant’, should nevertheless be ‘value-free’. But in his
celebrated lecture on the vocation of Politik he left his student audience in no
doubt that an ethic of responsibility is more to be admired than an ethic of
absolute ends. Nor did he refrain from enlisting his academic expertise in the
service of advocacy of policies which he believed to be in the best interests of
the German nation. In Marx’s case, the link between his analysis of capitalism

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W.G. Runciman

and his injunctions to proletarians and right-minded bourgeois to hasten the

overthrow of a system deservedly doomed to collapse is too familiar to need
elaboration. Durkheim, too, was as much a moral didact as he was an academic
analyst of the division of labour or suicide rates or primordial Australian
religion. All three would have been as nonplussed by the rise of moral rela-
tivism in the late-20th century as by the decline of teleological theory. The
assumption that morality is a matter of ethnographically local conventions
between which European sociologists have no special authority to arbitrate
would have struck them as eccentric if not perverse. They did not, admittedly,
assume that their own precepts would necessarily be followed, or their advice
taken, by the governments of their day. In that, they were if anything less
confident than their less theoretically-minded English counterparts who, as
Laurence Goldman has pointed out, were heirs to a tradition which ‘from its
very foundation, was premised on the use of social knowledge in the service of
reform’ (2007: 434). But the difference between then and now is neatly cap-
tured in the contrast between L.T. Hobhouse’s Morals in Evolution of 1906,
with its account of gradual but steady progress in the direction of Hobhouse’s
own liberal convictions, and Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality of
2006, with its account of the moral sense as an adaptive trait of the human
brain attributable to natural selection.

The Darwinian legacy

Nor can the founders be reproached for failing to foresee that by the begin-
ning of the 21st century the most pervasive influence on the human behavioural
sciences might turn out to be Darwin’s. Darwin himself, after all, did not, and
could not, realize the magnitude of his achievement, since he did not, and
could not, know how evolution through natural selection actually works. It was
not until the ‘new synthesis’, as it came to be called, between evolutionary
theory and population genetics was supplemented by the discoveries of
molecular biology that the objections which he had been unable to answer in
his lifetime could be definitively rebutted. Well into the 20th century, self-styled
Mendelians could still be anti-Darwinians. But by the last quarter of the 20th
century, when the ongoing debates among theoretical biologists were all being
conducted within an explicitly neo-Darwinian paradigm, social scientists too
were beginning to see in Darwin’s conception of ‘descent with modification’
the starting-point from which they could best address the explanation of
qualitative changes in human behaviour-patterns in disciplines ranging all the
way from archaeology (Shennan, 2002) to economics (Hodgson and Knudsen,
2006). Sociologists remained for the most part either ignorant of or hostile to
these developments. Marxists no longer saw Darwin, as Marx himself had
done, as underwriting the idea of class struggle as the driving force of human
history; the acrimonious controversies provoked by the publication in 1975 of
E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology convinced many sociologists that neo-Darwinian

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 Forgetting the founders

theory had nothing to offer them; and the remark made in 1959 by John
Maynard Smith, not yet known as the father of evolutionary game theory, at a
conference organized by the Scottish Branch of the British Sociological Asso-
ciation to the effect that sociologists’ suspicion of the application of biological
ideas to sociology might be justified by the ‘nonsense’ written in the name of
Social Darwinism and the crimes committed in the cause of racial superiority
(Maynard Smith, 1961: 83) continued to hold good for sociologists of all
theoretical schools.
That suspicion is at last beginning to be dispelled, even if it is still found
necessary on occasion to reaffirm the obvious proposition that ‘it is possible to
recognize the importance of the mechanism of natural selection without
thereby subscribing to ideas of selective breeding or ethnic cleansing’ (Stud-
holme, Scott, and Husbands, 2007: 818). But the agenda bequeathed to 20th-
century sociology by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim is being revised under the
influence of neo-Darwinian theory in two separate, although equally signifi-
cant, ways: first, by the findings of biologists, geneticists, and psychologists
which bear directly on naturally selected aspects of human behaviour; second,
by the application of neo-Darwinian theory to the framing and testing of
non-reductionist causal hypotheses about cultural and social evolution.
Sociologists may not unreasonably regard the findings of behaviour genet-
ics and behavioural ecology as marginal to their concerns. Behaviour geneti-
cists have done much to clarify and resolve the ‘nature-nurture’ debate in the
study of individual development and to account for within-group differences
in heritable susceptibility to both physical and psychological conditions of
various kinds. But these differences have less to contribute to the explanation
of the collective institutional processes which are sociologists’ concern. Simi-
larly, the matching by behavioural ecologists of the reproductive strategies
adopted by the populations they study to predictions modelled on maximiza-
tion of inclusive fitness (eg Borgerhoff Mulder, 2000) have less to contribute to
the explanation of the demography of populations of the kind with which
sociologists are accustomed to deal, where the pursuit of inclusive fitness is
frequently overridden by economic, ideological, and political influences (eg
Banks, 1981). On the other hand, the burgeoning discipline of evolutionary
psychology has generated an extensive and rapidly growing literature demon-
strating how human behaviour-patterns are affected by innate cognitive
mechanisms which have evolved through natural selection. Evolutionary psy-
chologists have been rightly criticized for assuming too readily that the design
of the human brain was fixed by the selective pressures which bore on our
hunting and foraging ancestors in a supposedly uniform Pleistocene environ-
ment (Foley, 1996; Irons, 1999). But explanations of aspects of present-day
human behaviour by reference to innate species-wide mental traits do not
depend on knowing just when and how the design of our brains came to be
what it is. Sociologists who feel threatened by the claims made by, or on behalf
of, evolutionary psychologists (Rose, 2001; Jackson and Rees, 2007) will have
to refute them rather than simply bemoan their influence. They need to show

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either that the observations which the contributors to the Oxford Handbook
(Dunbar and Barrett, 2007) claim to be able to explain are incorrect, or that
the proffered explanations fail to fit them. It can hardly be disputed that the
human brain is as much a product of natural selection as human intestines and
human teeth, and that an understanding of the resulting psychological capaci-
ties, dispositions, susceptibilities, and constraints common to all members of
the human species bears directly on a whole range of topics with which
sociologists are concerned. Nobody has overturned the study by Daly and
Wilson (1988) of homicide, which found that in every society for which there
is reliable evidence young adult males are overwhelmingly more likely to be
the killers than either older men or coeval women. Research in this area has,
moreover, been shown to have significant implications for feminist theory, not
least because male-female differences in physical aggression are seen at too
young an age for cultural stereotyping and gender labelling to account for
them (Archer and Côte, 2005). It is true that evolutionary psychologists have
been too ready to accuse any and all sociologists and anthropologists of being
wedded to an outdated ‘Standard Social Science Model’ (Tooby and
Cosmides, 1992) which assumes the human mind to be a blank slate on which
culture inscribes whatever locally variable instructions it will. But collabora-
tion between cognitive and developmental psychologists and neuroscientists is
beginning to demonstrate in detail just how much further from blank the slate
is than the majority of 20th-century anthropologists and sociologists were
willing to accept.
At the same time, it is being increasingly recognized that it is not only at the
level of natural selection that Darwin’s conception of ‘descent with modifica-
tion’ applies, and that cultural and social evolution come about through a
process continuous with and analogous, but not reducible, to it. Awareness that
cultural evolution might be modelled as a system of heritable variation and
competitive selection operating by different transmission rules from genetic
inheritance has given rise to the ‘dual-inheritance theory’ influentially devel-
oped by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson (Boyd and Richerson, 1985;
Richerson and Boyd, 2005). Dual-inheritance theorists follow Cavalli-Sforza
and Feldman (1981) in adapting mathematical models developed by popula-
tion geneticists to the reproduction and diffusion of information transmitted
not from organism to organism in strings of DNA but from mind to mind by
imitation and learning. They are careful to distinguish themselves from the
self-styled ‘memeticists’ (Blackmore, 1999; Distin, 2005) who have taken from
Richard Dawkins the notion of particulate units of cultural inheritance which
are replicated by analogy with genes and diffused by analogy with viruses. But
the dual-inheritance theorists share with the memeticists an explicit recogni-
tion that cultural selection can work independently of natural selection and
can either enhance or diminish (or, it may be, have no effect at all on) the
inclusive reproductive fitness of the carriers of locally successful cultural muta-
tions. Richerson’s and Boyd’s reluctance to adopt the term ‘meme’ leads them
to talk in terms of ‘gene-culture’ interaction when a more logical formulation

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 Forgetting the founders

would be either ‘gene-meme’ or ‘nature-culture’ interaction. But they have

produced not only deductive arguments but supporting empirical evidence to
show that what they prefer to call ‘cultural variants’ evolve in recognizably
Darwinian fashion. This would have been equally unacceptable to Marx, for
whom culture was a superstructural reflection of underlying social relations of
production, to Durkheim, who would have rejected outright the suggestion
that cultural evolution comes about through the aggregation of individual
psychological traits at population level, and to Weber, who explicitly consid-
ered the application of the concepts of selection (Auslese) and adaptation
(Anpassung) to sociology only then to reject them. But 21st-century sociolo-
gists have no reason not to welcome both dual-inheritance theory and evolu-
tionary psychology for what they can contribute to topics of traditional
sociological concern.

Natural, cultural, social

All three founders had their own preferred just-so stories of social evolution:
Marx’s of dialectical class conflict, Weber’s of formal and substantive rational-
ization, and Durkheim’s of the transition from mechnical to organic solidarity.
But these are very different from neo-Darwinian stories of the path-
dependent but open-ended evolution of societies from one to another kind
through the heritable variation and competitive selection of information
defining practices constitutive of institutional roles. Nor did any of the three
distinguish explicitly between cultural evolution, in which change in collective
behaviour-patterns comes about through the transmission of novel beliefs and
attitudes from one person’s mind to another’s, and social evolution, in which it
comes about through the institutional imposition of formal legal or customary
practices as opposed to the interpersonal acquisition of informal habits or
routines. In this they were at one with 20th-century anthropologists who, as
pointed out by Brown (1991: 40), have been particularly prone not only to
contrast ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ jointly with ‘biological’ but to treat ‘a culture’
and ‘a society’ as synonymous. But sociologists studying the armies, churches,
markets, businesses, bureaucracies, law-courts, and parliaments of large and
complex societies cannot but be implicitly, if not explicitly, aware of a differ-
ence between behaviour controlled by formal institutional sanctions and
behaviour which is the acting-out of beliefs and attitudes transmitted from
person to person by imitation and learning. Indeed, the relation between the
two is so integral to the explanation from almost any theoretical perspective of
the behaviour of the members of collectivities like these that it may be thought
by sociologists not to need any particular attention drawn to it in the course of
normal research.
Until now, both evolutionary psychologists and dual-inheritance theorists
have, like the anthropologists, made only the single distinction between the
biological on one side and the ‘sociocultural’ on the other.They are not unaware

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W.G. Runciman

of institutional as opposed to personal differences of power in human societies,

but treat them as externalities diverting cultural evolution in a different direction
from that in which it would otherwise proceed (Durham,1991:443).This is partly
because they tend to look for their empirical evidence either to psychological
experiments or to small-scale inter-group comparisons, and partly because, like
the behavioural ecologists, they tend to select for study in the field populations
of hunter-gatherers or pastoralists rather than of large industrial societies. But
there is no reason not to extend the same approach to large populations whose
members are the incumbents of institutional roles to which there attach formal
economic, ideological, and political sanctions. The way in which the practice of
wage-labour,for example,can invade populations in which barter and customary
exchange had previously appeared to have reached fixation is obviously analo-
gous, but equally obviously not reducible, to the way in which a novel fashion in
clothes or hairstyle or cookery is diffused across a population by imitation or
learning. Imitation and learning still remain a part of the process: in an emerging
capitalist economy, budding entrepreneurs will deliberately set themselves to
imitate and learn from the practices of those of their competitors whom they see
as the most successful. But, as James S. Coleman pointed out in discussing
‘authority relations’, we are now dealing with ‘an acting unit consisting of two
individuals [in this example,the capitalist and the wage-labourer] in place of two
separate and independent units’ (1990:146).Institutional role-dyads of this kind
are as much the outcome of the continuous process of heritable variation and
competitive selection as the distinctive mores and life-styles which are generated
in the course of cultural evolution. But something quite different is going on
in the two cases when a new behaviour-pattern displaces an old one in the
population concerned.
When the neo-Darwinian approach is brought to bear in this way on the
traditional sociological agenda, it may seem to imply that practices should be
taken to be ‘the’ units of social selection, memes ‘the’ units of cultural selec-
tion, and genes ‘the’ units of natural selection. But genes are not the only
candidate in biological evolution, where natural selection depends on other
mechanisms besides the replication of DNA and ‘multi-level’ selection is
recognized as commonplace. Sociologists can, and should, be open-minded
about where selective pressure may be at work down the causal chain from the
primary units of information, whatever they are, to their extended phenotypic
effects. The benefit to be gained from such open-mindedness can be clearly
seen in the study of the evolution of languages, where phonemes or syllables
or words or even grammars can be taken to be the heritably variable objects
which have outcompeted their rivals.There is nothing inherently misconceived
in treating either ‘core traditions’ or ‘ephemeral assemblages of small units’
(Boyd et al., 1997: 365) as what cultural selection selects, or treating roles or
even institutions as what social selection selects, if that will better explain what
is going on in the culture or society concerned.
It is important also to dissociate neo-Darwinian theory from the imputation
of genetic, cultural, or social determinism. Evolutionary biologists are well

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 Forgetting the founders

aware of the phenomenon of ‘niche construction’ whereby organisms them-

selves modify their environment and thereby affect the selective pressures
acting on them. At the cultural level, memes are actively reinterpreted and
reconstructed in the course of transmission from mind to mind. At the social
level, the practices defining institutional roles are constantly being renegoti-
ated within relationships of economic, ideological, and political power. The
practical difficulty which this poses for comparative sociology is not that of
identifying these ongoing reciprocal interactions but that of estimating the
extent of their relative influence on subsequent population-level outcomes as
biological, cultural, and social evolution proceed.

An illustrative example

It is still early days in the application of neo-Darwinian theory to the tradi-

tional sociological agenda, and any sociologist who attempts it is likely to be
criticized by other sociologists as too Darwinian and by evolutionary psy-
chologists and dual-inheritance theorists as not Darwinian enough. But one
recent study, whose authors explicitly cite the principles underlying evolution-
ary psychology as providing the ‘metatheoretical base’ for research like theirs
(Nisbett and Cohen, 1996: xviii), illustrates particularly clearly the value of a
neo-Darwinian approach. Nisbett and Cohen’s chosen topic is the ‘culture of
honor’ in the Southern United States and the lethal interpersonal violence to
which it gives rise. Unsurprisingly, the much higher incidence of homicide
among young adult males than either older males or coeval females is fully
confirmed. But Southern women are much more likely to kill than Northern
women, and the consistent readiness of white, non-Hispanic Southern males to
respond with lethal violence to personal insults or threats to their families or
property is unmistakably attested in the homicide rates disaggregated by
Nisbett and Cohen from U.S. Department of Justice records. The regional
differences are, moreover, significantly more marked in ‘argument-related’
than ‘felony-related’ homicide. The regional correlations are supported by
both survey data and experimental results. There is no evidence which would
favour either an ecological or a genetic explanation. White Southerners differ
as much from non-white Southerners as they do from white Northerners.
Young Southerners acquire from parents, mentors, peer-groups, and role-
models a tradition whereby insults must be punished, wrongs avenged, and
recourse had to self-defence rather than public protection. This distinctive
upbringing derives from the sociological difference that Southerners are
descended from herders and Northerners from farmers, and herders all over
the world are known to be more disposed to aggressive and retaliatory vio-
lence because of their vulnerability to losing the animals on which they depend
for their livelihood and which, unlike land, are easy to steal. This therefore
gives rise to the perceived need to establish and maintain a reputation for

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W.G. Runciman

being willing to resort to violence in the face of attempted predation which

does not arise in otherwise indistinguishable farming populations.
Sceptics of the neo-Darwinian approach to sociological questions may seek
to dismiss this explanation as a just-so story constructed in hindsight. But all
evolutionary explanations are just-so stories constructed with hindsight. Soci-
ologists, like biologists, have to find out as best they can which of the alterna-
tives on offer is the right one. Kipling’s just-so story of how the elephant got his
trunk is a comic answer to a question to which the serious answer is given by
the theory of natural selection. Nisbett and Cohen’s just-so story of lethal
violence and the culture of honour in the American South cannot be tested as
conclusively as that of the ecology and evolution of Darwin’s finches (Grant,
1999). But that is because, as every practising sociologist well knows, even the
panoply of methods deployed by Nisbett and Cohen cannot approximate the
quasi-experimental contrasts on which explanations from within the theory
of natural selection can be based. It is not because theirs is either trivial or
circular.
Notice also how it is a story of selection at the biological and cultural and
social levels. The culture of honour is handed down by imitation and learning
and sustained by the sanction of personal reputation. But the lethal violence
whose incidence is heightened by it depends on evoking an innate capacity
differentially inherited by men and women, and it is in part the social-
evolutionary product of a mode of production which differentially heightened
the probability of cultural reproduction of its constituent memes. Nisbett and
Cohen themselves suggest that if their explanation is well-founded, a similar
behaviour-pattern is more likely to be found in horticultural societies than
among either stable agricultural communities or hunter-gatherers. But they
also point to the re-emergence of a sub-culture of the same kind in the
environment of inner cities, which exerts strong selective pressure favouring
norms of individual self-protection and vigilance against behaviour by others
which threatens, or can be seen as threatening, the respect which the individual
young male regards as his due.

Conclusion

One possible response to the suggestion that sociologists should be readier

than they are to forget the founders might be to argue that the founders’
concerns are still our own. Don’t Marx’s views about class conflict and the
social relations of production, Weber’s about power and forms of legitimacy,
and Durkheim’s about anomie and the division of labour remain as relevant to
21st- as to 20th-century sociology? But although the concerns may be the same,
the concepts and methods with which to address them are not. However far
sociology may be from standing comparison with the advances which biology
has made in the last hundred years, we now know very many things that the
founders did not, and it implies no disparagement of their achievements to say

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 Forgetting the founders

so. Indeed, it can be argued that Weber, in particular, would have both under-
stood and welcomed the support which evolutionary game theory can give
to one aspect of his thesis about the part played by a distinctively Puritan
Lebensführung in the evolution of American capitalism (Runciman, 2005).
The continuing resistance among present-day sociologists to neo-
Darwinian theory is itself an interesting topic in the sociology of sociology.The
overtly political hostility of Marxist critics fearful that it may be deployed in
support of reactionary views and policies to which they object can perhaps be
dismissed alongside the overtly religious hostility of Christian critics fearful
that it may be deployed in support of atheistic views and policies to which
they similarly object. But there remains a wilful disposition among neo-
Darwinism’s critics to attribute to neo-Darwinians opinions which they do not
in fact hold. It is simply not true that neo-Darwinians are all covert reduction-
ists who believe that cultural variation is controlled (as opposed to con-
strained) by the extent of its contribution to the maximization of inclusive
reproductive fitness. Nor is it true that they are Panglossian optimists who
think that evolution leads to a best of possible worlds as opposed to locally
optimal trade-offs. Nor are they ‘pan-selectionists’ who think that every
observed biological, culture, or social trait must be explained as an adaptation.
Nor do they believe that there are single genes ‘for’ personal characteristics, or
single memes ‘for’ life-styles, or single practices ‘for’ modes of production,
persuasion, or coercion. Nor is it true that the population-level approach
which is central to neo-Darwinian theory ‘systematically disrupts any attempt
to understand the generative dynamics of developmental systems’ (Ingold,
2004: 219). The study of development and of adaptation are complementary,
not mutually exclusive, and there is good reason to believe both that devel-
opmental plasticity is an adaptation and that some important elements of it are
adaptive (Sterelny, 2003: 166). There is no lack of unresolved questions within
the study of natural selection itself, let alone the study of its interaction with
the concomitant processes of cultural and social selection. But polemical
stereotyping of opponents’ views is not helpful to the development of research
designs by which prospective answers to the unresolved questions can be
formulated and put to the test.
For sociologists of the early 21st century, the need is to recognize the extent
to which neo-Darwinian theory, far from undermining their findings about
collective human behaviour, can help to underwrite them. This implies no
threat to the autonomy of sociology as an academic discipline. Study of the
behaviour-patterns which distinguish different kinds of communities, institu-
tions, cultures, and societies from one another involves both concepts and
methods quite distinct from those involved in the study of individual human
minds and bodies. But the increased understanding of the workings of the
human mind which is emerging from current palaeoanthropological as well as
psychological research holds out the prospect of grounding the findings of
sociologists on a basis far more solid than Marx, Weber, or Durkheim could
have conceived of. Then, perhaps, it may become possible to resolve what

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W.G. Runciman

might be called Gellner’s Paradox: ‘Question: how can a species, genetically

granted by Nature such remarkable freedom and licence, nevertheless observe
such restraint, such narrowly defined limits, in its actual conduct?’ (Gellner,
1989: 516).

Trinity College, Cambridge Received 9 November 2007

Accepted 7 January 2008

Note

* This article is a revised version, with references added, of a lecture delivered at the Royal Irish
Academy, Dublin in January 2007 under the title ‘Has Sociology Come of Age at Last?’.

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