Books by W. G. Runciman

Mr Runciman studies the relation of sociology to political philosophy, clarifies an number of disputed and often unclear topics in the social sciences, and extends traditional political philosophy in the direction of recent developments. He examines the sociological writings of Marx, Max Weber and other sociologists.

Plato's Republic, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Marx's Communist Manifesto are universally acknowledged classics of Western political thought. But how strong are the core arguments on which they base their visions of the good society that they want to bring into being? In this lively and provocative book, W. G. Runciman shows where and why they fail, even after due allowance has been made for the different historical contexts in which they wrote. Plato, Hobbes, and Marx were all passionately convinced that justice, peace, and order could be established if only their teachings were implemented and the right people put into power. But Runciman makes a powerful case to the effect that all three were irredeemably naive in their assumptions about how human societies function and evolve and how human behavior could be changed. Yet despite this, Runciman insists that Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto remain great books. Born of righteous anger and frustration, they are masterfully eloquent pleas for better worlds--worlds that Plato, Hobbes, and Marx cannot bring themselves to admit to be unattainable.

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.

This essay is written in the belief that it is possible to say both where Max Weber's philosophy of social science is mistaken and how these mistakes can be put right, and constitutes in itself a valuable contribution to the philosophy of social science.