The Social Animal

Reviews / Votes

Praise for A Treatise on Social Theory (CUP: 1983, 1989, forthcoming): 'One of the most exotic - even flamboyant - intellectual projects of recent years...the two questions [Runciman] seeks to explain are nothing less than these: what kinds of society are possible at any given stage of human development, and why any given society became the way it did, in the course of it... The result is a dazzling display of erudition. Runciman's command of the comparative historical record has few, if any, rivals. Old Babylonia, tribal Africa, archaic Greece, Pre-Columbian America, Stone Age Melanesia, Classical Rome, Dark Age Lombardy, Medieval Japan, Imperial China, feudal Poland, republican Venice, caliphal Islam, absolutist France, industrial Britain, revolutionary Mexico, Stalinist Russia, populist Argentina, social-democratic Sweden, racist South Africa - all these and many more parade across what astonishingly remains a compact, middle-sized book, each deftly and economically captured... Deeply impressive.' Perry Anderson, London Review of Books