The craft of large-scale theory: W. G. Runciman and the neo- traditionalist revival in sociological theory

Abstract

In this essay, I single out the recent work of W. G. Runciman as emblematic of a possible 'neo-traditionalist' revival in social theory, following the inevitable domestication of postmodernist challenges to the 'classical' sociological imagination. Using as an interpretative grid some suggestions of Nicos Mouzelis and Zygmunt Bauman about the main issues facing sociological theory, I indicate how Runciman's project in his Treatise on Social Theory stands as perhaps the most impressive embodiment of that neo-classical aspiration. Whilst commending and admiring the quality of Runciman's substantive theorising, I nonetheless find this 'conservative' turn questionable in key respects, and use some 'postmodern' concerns to try to get beyond a straight opposition between realist and deconstructive explanatory formats.

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