Volume 31, Number 17 · November 8, 1984
Method Acting
By Jonathan Lieberson
A Treatise on Social Theory Volume I: The Methodology of Social Theory
by W.G. Runciman
Cambridge University Press, 350 pp., $14.95 (paper)
On the first page of his new book, the well-known British sociologist W.G. Runciman defines the classic and often ferocious debate he wants to deal with. It is, he writes, the debate between 'those who affirm and those who deny that there is a fundamental difference in kind between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man.' This controversy, which 'has continued without resolution for more than two hundred years,' he proposes to resolve. If the social sciences have not yet provided us with convincing theoretical knowledge or laws governing human behavior, is it because the matters they deal with are so complex as to prevent the discovery of such knowledge? Or is it because no one has found a suitable method for studying these materials? Or is it because the interests and values of social scientists have contaminated their work, with the result that instead of objective theory they have produced merely a series of tendentious, if occasionally brilliant, speculations?
Review, 6029 words
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