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This book takes as its starting point the distribution of political, ideological, and economic power between English society's constituent roles from the time when Daniel Defoe was writing Robinson Crusoe, and argues that Defoe would find it remarkably similar three centuries later despite all the changes in technology, lifestyles, amenities, beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values by which he would no doubt be astonished. 0The disjunction between the two is explained by bringing to bear the approach of current evolutionary sociological theory in which the reproduction or extinction of a society's institutional practices is traced to selective environmental pressures which are independent of the personal motives and subjective experiences of the individuals whose practices they are. It is further argued that the rates of high absolute and low relative social mobility that sociologists have documented in detail for the twentieth century are likely to have been much the same during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The conclusion drawn is that for as long as the country was not defeated in a European war, the probability of a radical change in institutional distribution of power was extremely low throughout, however much contemporary observers or later historians would have either welcomed or deplored it

"In The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection, W.G. Runciman presents an original and wide-ranging account of the fundamental process by which human cultures and societies come to be of the different kinds that they are. Drawing on and extending recent advances in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Runciman argues that collective human behaviour should be analyzed as the acting-out of information transmitted at the three separate but interacting levels of heritable variation and competitive selection - the biological, the cultural, and the social. The implications which this carries for a reformulation of the traditional agenda of comparative and historical sociology are explored with the help of selected examples, and located within the context of current debates about sociological theory and practice. The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection is a succinct and highly imaginative contribution to one of the great intellectual debates of our times, from one of the world's leading social theorists"--Provided by publisher