Walter Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford

Walter Garrison Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford , known as WG (Garry) Runciman CBE (born October 10, 1934 ) is a British nobleman and sociologist .

Live and act

Runciman comes from a family of shipowners and politicians . His grandfather Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford , had been a member of the House of Commons for almost 40 years and was also a minister in various liberal governments for many years .

Runciman received his educational and academic training from Eton College and Trinity College at the University of Cambridge . Between 1958 and 1960 he continued his academic training in the United States with a scholarship to Harvard and Berkeley Universities. In 1959 he was a Fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge until 1963. He then became a businessman, but returned in 1971 as a Fellow back to his college and taught there comparative and historical sociologist. In 1975 he became a member of the British Academy , where he was President from 2001 to 2005. In 1986 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1993 he has been a member of the Academia Europaea .

The universities of Edinburgh , Oxford and York as well as King's College London have awarded him an honorary doctorate .

In 1989 he inherited the title of Viscount Runciman of Doxford . He lost the associated seat in the House of Lords through the House of Lords Act 1999 .

Runciman is married to Ruth Runciman . His wife was chair of the now defunct Mental Health Act Commission . Their son David Runciman is a well-known political scientist , his uncle Steven Runciman was an important historian who wrote a three-volume history of the Crusades .

plant

Runciman's book Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (1966) is considered a social science masterpiece. In an interdisciplinary manner, the author succeeded in using approaches from sociology, social psychology and history to differentiate between the actual inequality and its subjective perception and evaluation. To determine the relative (“felt”) deprivation , he used the concept of the reference group in three ways: the comparative reference group , the normative reference group (it provides the standards for the comparison) and the membership reference group (membership group). The book has had a major impact on the discussion about social justice .

Selection of works

• Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: a Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century Britain (1966)
• Social Science and Political Theory (1969)
• A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science (1972)
• A Treatise on Social Theory , Vol. I: The Methodology of Social Theory (1983), Vol. 2 (1989), Vol. 3 (1997),
• The Social Animal (1998)

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford in the catalog of the German National Library
• Home WG (Garry) Runciman

Individual evidence

1. ^ Membership directory: Garry Runciman. Academia Europaea, accessed January 7, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Georg W. Osterdiekhoff (ed.): Lexicon of sociological works . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, p. 583.

predecessor	Office	successor
Walter Leslie Runciman	Viscount Runciman of Doxford 1989-	current owner of the title