Contributions to academic literature were only one component of the role of Garry Runciman, Third Viscount Runciman of Doxford, in British public life. He was also a senior figure in the shipping industry, active in a number of social causes, and chair of a major royal commission. Yet those academic contributions were major and extensive. Various of his writings could be classified within a number of disciplines: classics, philosophy, political theory, sociology. Yet he chose the least fashionable of these – sociology – as his primary academic identity. He once pointed out that he was ‘the first sociologist in the hundred-year history of the British Academy to be elected its President’ (served 2001–05). Within British sociology he came to adopt what he called a neo-Darwinian position – an easily misunderstood term. Although he made major contributions to social theory, he once described himself as a ‘reluctant theorist’, as he believed that theory needed to be rooted in and to emerge from empirical study. He thus reached across that frequent divide among sociologists, just as he reached across and integrated different disciplines. As well as a major intellectual figure, he was also a thoroughly independent one, defying attempts at categorisation.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 23