Relative Deprivation and Social Justice A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England

Preface.  Part One: Introduction  1. The Study and its Methods  2. Relative Deprivation and the Concept of Reference Groups  3. The Three Dimensions of Social Inequality  Part Two: The Historical Background, 1918–1962  4. Changing Comparisons of Class  5. Attitudes to Status  6. Inequalities of Power and the Decline of Militancy  7. The Implications of Party Choice  Part Three: The 1962 Survey  8. Self-assigned ‘Class’  9. The Working-class Conservatives  10. Reference Groups and Inequalities of Class  11. Reference Groups and Inequalities of Status  Part Four: Conclusions  12. The Assessment of Relative Deprivation  13. A Theory of Social Justice  14. Reform and its Limits.  Appendices.  List of References.  Index.

Biography

W. G. Runciman was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he was awarded First Class Honours with Distinction in Classics and History. In 1958 he went to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship which he spent at Harvard, Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1959 to 1963 he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the author of Plato’s Later Epistemology and Social Science and Political Theory, which was described by the Times Literary Supplement as “one of the most important studies of political thought and behaviour to have appeared in recent years.”  At the time of original publication he was living in Newcastle in the UK and working in industry.

Review for the original edition:

“Mr W. G. Runciman has written the most interesting book on politics to appear for a long time. He provides us with new and interesting facts and he attempts to integrate these facts into a theoretical framework constructed from materials provided by recent political philosophy.” – Alasdair Macintyre, Guardian