Objectivity in Social Science

Though Ordering of Reality

The attempts to determine the "real" and the "true" meaning of historical concepts always reappear and never succeed in reaching their goal. Accordingly the synthetic concepts used by historians are either imperfectly defined or, as soon as the elimination of ambiguity is sought for, the concept becomes an abstract ideal type and reveals itself therewith as a theoretical and hence "one-sided" viewpoint which illuminates the aspect of reality with which it can be related. But these concepts are shown to be obviously inappropriate as schema into which reality could be completely integrated. For none of those systems of ideas, which are absolutely indispensable in the understanding of those segments of reality which are meaningful at a particular moment, can exhaust its infinite richness. They are all attempts, on the basis of the present state of our knowledge and the available conceptual developments, to bring order into the chaos of those facts which we have drawn into the field circumscribed by our interest. The intellectual apparatus which the past has developed through the analysis, or more truthfully, the thought rearrangement of the immediately given reality, and through the latter's integration by concepts which correspond to the state of its knowledge and the focus of its interest, is in constant tension with the new knowledge which we can and desire to wrest from reality. The progress of cultural science occurs through this conflict. Its result is the perpetual reconstruction of those concepts through which we seek to comprehend reality. The history of the social sciences is and remains a continuous process passing from the attempt to order reality through the thought construction of concepts--the dissolution of the thought constructs so constructed through the expansion and shift of the scientific horizon--and the reformulation anew of concepts on the foundations thus transformed. It is not the error of the attempt to construct conceptual systems in general which is shown by this process-- every science, even simple descriptive history, operates with the conceptual stock-in-trade of its time. Rather, this process shows that in the cultural sciences concept-construction depends on the setting of the problem, and the latter varies with the content of culture itself. The relationship between concept and reality in the cultural sciences involves the transitoriness of all such syntheses. The great attempts at theory-construction in our science were always useful for revealing the limits of the significance of those points of view which provided their foundations. The greatest advances in the sphere of the social sciences are substantively tied up with the shift in practical cultural problems and take the guise of a critique of concept-construction. Adherence to the purpose of this critique and therewith the investigation of the principles of syntheses in the social sciences shall be among the primary tasks of our journal.

In the conclusions which are to be drawn from what has been said, we come to a point where perhaps our views diverge here and there from those of many, and even the most outstanding, representatives of the Historical School, among whose offspring we too are to be numbered. The latter still hold in many ways, expressly or tacitly, to the opinion that it is the end and the goal of every science to order its data into a system of concepts, the content of which is to be acquired and slowly perfected through the observation of empirical regularities, the construction of hypotheses, and their verification, until finally a "completed" and hence deductive science emerges. For this goal, the historical-inductive work of the present-day is a preliminary task necessitated by the imperfections of our discipline. Nothing can be more suspect, from this point of view, that the construction and application of clear-cut concepts since this seems to be an over-hasty anticipation of the remote future.

This conception was, in principle, impregnable within the framework of the classical-scholastic epistemology which was still fundamentally assumed by the majority of the research-workers identified with the Historical School. The function of concepts was assumed to be the reproduction of "objective" reality in the analyst's imagination. Hence the recurrent references to the unreality of all clear-cut concepts. If one perceives the implications of the fundamental ideas of modern epistemology which ultimately derives from Kant; namely, that concepts are primarily thinking instruments for the intellectual mastery of empirical data and can be only that, the fact that precise categorical concepts are necessarily ideal types will not cause him to desist from constructing them. The relationship between concept and historical research is reversed for those who appreciate this; the goal of the Historical School then appears as logically impossible, the concepts are not ends but are means to the end of understanding phenomena which are significant from concrete individual viewpoints. Indeed, it is just because the content of historical concepts is necessarily subject to change that they must be formulated precisely and clearly on all occasions. In their application, their character as ideal thought constructs should be carefully kept in mind, and the ideal-type and historical reality should not be confused with each other. It should be understood that since really definitive historical concepts are not in general to be thought of as an ultimate end in view of the inevitable shift of the guiding value-ideas, the construction of sharp and unambiguous concepts relevant to the concrete individual viewpoint which directs our interest at any given time, affords the possibility of clearly realizing the limits of their validity.

It will be pointed out and we ourselves have already admitted, that in a particular instance the course of a concrete historical event can be made vividly clear without its being analyzed in terms of explicitly defined concepts. And it will accordingly be claimed for the historians in our field, that they may, as has been said of the political historians, speak the "language of life itself." Certainly! But it should be added that in this procedure, the attainment of a level of explicit awareness of the viewpoint from which the events in question get their significance remains highly accidental. We are in general not in the favorable position of the political historian for whom the cultural views to which he orients his presentation are usually unambiguous-- or seem to be so. Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal. "Each sees what is in his own heart." Valid judgments always presuppose the logical analysis of what is concretely and immediately perceived, i.e. the use of concepts. It is indeed possible and often aesthetically satisfying to keep these in petto but it always endangers the security of the reader's orientation, and often that of the author himself concerning the content and scope of his judgments.

The neglect of clear-cut concept-construction in practical discussions of practical, economic and social policy can, however, become particularly dangerous. It is really unbelievable to an outsider what confusion has been fostered, for instance, by the use of the term "value"--that unfortunate child of misery of our science, which can be given an unambiguous meaning only as an ideal type--or terms like "productive," "from an economic viewpoint," etcetera, which in general will not stand up under a conceptually precise analysis. Collective concepts taken from the language of everyday life have particularly unwholesome effects. In order to have an illustration easy for the layman to understand, let us take the concept of "agriculture" especially as it appears in the term "the interests of agriculture." If we begin with "the interests of agriculture" as the empirically determinable, more or less clear subjective ideas of concrete economically active individuals about their own interests and disregard entirely the countless conflicts of interest taking place among the cattle breeders, the cattle growers, grain growers, corn consumers, corn-using, whiskey-distilling farmers, perhaps not all laymen but certainly every specialist will know the great whirlpool of antagonistic and contradictory forms of value-relationship which are vaguely thought of under that heading. We will enumerate only a few of them here: the interests of farmers, who wish to sell their property and who are therefore interested in a rapid rise of the price of land; the diametrically opposed interest of those who wish to buy, rent or lease; the interest of those who wish to retain a certain property to the social advantage of their descendants and who are therefore interested in the stability of landed property; the antagonistic interests of those who, in their own or their children's interests, wish to see the land go to the most enterprising farmer--or what is not exactly the same--to the purchaser with the most capital; the purely economic interest in economic freedom of movement of the most "competent farmer" in the business sense; the antagonistic interests of certain dominating classes in the maintenance of the traditional social and political position of their own "class" and thereby of their descendants; the interest of the socially subordinated strata of farmers in the decline of the strata which are above them and which oppress them; in occasional contradiction to this the interest of this stratum in having the leadership of those above them to protect their economic interests. This list could be tremendously increased, without coming to an end although we have been as summary and imprecise as possible.

We will pass over the fact that most diverse purely ideal values are mixed and associated with, hinder and divert the more "egoistic" interests in order to remind ourselves, above all, that when we speak of the "interests of agriculture" we think not only of those material and ideal values to which the farmers themselves at a given time relate their interests, but rather those partly quite heterogeneous value-ideas which we can relate with agriculture. As instances of these value-ideas related to agriculture we may cite the interests in production derived from the interests in cheap and qualitatively good food, which two interests are themselves not always congruous and in connection with which many clashes between the interests of city and country can be found, and in which the interests of the present generation need not by any means always be identical with the interests of coming generations; interests in a numerous population, particularly in a large rural population, derived either from the foreign or domestic interests of the "State," or from other ideal interests of the most diverse sort, e.g., the expected influence of a large rural population on the character of the nation's culture. These "population interests" can clash with the most diverse economic interests of all sections of the rural population, and indeed with all the present interests of the mass of rural inhabitants. Another instance is the interest in a certain type of social stratification of the rural population, because of the type of political or cultural influence which will be produced therefrom; this interest can, depending on its orientation, conflict with every conceivable (even the most urgent present and future) interests of the individual farmers as well as those "of the State." To this is added a further complication: the "state," to the "interests" of which we tend to relate such and numerous other similar individual interests, is often only a blanket term for an extremely intricate tangle of value-ideas, to which it in its turn is related in individual cases, e.g., purely military security from external dangers; security of the dominant position of a dynasty or a certain class at home; interest in the maintenance and expansion of the formal-juridical unity of the nation for its own sake or in the interest of maintaining certain objective cultural values which in their turn again are very differentiated and which we as a politically unified people believe we represent; the reconstruction of the social aspects of the state according to certain once more diverse cultural ideas. It would lead us too far even merely to mention what is contained under the general label "state-interests" to which we can relate "agriculture." The illustrations which we have chosen and our even briefer analyses are crude and simplified. The non-specialist may now analyze similarly (and more thoroughly) for instance "the class interests of the worker" in order to see what contradictory elements, composed partly of the workers' interests and ideals, and partly of the ideals with which we view the workers, enter into this concept. It is impossible to overcome the slogans of the conflict of interests through a purely empirical emphasis on their "relative" character. The clear-cut, sharply defined analysis of the various possible standpoints is the only path which will lead us out of verbal confusion. The "free trade argument" as a worldview or as a valid norm is ridiculous but--and this is equally true whichever ideals of commercial policy the individual accepts--our underestimation of the heuristic value of the wisdom of the world's greatest merchants as expressed in such ideal-typical formulae has caused serious damage to our discussions of commercial policy. Only through ideal-typical concept-construction do the viewpoints with which we are concerned in individual cases become explicit. Their peculiar character is brought out by the confrontation of empirical reality with the ideal-type. The use of the undifferentiated collective concepts of everyday speech is always a cloak for confusion of thought and action. It is, indeed, very often an instrument of specious and fraudulent procedures. It is, in brief, always a means of obstructing the proper formulation of the problem.

We are now at the end of this discussion, the only purpose of which was to trace the course of the hair-line which separates science from faith and to make explicit the meaning of the quest for social and economic knowledge. The objective validity of all empirical knowledge rests exclusively upon the ordering of the given reality according to categories which are subjective in a specific sense, namely, in that they present the presuppositions of our knowledge and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us. The means available to our science offer nothing to those persons to whom this truth is of no value. It should be remembered that the belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures and is not a product of man's original nature. Those for whom scientific truth is of no value will seek in vain for some other truth to take the place of science in just those respects in which it is unique, namely, in the provision of concepts and judgments which are neither empirical reality nor reproductions of it but which facilitate its thought ordering in a valid manner. In the empirical social sciences, as we have seen, the possibility of meaningful knowledge of what is essential for us in the infinite richness of events is bound up with the unremitting application of viewpoints of a specifically particularized character, which, in the last analysis, are oriented on the basis of value-ideas. These value-ideas are for their part empirically discoverable and analyzable as elements of meaningful human conduct, but their validity can not be deduced from empirical data as such. The "objectivity" of the social sciences depends rather on the fact that the empirical data are always related to those value-ideas which alone make them worth knowing and the significance of the empirical data is derived from these value-ideas. But these data can never become the foundation for the empirically impossible proof of the validity of the value-ideas. The belief which we all have in some form or other, in the meta-empirical validity of ultimate and final values, in which the meaning of our existence is rooted, is not incompatible with the incessant changefulness of the concrete viewpoints, from which empirical reality gets its significance. Both these views are, on the contrary, in harmony with each other. Life with its irrational reality and its store of possible meanings is inexhaustible. The concrete form in which value-relationship occurs remains perpetually in flux, ever subject to change in the dimly seen future of human culture. The light which emanates from those highest value-ideas always falls on an ever changing finite segment of the vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.

Now all this should not be misunderstood to mean that the proper task of the social sciences should be the continual chase for new viewpoints and new thought constructs. On the contrary: nothing should be more sharply emphasized than the proposition that the knowledge of the cultural significance of concrete historical events and developments is exclusively and solely the final end which, among other means, concept-construction and the criticism of constructs also seek to serve. There are, to use the words of F. Th. Vischer, "subject matter specialists" and "interpretative specialists." The fact-greedy gullet of the former can be filled only with legal documents, statistical work-sheets and questionnaires, but he is insensitive to the refinement of a new idea. The gourmandise of the latter dulls his taste for facts by ever new intellectual subtilities. That genuine artistry which, among the historians, Ranke possessed in such a grand measure, manifests itself through its ability to produce new knowledge by interpreting already known facts according to known viewpoints.

All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself. It will discontinue assessing the value of the individual facts in terms of their relationships to ultimate value-ideas. Indeed, it will lose its awareness of its ultimate rootedness in the value-ideas in general. And it is well that should be so. But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its thinking apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought. It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors:

The newborn impulse fires my mind,
I hasten on, his beams eternal drinking,
The Day before me and the Night behind,
Above me Heaven unfurled, 
the floor of waves beneath me. 

(Faust: Act I, Scene II)