Embattled Reason

Volume 2, Essays on Social Knowledge

Reinhard Bendix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000675542
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Embattled Reason constitutes an intellectual profile of one of America's preeminent sociologists. This collection of essays, published over the course of thirty years, embodies a series of intellectual choices in response to current concerns and to debates of the past, affording a coherent and unified view of Bendix's work as a whole.

The articles are grouped under three headings. In "Conditions of Knowledge" the author is concerned with the value assumptions basic to the social sciences. Under "Theoretical Perspectives" the author presents the guiding considerations of his own work in a continuing dialogue with such thinkers as Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. In the last section, "Studies of Modernization, " Bendix takes up problems involved in an analysis of social change though a reexamination of evolutionist assumptions.

PART I
Biographical

INTRODUCTION

Volume I of these Selected Essays on Social Knowledge began with a discussion of the interests surrounding the quest for knowledge. To large masses of people the “need” for knowledge is not as evident as the need for food, clothing, and shelter. Probably most people want to benefit from applied knowledge, provided they know or learn how to obtain access to it. Their interest in the theories at the bases of applied knowledge is at best sporadic. Knowledge-seekers often put the emphasis the other way around, though they disagree among themselves in many other respects. It is clear, at any rate, that men vary in their interests when they seek or apply knowledge. Some collect butterflies, while others could not care less or think such a hobby a cruelty to animals, while still others study the propagation of butterflies, and so on. Each person has reasons for such interests and feels some affinity with those who share them. This shared interest is one condition not only for the pursuit of knowledge but also for the ability to reach agreement. “The objective validity of all empirical knowledge,” Max Weber remarks in this context, is “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.”¹ Though it may be self-evident, I would add that this truth is available only to those who ask the same questions and use the same framework of assumptions.

The questions we are interested in as scholars have a biographical side; we come to them because our upbringing and experience helped to shape our curiosity. Of course, people of different backgrounds may develop similar interests (for example because of their education), while people of similar backgrounds diverge in what appeals to their imaginations (for example because of their relations with their parents). So the biographical dimension is not a simple determinant of scholarly interests. But biography is not to be dismissed for that reason. In Chapters 1 through 5 in Volume 1, I have shown that we bring to the study of man and society not only specific questions but an “image” of basic priorities, a more or less articulated model of fundamentals, a definition of “the real,” i.e., of what matters most to us in the long run, often with the implicit conviction that other things matter less. Where these convictions become absolutes, as in Hegel’s “The True is the Whole”² or in Marx’s first premise of all human existence which states that “men must be in a position to live in order to ‘make history’”³, claims of comprehending everything ensue, and dogmatism, even if insightful, replaces the search for knowledge. That search, by contrast, is ever approximate, depending as it does on the “provision of concepts and judgments which are neither empirical reality nor reproductions of it but facilitate its analytic ordering in a valid manner” (Max Weber). So conceived, the quest for knowledge does not claim to comprehend everything. Instead, it tries out various perspectives. Each of these is guided by models of fundamentals and will be persuasive only to those who share that view, an existential circularity for which we need not apologize. For these scholarly definitions of “the real” are provisional. They do not claim to understand “the whole,” and they can be discarded once their capacity to convince those who desire truth and approach “the facts” from the same angle of vision becomes exhausted by common if gradual consent.

To dismiss this proximate search for truth as relativism makes sense only from the metaphysical standpoint of those who believe they possess the “whole truth.” The rest of us are likely to see the perspectivism of the social sciences as an indication that the search for knowledge, even when successful, remains bounded by the limits of the human condition. These limits give rise to the many divergent approaches familiar to us from the history of the social sciences. I accept the view expressed by Leszek Kolakowski:

The law of the infinite cornucopia…applies not only to philosophy but to all general theories in the human and social sciences: it states that there is never a shortage of arguments to support any doctrine you want to believe in for whatever reasons. These arguments, however, are not entirely barren. They have helped in elucidating the status questiones and in explaining why these questions matter.⁴

In the social sciences the limits of human endeavor consist of the two conditions for the quest for knowledge I have mentioned: that truth exists only for those who value it, and that the people involved agree on the question to be asked and on some image of man and society which—to them—matters most in the long run. If, on these conditions, agreement cannot be reached, then further research is called for in order to resolve the remaining uncertainties. If this avails nothing, then the continuing lack of agreement probably derives from some divergence of underlying assumptions which has not yet been disclosed.

This is where the biographies of social scientists come in, though the relevance of personal history is often misunderstood. In the methodological sense of interest here, personal history does not pertain to the quest for knowledge itself. Since so many are interested in knowledge, the personal history of that interest has no bearing on the fact that the quest for knowledge continues. Likewise, personal history does not pertain to the validation of results which depend instead on standards of evidence and procedure, which ideally are devoid of personal feeling. Rather, personal history pertains to the questions a scholar asks and the model of fundamentals he finds congenial. Even here, as I have emphasized, personal history is at most a partial determinant of the scholarly process. Nevertheless, this personal component is of some importance in the social sciences, partly because schools of thought proliferate, partly because an idealized natural-science model makes social scientists very reluctant to own up to their personal preoccupations,⁵ and last but not least because scholarly disagreements are quite often due to the questions asked and the fundamentals assumed. The failure to fully articulate these questions and assumptions is the cause of many spurious disagreements, especially in the social sciences where the scholar is also part of the society he or she studies. Here more autobiographical candor would surely help. Such candor, if generally forthcoming, would make academic debates more productive.

These considerations are the reason for the tripartite division of this second volume of essays on social knowledge. On the principle that one should practice what one advocates, the first three essays deal with my own background. I try to show that even one’s own story can be told with that controlled subjectivity which is what the term “objectivity” implies. Part II deals with “Intellectual Confrontations” which to me means ideally that the student and scholar confronts his or her teachers, real or imagined, with the implications of their own views or that he or she brings out these implications by confronting one teacher with another. This approach to intellectual dialogue is a corollary of Kolakowski’s idea of “cornucopia.” Finally, Part III deals with “Ideas and Institutions,” assembling a number of unpublished and published essays. Over the years I have explored divergent contexts in which the convergence of the material and spiritual causes of culture and history becomes manifest, thus following the injunction with which Max Weber closed his analysis of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.⁶

One guideline to the reader may be in order. An author publishing a volume of selected essays can hope for a reader who will read all the essays consecutively, but he can hardly take him or her for granted. I have arranged the sequence of essays with such an ideal reader in mind. But I have also taken care to cross-reference related points in the different essays while keeping repetition to a minimum. These two objectives are difficult to reconcile, however. I hope that the repetitions which remain will help the reader.

Notes

1. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (tr. by Edward Shils and Henry Finch; Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 110–11.

2. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1928), p. 21.

3. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 119–20.

4. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 16.

5. For an analysis of subjective factors in the research of natural scientists cf. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), passim. It may be added that natural scientists are a part of nature and this fact has been taken into account at important points in modern physics, though the layman is unable to follow the details of the argument.

6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 183.

1
A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

My interest in biography did not begin with my father. The first public expression was an essay on my teacher at the University of Chicago, Louis Wirth. Even before that, while still living in Berlin, this interest had been kindled, as I recognize in retrospect. At that time, at eighteen or nineteen, I pursued questions concerning the life cycle, as it is called now, or life history as it was called at Chicago. My reason for this early interest, odd though it seems to me today, was the Marxist assertion that in the long run the economic substructure shapes or determines the superstructure of culture, politics, law—in short all conscious products of the human mind. I wanted to know how this causal influence was supposed to work. This question led me to readings in child psychology, as I explain below in Chapter 2. It does not matter that I did not find clear answers to a question which lacked precision. It did matter that I had found a question which interested me, which was formulated in theoretical terms, and for which I tried to find an empirical answer. I see now that this pattern has remained with me ever since. Still, for many years thereafter, it never occurred to me that I could pursue the answer(s) to such a question in the experience of my own family.

The first impetus for this turn of my interests came from outside. At a meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien in 1963, I was approached by Thilo Ramm, then Professor of Law at the University of Giessen, asking me whether I was interested in publishing a selection of my father’s writings from the 1920s in order to bring them to the attention of the contemporary German public. Five years later, the following introduction to Ludwig Bendix, Zur Psychologie der Urteilstätigkeit des Berufsrichters was published.¹ Subsequently I translated this essay, because I had been asked to contribute to a new Canadian journal of sociology.² This seemed a welcome opportunity to call the attention of English readers to my father’s work which had remained entirely unknown despite the increasing interest in the sociology of law. I was surprised to receive a number of letters from friends, who wrote how moved they had been by discovering my father’s work as the immediate background of my own. I remembered this response when later I turned to my family’s story in From Berlin to Berkeley.³

The intellectual affinity naturally went deeper than this encouragement from friends. My father had made the inquiry into the personal and political motivation of German judges a major issue. His call for their critical self-examination was a highly political act in the context of the Weimar Republic, however unrealistic it may have been. In retrospect I have learned to understand that I remained impressed by this appeal to self-knowledge outside that special context, because—as the introduction to this volume suggests—I applied it later in my approach to social science methodology. In this respect it did not matter really that my father had applied self-knowledge only in his private poetry and not in the legal and scholarly contexts which would have obligated him to widen his perspective and include his own roles as lawyer and writer. What mattered to me was that self-knowledge seemed an important way of getting at the background for the endemic divergence of perspectives in the social sciences, and sociology in particular. It was small comfort to hear repeatedly that sociology was still a young discipline and had not had time to mature. After a century and a half, if one counts from Auguste Comte, or close to four centuries if one counts from Thomas Hobbes, it seemed to me time to grow up. And since I could not influence the whole field, I thought it best to start with myself.

Self-knowledge, not preoccupation with self, seems to me an important methodological tool. It so happens that Socrates’ appeal “Know thyself!” also attracts me for more general reasons. In the twentieth century, many if not most people feel rather overwhelmed by a course of events beyond their control, if not beyond their grasp. This sense of impotence easily induces defeatism, an attitude in striking contrast to my father’s abiding faith that through his work he had a chance of reforming a whole legal system single-handedly. I dislike defeatism, but I could no longer hold onto my father’s confidence. The times were not propitious for his beliefs. Given these parameters, the quest for self-knowledge is to me, as a methodological tool and an element in teaching students, no mere self-indulgence or quiescent meditation but rather a pragmatic approach. I should add that this is said with the wisdom of hindsight; it took me a long while to understand what I had been doing.

* * * * *

Fashions in sociology suffer from rapid obsolescence. The standard concerns of one generation are superseded by those of another not because problems are solved, but rather because interests shift. The vocabulary of terms changes even more rapidly than the focus of interest. A case in point is the ascendance of the concept “social role,” and the declining interest in life history. During the years between the world wars the relative merits of the statistical approach and the case study were debated at length, leading to the tame conclusion that both are needed. At the time the “proper criteria” for the study of life histories were the subject of considerable discussion, stimulated by Thomas and Znaniecki’s study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, and the dramatic cultural discontinuities of “Americanization.” Since the late 1930s, however, this phenomenological approach to an individual’s life experience has been replaced by typological and reductionist approaches. Now the individual’s life experience is considered worth a scholar’s attention if it sheds light on underlying factors, be they the role expectations of others or the repercussions of critical turning points in childhood experience. Elton Mayo typified this position when he declared that he was not interested in what a man said, but in why he said it. Given the importance of deception in all human communications, there is obvious merit in that line of inquiry, but also the danger that after a time scholars so preoccupied might cease to listen. The way people act, and the ideas and emotions which comprise their experience, will not retain their claim on our attention if they are seen only as index and symbol of forces outside that action and experience. If as analysts we ignore the manifest content of social life, we will end by likening the human condition to a puppet show in which each action is due to a pull on a string and each voice to the impersonator. This is not unlike the earlier position of Hobbes, who likened man to a watch because his “heart, nerves and joints are like so many springs and wheels which give motion to the body.”

In contrast to these currently fashionable views, this memoir proposes to take seriously what a man says, including his own reasoning of why he said it. The memoir is based on the proposition that the conscious and intellectual side of human nature is an essential aspect of society in that it projects and articulates selected impulses of individual and group experiences. However caused and “distorted,” such projections and articulations also provide part of the scaffolding and framework of what we call social structure. This memoir of my father describes a man of action and knowledge whose life and work illustrate creative experience in a time of rapid social change.⁴ In examining his career and his ideas I shall attempt to disentangle some of that interplay between challenging circumstance and individual response which distinguishes a man from a puppet.

CAREER

My father was born in 1877, the son of a Hebrew teacher in the little Jewish community of a village outside Dortmund. He was one of three children from his mother’s second marriage; she already had five children by a first marriage. The setting was rural and the family’s way of life very modest. When my father was fifteen the family moved to Berlin, then the capital of Imperial Germany. My grandfather had resigned his teaching position and begun work as an insurance agent to support his growing family; he continued with this apparently successful occupation in Berlin. There my father attended a gymnasium, where Rudolf Lehmann, well-known at the time as a writer on pedogogic subjects, was one of his teachers. Lehmann had a penchant for teaching philosophy and psychology in the last two grades of the gymnasium. My father, together with two other students who became his lifelong friends, was greatly influenced by Lehmann’s instruction which encouraged his interest in psychology, his tendency toward critical self-examination, and his basic drive to be sympathetically concerned with other people.⁵

The decision to attend a university was not a simple one. Prospects in the insurance business were good and a considerable struggle preceded the final paren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Part I: Biographical
• Part II: Intellectual Dialogues: Past and Present
• Part III: Ideas and Institutions: Ancient and Modern
• Publications by Reinhard Bendix
• Index