Social Science and Government

Policies and problems

A. B. Cherns, W. I. Jenkins, R. Sinclair, A. B. Cherns, W. I. Jenkins, R. Sinclair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136444685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1972 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Part 1
Social Science as a Policy Area

1 The functions and roles of the
social sciences

Bertrand de jouvenel

The question of what the 'appropriate' role of the social scientist might be in society at large, particularly as concerns the potential applicability of social science knowledge to topics defined as 'recognized problems', is one that has received a great deal of attention. Unfortunately much of this attention has remained at the level of polemic and is exemplified by two opposed stances: that which argues for the isolation of research as necessary for the development of social science theory, as against that which advocates the inescapable necessity of the social sciences advancing only through a direct involvement with discrete problems.

Many difficulties in the debate on these issues appear to arise from false analogies between the social sciences and the natural sciences - the sciences of man and the sciences of matter as Bertrand de Jouvenel terms them in his opening address. In this address de Jouvenel points to two major distinctions between the areas of social science and natural science — differences in knowledge and differences in thinking. Linked with differences in knowledge is the error of building repetitive models in the social sciences, i.e. models that have failed to take account of the phenomena of change; differences in thought mean that in many cases the aggregation of human actions is inadequate to provide a theoretical explanation for social behaviour. De Jouvenel by no means rejects the utility of quantitative measurement but does blame an over-emphasis on quantification for an intellectual conservatism in social science. The need as he sees it is not only to explain behaviour in a post hoc fashion by using aggregation as evidence, but to achieve a perspective whereby change can be anticipated.

Bertrand de Jouvenel is an economist whose studies and writings over forty years have dealt not only with economics but also with politics, political philosophy, and, recently, with the wider interdisciplinary area of future studies. At present a professor in the University of Paris, de Jouvenel is also director of the Institute SÉDÉIS and editor of the publication Analyse et Prévision, which encompasses the series 'Études futuribles'. He has since 1930 published many books and articles. His most recent volume, linked with his current leading interest in 'futures', is The L'Art de la conjecture (1964).

The place of science in society has grown enormously in the course of the last generation, whether growth is measured in terms of inputs or in terms of status. Indeed the status now achieved by science has been compared with that once enjoyed by religion. Laboratories invite the same awed reverence as did monasteries, and the endowment of research has become as much a social imperative as was the endowment of prayer.

Within this prestigious scientific establishment (Price, 1965), the social sciences have a minor and insecure standing: scientists have been reluctant to admit them into the scientific community, nor does the public trust them as it does the natural sciences.¹

This inferiority of esteem in which the social sciences are held contrasts not only with their seniority but also with the urgently felt need for wise counsel in human affairs. This has been a century of total wars, totalitarian governments, and genocide. This is a world where most governments are born of violence or maintain themselves by coercion, and where even the most fortunate countries are plagued by the rise of criminality and the fanning of domestic differences into conflicts.

Therefore a moral obligation falls upon social scientists to guide their fellows to more amicable relations for the common good. It is not enough that they seek knowledge for itself, they must be prepared to apply it themselves.²

In my opinion consideration of the problem of beneficial performance by the social sciences requires some preliminary overview of the environment within which and upon which they have to operate. An overview is, of necessity, simplistic. But, as it haunts my mind and colours my perception of the subject, honesty calls for its statement.

A Society Shaped by Mastery of Matter

I have alluded to the seniority of the social sciences. Indeed other fields of knowledge were hardty opened when problems of society, of conflict resolution and human excellence, were deeply discussed in Greece. But the society we live in has not been shaped by a successive development of such concerns. It has arisen from an utterly different source.

In fact our civilization, as it stands in the more advanced countries, is the daughter of the technologies and sciences of matter. (Technologies figure first since to a large degree they preceded the involvement of science.) It seems essential to dwell upon this point because from such fostering arise the features, concrete, psychological, and even intellectual, of the environment within and upon which we must operate.

All civilizations previous to our own were reared upon hegemonic symbiosis: our dominant association with plant and animal life. Not only did plant and animal life provide us with food as they had done from the beginning and still do, but it was from immediate products of life that we drew the great bulk of our raw materials, flax, wool, leather, and above all wood. Animals were our machines for transport and pulling, we had few other machines and little other auxiliary energy.

Going back only three centuries, it is striking to find how large was the use we made of diverse forms of life and their products, how narrow was the use we made of matter, lifeless and not proceeding immediately from life.

Associated logically with this scantiness of use was our scantiness of knowledge. While aware of the great diversity of the forms of life, we were extremely ignorant of the great diversity of the structures of matter and of the various properties attached thereto.

Fantastic progress in the understanding and handling of matter has made the modal way of life in the advanced countries of today utterly different from what it was three centuries ago.³ As the present is an incomparably easier and larger way of life, it is small wonder that we should honour the sciences and technologies that have proved the fount of this improvement and which, moreover, promise ever further improvement. Rightly earned therefore is the primacy granted to the sciences of matter. The only discipline that ranks with them in the new Olympus is medicine, from which we expect long life. Its progress however has been very dependent upon that of physics and chemistry.

Because of this exalted standing of the sciences of matter, it is natural that the social sciences should tend to take them as a model.

But there are great obstacles to making knowledge of society in the image of knowledge of matter, and some serious objections to drawing our inspiration from the latter.

Differences in Knowledge

It is commonly granted that our knowledge of society is less than our knowledge of matter. Our attention will focus upon differences in kind.

Consider the penetrating knowledge our chemists have acquired of the constitution of petroleum, and, to be more specific, of Persian and Iraqi petroleum. What they now know so well is that selfsame naphtha which Pliny mentioned, and of which he stated that 'between Persia and Babylon' there were some fifteen places where its outpouring kept up a ceaseless torch of flames. So here the progress of knowledge is a deep delving into a structure which for some time existed, awaiting our understanding.

Or again let us consider the constitution of atoms, and, to be more specific, of Uranium 235. The structure into which the inquiring mind has so recently achieved penetration has been in existence for millions of years.

Thus the progress of knowledge in the sciences of matter is an ever deeper penetration of the mind into structures unchanged, of which our seekers make successive representative models, ever more adequate.

In contrast, social scientists of our day address themselves to swiftly changing structures. Previous representative models have therefore to be discarded by social scientists, not, as was the case with physical scientists, because these models were inadequate representations of what is, but because they were representations of what is no more. Instead of increasing their mental grasp of states of things that await investigation, they must keep pace with states of affairs that are flowing away.

Even the most elementary social structure, the household, changes, but much less than larger structures; New York City is assuredly not a City in the Aristotelean sense — implying the possibility of frequent assemblies of citizens to make their collective decisions. In the course of a few generations enormous new bodies, the giant corporations, for example, have appeared on the social scene. The mind boggles in seeking to imagine any analogical transformations in the solar or galactic system.

Ongoing metamorphosis makes it very difficult to build an edifice of trustworthy affirmations, such as we have in the physical sciences. Montesquieu (1748) sought the natural laws of society and opened his study with this statement: 'Laws in their widest acceptance are the necessary relations which derive from the nature of things'. But it was then in the nature of things, in the economic realm, that any bulky commerce was bound to the sea or waterways; in the political realm, that a speaker could address no more than the few thousand assembled in a public place, that news travelled only at the speed of sail or horse, that a ruler's vision of the provinces and foreign parts was made up of unequally lagged information.

Just a hundred years separate the Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels, 1848) from The Spirit of the Laws: a century when social transformism is the dominant theme. This is indeed the core of Rousseau's work: he might be called the first of the social evolutionists, and the reaction to his pamphlets served to gel awareness of this phenomenon and to rally enthusiasm for it. Turgot and Bentham are of course positive evolutionists, and the accent becomes one of unbounded enthusiasm in Condorcet, Saint Simon, Comte, whose intellectual tone is akin to that of Beethoven's symphonies. Tocqueville must of course be mentioned. Hegel and Marx add a dialectical twist. It seems unquestionable that social transformism preceded and prepared the transformation of species.

It seems somewhat strange that while the chief social thinkers concentrated on change, neither political science nor economics did. In both these disciplines, right up to the First World War and somewhat beyond, theoretical work consisted mainly in developing the logical consequences of premises laid down in the eighteenth century.

Political science was addicted to Constitutionalism, economics to General Equilibrium, that is to static models. Constitutionalists took no notice of the fact that the typical citizen had ceased to be an independent operator, they did not face the fact that elected representatives were not competent in the more diverse problems accruing to government. General Equilibrium theorists took no notice of the ever-increasing importance of corporations, and in their perfect competition there was no room for capital accumulation from cash-flow. I find it telling that the intention of praising Walras 'highly' has led to calling him 'the Newton of Economics', as if there was some similarity between the changing social system and the solar system; most puzzling is that this form of praise should have been used by Samuelson.

It seems to me that it is only since the Second World War that the attention of the social scientist has been addressed mainly to change —going under the names of growth and development. This has been due in part, and mainly for economics, to the combined impressions made by the Great Depression and the Soviet Five Year Plans, but to a far greater degree and more generally to the notice taken of 'underdevelopment'.

Differences in Thinking

In the previous epoch of the social sciences, there was a pervasive influence of geometric ways of thinking. It is only in the more recent epoch that ways of thinking learned from the sciences of nature have been embraced with enthusiasm.

The very terms growth and development denote a reference to living organisms: the comparison of society with an organism was of course the great theme of Durkheim, and, before him, of Thomas Huxley. While there may be some uses for this analogy, carefully handled, it is undoubtedly bad and misleading to assume that each and every society is just the same organism at different degrees of development: as Chesterton would say, it is wrong to regard a lamb as an underdeveloped tiger - an image which incidentally leads us to stress that every organism has its appointed terminus ad quem, which is not the case with societies, and the present lamb may evolve into something better than either a sheep or a tiger.

It is, however, only in more general terms that the social sciences refer to the sciences of life: their methods have been derived from the sciences of matter.

Knowledge of die different forms of matter is basically knowledge of their properties, according to which they respond to different contacts or treatments. Forms of matter are wholly lawful objects, whereby I mean that objects of a given category cannot fail to respond all in the same way and always in the same way to the same contact or treatment. If sulphur fails to turn into sulphuric acid, then it is not sulphur: but shall we say that if a dog fails to respond to the whistle, then it is not a dog? As we move from forms of matter to higher and higher forms of life, we encounter increasingly irregular forms of behaviour.

How then can we apply in the social sciences the ways of thinking developed in the sciences of matter, which we have come to equate with the scientific method? There is safety in numbers: aggregate behaviour of sets or subsets offers a reassuring consistency and allows us to tie it by regular relationships with other factors. This practice has been developed with considerable success in economics, where indeed Tinbergen, as early as 1938, built an overall model of the economy consisting in a system of equations tying together a diversity of variables each representative of an aspect of aggregate behaviour. In this vision each of several aspects of behaviour, pertaining to overlapping sets of actors, is, so to speak, 'objectified'.

While economists could find regularity of response (lawfulness in the sense indicated above) only at a certain level of aggregation, it was comforting to them to learn that physicists discovered unlawfulness by reaching down well beneath the level at which forms of matter had been previously apprehended. However I cannot identify the individuality of human actions that depart from the average with the randomness of Brownian motion. On the one hand we are dealing with randomness and entropy, on the other with liberty that can be conducive to change.

And indeed here myths come to mind, which put chaos at the beginning of things, then order coming out of chaos, and then initiative with its attendant uncertainties. But let us leave this suggestion for further consideration.

We must go on from economics to other social sciences where the same effort has been made to find lawfulness at the level of some aggregates. Thus political scientists have sought to tie the aggregates of voting behaviour to social status: they have met with incomplete success. But political science has also shown that quite small ...