Essays in the Theory of Society

Ralf Dahrendorf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000532760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1968, these ten essays by one of Europe's leading sociological theorists deal with important issues on the borderline between sociology and social philosophy and demonstrate the author's deep insight into history and political analysis. The author maintains that the structures of power in which the political process takes place not only originate change and give it direction, but also produce the fertile conflicts that give expression to the fundamental uncertainty of human existence. Through an examination of various concepts inherent in this dynamic process – power, resistance, conflict, change, freedom, uncertainty – a coherent theory of society emerges.

1 Values and Social Science

The Value Dispute in Perspective

A dramatic chapter in the history of German social science reached its climax on January 5, 1914, in Berlin, at a meeting of the enlarged committee of the Verein für Sozialpolitik.¹ The circumstances of this meeting were strange enough. Before the discussion began, the more than fifty participants passed a number of resolutions that in themselves would have sufficed to ensure their meeting a place in history and legend: they sent the stenographers home, ruled any taking of minutes out of order, formally vowed to disclose nothing about the proceedings to any nonparticipant, and forbade publication of the written papers that had been submitted by eminent scholars as a basis for discussion. The fears that probably gave rise to this secrecy proved justified. The discussion ended in a passionate clash of convictions and personalities, a clash that divided German social scientists into two groups for years and in some respects divides them to the present day. The subject that led to such extraordinary measures and results was precisely the subject of these reflections: values and social science.

¹ This “Association for Social Policy,” which had been founded in 1872, was in fact the professional organization of social scientists; it subsequently became, and is today, the German Economics Association. In its early years, it was dominated by the intellectuals who originated and supported Bismarck’s welfare state policies. For a detailed history of the Verein, see Franz Boese (6).

Even now it is difficult to reconstruct in detail the prehistory and history of the memorable Werturteilsstreit (as the Value Dispute was called at the time), and impossible to do so without taking sides. Whatever one may think about the feasibility and desirability of a value-free social science, the subject of value-free science itself cannot, it appears, be discussed in a value-free, or even dispassionate, manner. So far as the historical Value Dispute is concerned, we know that from the beginning of the century on, the question of the place of “value judgments” in social science arose with increasing frequency and intensity in the debates of the Verein für So-zialpolitik. When in 1904 Edgar Jaffe, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber took over as editors of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, they published in their first issue a statement of policy that said, among other things: “Inevitably, problems of social policy will... find expression in the columns of this journal... alongside those of social science. But we would not dream of pretending that such discussions can be described as ’science,’ and we shall see to it that they are not confused with it.” (24: 157.)

This statement was meant to be polemical, and in fact constituted an outright attack on the prevailing mood of the Verein and its then almost undisputed head, Gustav Schmoller. It was Schmoller who had prescribed for the “science of economics” not merely the tasks “of explaining individual phenomena by their causes, of helping us understand the course of economic development, and if possible of predicting the future,” but also that of “recommending” certain “economic measures” as “ideals” (23: 77). At the very next meeting of the Verein, the Mannheim meeting of 1905, a violent exchange on this issue took place between Schmoller and Weber, which led to the characterization of Weber and others as a “radical left wing” and had other lasting consequences. A few years later, in 1909, the “radical left wing” founded the German Sociological Society, whose 1910 statutes stated in no uncertain terms: “It is the purpose [of the Society] to advance sociological knowledge by undertaking purely scientific investigations and surveys, and by publishing and supporting purely scientific studies.... It rejects all concern with practical (ethical, religious, political, esthetic, etc.) goals of any kind.” (8: v.)

In order to make clear the polemical nature of this paragraph, and of the founding of the German Sociological Society as such, the explicit reference to the Verein in the report of the Society’s executive committee at its second meeting in 1912 was hardly needed: “In contrast to the Verein für Sozialpolitik, whose very purpose is to make propaganda for certain ideals, our purpose has nothing to do with propaganda, but is exclusively one of objective research.” (9:78.) Indeed, the founding charter of the Verein für Sozialpolitik had included such goals as “supporting the prosperous development” of industry, “stimulating timely, well-considered state intervention to protect the just interests of all participants” in the economy, and helping to accomplish “the supreme tasks of our time and our nation.” (6: 248ff.) Despite the controversy, however, the “pure scientists” remained members of the Verein; indeed, they were the ones who proposed, in a circular letter of November 12, the explicit discussion of value judgments that turned into the Value Dispute. “To lay the groundwork for the meeting, the letter listed four topics for discussion: (1) the position of moral value judgments in scientific economics; (2) the relation of economic development to value judgments; (3) the determination of the goals of economic and social policy; and (4) the relation of general methodological principles to the particular requirements of academic teaching.” (6: 145.)

In accordance with the proposal set forth in the letter, a number of members wrote “position papers” on the four topics to be discussed. The authors of these statements included Franz Eulenburg, Wilhelm Oncken, Joseph Schumpeter, Othmar Spann, Eduard Spranger, Max Weber, and Leopold von Wiese—to mention but a few of the most important names. At Schmoller’s suggestion, the meeting took place on January 5, 1914, in the conspiratorial atmosphere described above, which was intended (in the words of a partisan, pro-Schmoller report written in 1939 by Franz Boese, then secretary of the Verein) “to preserve the wholly intimate character of the discussion, and also to make sure that the expected differences of opinion would not be used by outsiders against the Verein or against science.” (6: 147.) After that, passion held sway: Weber and Sombart on one side, Karl Grunberg and the majority of those present on the other, clashed violently, until in the end—to quote Boese’s report again—Weber “once again rose to deliver a weighty statement, which, without mincing words, informed his opponents that they did not understand what he (Weber) was talking about,” whereupon he “angrily” left the meeting (6: 147).

If we can trust such reports as we have, the Value Dispute ended with the clear “defeat” of the “pure scientists.” Even seven years later, after the First World War and Weber’s death, Paul Honigs-heim observed somewhat apologetically: “Of all the things Max Weber did, said, and wrote, nothing has been as much talked about, commented on, misunderstood, and laughed off as his doctrine of a value-free approach in sociology.” (13: 35.) But the “victory” of the “social politicians” proved ephemeral. The development of social science since the Value Dispute has been, in the words of the German economist Karl Schiller, a continuous “retreat from subjective value-tables to the toolbox” (22: 19). Indeed, it would seem that the relative strengths of the two parties to the debate have been reversed, so that today the defenders of a combination of values and social science feel themselves in the minority, and the “radical left wing” of our own day would be more likely to advance, at least in discussions of methodology, a position nearer Schmol-ler’s.² Despite the duration and the undiminished intensity of the dispute, however, many of the questions underlying it have been repressed rather than resolved, with the result that they still require elucidation.

² The “conservatism-radicalism” debate is the main concern of American sociologists today; for a balanced, if partisan, discussion, see Jürgen Habermas, “Kritische und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie” (1). A more general account of the state of the value debate can be found in the proceedings of the German Sociological Society meeting on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Weber’s birth, in 1964 (see 10).

II

It would be wrong to describe the Value Dispute of 1914 as a matter of a few individuals. Yet its course was determined primarily by the one man with whose name it is today inseparably linked and for whom it was more than a scholarly debate: I mean, of course, Max Weber. The polemical statement quoted from the Ar-chiv für Sozialwissenschaft, the profound differences with Schmoller, the founding of a German Sociological Society with statutes stressing the need for “pure science,” the report of this Society’s executive committee at its second meeting, the suggestion that an open debate be held in the Verein für Sozialpolitik—all this was Weber’s work. In his essays, collected later under the title Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, and even more vividly in his famous Munich lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” the intensity and passion of the bitter struggle to establish a value-free social science come to life. Weber took sides on the question that interests us here; he did so more radically than anyone else. For that very reason it seems useful to relate the following considerations, explicitly or implicitly, above all to Max Weber.

We are concerned here not with reawakening old passions, but with reformulating the relationship between social science and value judgments and essaying a few general propositions. We shall try especially to distinguish between the various aspects of this problem, which were all too often badly confused in the heat of the dispute fifty years ago. In doing so we shall have to distinguish questions that permit of analytic solutions from others that by their very nature allow plausible, perhaps convincing, but in the last analysis only personal answers. Weber called his position paper for the Value Dispute (reworked in 1917 for publication) “The Meaning of ‘Value-free’ in the Sociological and Economic Sciences.” More precisely, we have to ask: What is the legitimate place of value judgments in sociology? Where must they be eliminated from scientific sociology, and how is this to be done? Where, how, and to what extent may value judgments exert their influence without endangering the goals and results of scientific research? Where might it indeed be necessary to abandon Weber’s rigid insistence on value-free scholarship?

Even Weber complained that “interminable misunderstandings, and above all terminological (thus wholly sterile) disputes, have arisen over the term Value judgment,’ which obviously do not contribute anything at all to the substance of the problem.” (24: 485.) It seems indeed possible to set out—without extensive discussion— with the notion that value judgments are statements about what ought or ought not to happen, what is or is not desired, in the world of human action. Weber’s definition seems useful: “By Valuation’ we shall understand the ‘practical’ rejection or approval of a phenomenon capable of being influenced by our actions.” (24: 475.) It seems obvious, moreover, that any such value judgment, any statement that concerns a practical obligation, includes assumptions that are neither verifiable nor falsifiable by observable facts. In other words, value judgments cannot be derived from scientific insights.³ The assertions of social science and value judgments may legitimately be seen as two distinct types of statement. We may ask, therefore, at which points in the sociologist’s research he encounters value judgments, and how he should act in these encounters. If with this question in mind we follow the steps in the process of acquiring knowledge in social science, it seems to me that we find six points at which value judgments are an issue. A consideration of these six points may help to advance the discussion of a value-free sociology beyond its explosive and unsatisfactory state at the end of the Werturteilsstreit.

³ “Critical theorists,” i.e., sociologists with a Hegelian bent, prefer to be somewhat vague on this point, because they do not want to admit the possibility of a positive science without critical detachment (see Habermas, 1: 244). But even by these theorists the basic distinction between the “affirmative” and “critical” functions of science is not really denied.

III

Scientific inquiry begins, at least in temporal terms, with the choice of a subject, and it is here that we find the first possible encounter between social science and value judgments. That the process of inquiry begins with the choice of a subject is rather a trivial statement; but if we advance one step further and ask on what basis a scholar chooses the themes of his research, we have left the realm of triviality. A sociologist may be interested in, say, “the position of the industrial worker in modern society” for many different reasons. Perhaps he merely believes that this is the subject to which he can contribute most. Perhaps he regards it as a neglected subject, one whose study may help to close gaps in our knowledge. He may have a research grant from an institute or foundation requiring him to work on the subject. Possibly he hopes to provide materials for political action to remedy a social injustice. Not all these motives (and there may be many others) involve value judgments, but some do; and the example is routine enough to make it clear that value judgments are often a factor in choosing a subject. Can or must such value judgments be eliminated? What is their place at this point in a sociological inquiry?

The first, and broader, of these questions is easily answered. Let us assume that four different scholars, each guided by a different one of the four motives mentioned, begin to investigate “the position of the industrial worker in modern society,” and further that this subject has been defined precisely, so that we may reasonably describe the four men as investigating the same thing. Obviously all four may come up with the same results, and so indeed they should if they follow the rules of empirical social science. But in this event the reasons influencing their choice of subject have no effect on their findings. Clearly, then, the choice of subject is made in what may be called the antechamber of science, where the sociologist is still free from the rules of procedure that will later govern his research. It is probably unrealistic to insist that value judgments be eliminated from the choice of subjects; in any case it is quite unnecessary, since the reason why a subject is regarded as worth investigating is irrelevant in principle to its scientific treatment.

This conclusion is by no means new or exciting; long ago Weber rightly dismissed as a “false objection” the claim that the choice of subjects involves a value judgment. But we may still ask whether or not value judgments should govern the choice of subjects for sociological research; in other words, whether fruitful scholarship does not in fact require that the choice of subjects be based on certain values. The answer to this question, whether affirmative or negative, does not of course affect our first conclusion. To stay with our metaphor, we are concerned now with the laws, if any, of the antechamber of science, laws that by definition bear no relation to the laws of science itself.

Time a...