Freedom from Value Judgments: Value-Free Social Science and Objectivity in Germany, 1880-1914
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Freedom from Value Judgments: Value-Free Social Science and Objectivity in Germany, 1880-1914 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Spadafora, Andrew Jeffrey. 2013. Freedom from Value Judgments: Value-Free Social Science and Objectivity in Germany, 1880-1914. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10947518 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2013 Andrew Jeffrey Spadafora All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Peter Gordon Andrew Jeffrey Spadafora Freedom from Value Judgments: Value-Free Social Science and Objectivity in Germany, 1880-1914 Abstract This dissertation addresses a central issue in the methodological debates that raged in the German academy around the turn of the twentieth century. The idea of “value-free” social science, or “value-freedom,” was passed down to subsequent decades as a way of thinking about the objectivity of knowledge, but because of its name it has been widely misunderstood. Moreover, it has been seen either as a clever invention of the polymath scholar Max Weber, or as some form of ideology masquerading as neutrality (or both). Instead, a contextually sensitive historical analysis of the work of five German and Austrian scholars—Carl Menger, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Jellinek, Hermann Kantorowicz, and Gustav Radbruch—demonstrates that value-freedom was a complex doctrine with widely ramified sources in the intellectual history of economics, sociology, and law. It was accepted on a variety of grounds and by individuals of differing personalities, politics, philosophical training, and academic disciplines. “Value-free” social science in the work of these men meant anything but the removal of values from scholarly consideration. Instead, its advocates promoted a focus on the subjectivity and the will of the individual, goal-directed agent. Value-freedom took the form of several interrelated distinctions, between theory and practice, fact and value, “is” and “ought,” means and ends; but each of these scholars coupled his preferred formulation with the shared view that human values are incapable of rational justification. They insisted on the importance of the analytical separation of the positive and normative but recognized a legitimate role for the social sciences in the positive discussion of values. However, the attempt to bridge the subjective world of human values and the objective world of social scientific fact foundered for most of them on the inherently subjective choices made by the individual scholar, leading them to face the possibility that value-freedom could not provide a successful theory of objectivity without reformulation. The dissertation spans three decades and several disciplines, including the work of important jurists whose social scientific credentials have been neglected owing to their disciplinary backgrounds. iii Contents Acknowledgements v Chapter 1: Introduction: Value Freedom and Objectivity in Max Weber’s Germany 1 Part I. Economics and Sociology Chapter 2: “Ethical” Political Economy and “Value-Free” Economics in the Era of the of the Methodenstreit: The German Historical School and Carl Menger 41 Chapter 3: Ferdinand Tönnies on the Subjectivity of Values and “Value-Free” Science 146 Part II. Law Chapter 4: Law as “Value-Free” Social Science: Georg Jellinek and Hermann Kantorowicz 213 Chapter 5: Gustav Radbruch and Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Law 299 Chapter 6: Conclusion 355 Bibliography 359 iv Acknowledgements I wish to express to the adviser of this dissertation, Peter Gordon, my grateful appreciation for his guidance, encouragement, and counsel throughout this project. I am also thankful for the support, assistance, and suggestions of the other readers of the dissertation, David Blackbourn and Emma Rothschild. These members of the Harvard History Department have helped me to see my way toward a doctoral dissertation project that could be successfully accomplished, and they have provided me with many insights and saved me from many errors along the way. Needless to say, the faults that remain in this dissertation are my own. The library-based research for this project was largely carried out at the incomparable Harvard University Libraries, and occasionally at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In Germany, archival research at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, the Universitätsarchiv of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau, the Universitätsbibliothek of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg, the Schleswig- Holsteinische Landesbibliothek in Kiel, and the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz was carried out with the support of fellowships from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, for which I am grateful. I owe appreciation to an array of German librarians and curators for their assistance in gaining access to under-appreciated and under-utilized manuscript materials, and for in a few instances helping me puzzle out some very bad late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German handwriting. To my parents, Carolyn and David Spadafora, to my sister Claire Spadafora, and to Maggie Schallau, I owe more than I can hope to express here. Their enduring personal support has maintained me throughout the challenging years of this project, and their love remains the center of my life. Cambridge, Massachusetts May 16, 2013 v Chapter 1. Introduction: Value-Freedom and Objectivity in Max Weber’s Germany This is a study of a badly named but highly influential concept. In the course of the twentieth century, many European and especially American practitioners of social science who were concerned to justify the objectivity of their work began to refer to it as “value-free.”1 Although never lacking critics, the term gained popularity among practicing social and natural scientists and even among philosophers of science in the two decades after the Second World War, and the ostensible idea behind it achieved a kind of commonsense status.2 Like many terms that suddenly enjoy a vogue, the predicate “value-free” was not given a rigorous definition, but its meaning seemed readily apparent. The social or natural sciences would reach the desired “objective” status when practicing scientists3 had suitably excluded their values from their analyses and proceeded to deal solely with the facts they were endeavoring to explain. Or so it appeared. Of course, the complete removal of values from any science, let alone from social science, was impossible; anyone claiming to be a practitioner of “value-free” social science in this commonsense understanding of the term was mistaken. For as a wide body of philosophical literature has shown in the subsequent decades, it is not possible even for natural scientists to set their values aside completely. At a minimum, those that came to be known as 1 See the essays on particular social science disciplines in Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), e.g. Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” 217-218; James Farr, “Political Science,” 316-318; Robert C. Bannister, “Sociology,” 335, 346; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 429. 2 On the postwar history of the idea, principally from a philosophy of science perspective, see Heather E. Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 46-65. 3 Throughout this dissertation, the words “science” and “scientist” are used as translations of the German Wissenschaft and Wissenschaftler, to indicate an “organized body of knowledge” and the scholars who produce it, rather than according to the common English meaning of “natural science” or “natural scientist.” Science and scholarship are treated as synonyms. This usage is purely for purposes of convenience and does not imply any identification of the social sciences with the natural sciences. 1 “epistemic” or “cognitive” values, such as “accuracy, consistency, predictive and explanatory scope, simplicity and fruitfulness in generating research puzzles…, instrumental efficacy… or ‘prediction and control,’… [a] high degree of falsifiability,” and many others, were necessary to determine what counted as an effective theory.4 A chorus of critics has argued, often plausibly, that even this distinction between epistemic values internal to the sciences on the one hand, and personal or social values on the other, is impossible to draw consistently.5 The philosopher Hilary Putnam offers an important case in point. His work contends that the concept of a clear-cut dichotomy or dualism (as opposed to a softer “distinction”) between the categories of “fact” and “value,” which lies at the heart of the “value-free” science ideal, is not justifiable, owing especially to linguistic and epistemic considerations. The “practices of scientific inquiry upon which we rely to decide what is and what is not fact, suppose values.” Because an “enormous amount of our descriptive vocabulary” is necessarily “entangled” with our values, description and