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Some Facts About Values
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
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Leading articles in both the current issue of APSR (Winter 1969–70) and of PS (Fall 1969) attack an identical quotation from my chapter in “The Public and the Polity” in Contemporary Political Science. In reply to Professor Sheldon Wolin's article in APSR, I wrote a short reply for he clearly misinterpreted the quotation in an otherwise serious article. Professor Surkin's piece, “Sense and Non-sense in Politics” in PS frustrates all my attempts at a short reply, for the issue is not the text of a particular quotation that has become a minor cause célebre, but rather the central thesis of his article that is in error. His is an error that has become sufficiently widely diffused these days that it needs a serious reply.
The issue is the role of value judgments in political science. The common error is the assertion that modern political science has been non-normative and value-free, or at least has aimed at being so. The statement is usually made in criticism of so-called behavioral political science and in favor of a supposed post-behavioral revolution, which is alleged to be seeking a new concern for relevance. Professor Surkin's article is a particular variant on that theme. He states that his purpose is to show that a particular social science methodology, namely, “claimed objectivity and value neutrality” leads to a “non-objective role for social science knowledge in the service of the dominant institutions in American society”. Here is an important set of allegations.
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- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1970
References
1 I have analyzed Lasswell's, Harold concerns with the social and moral significance of content analysis in “Content Analysis and the Intelligence Function: in Arnold Rogow,” ed. Politics and Personality in Social Science in the 20th Century Google Scholar.
2 White, L. D., ed., The Future of Government in the United States: Essays in Honor of Merriam, Charles E. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942)Google Scholar; reprinted in Lasswell, R. D., The Analysis of Political Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 1 Google Scholar, and “The Relation of Ideological Intelligence of Public Policy,” Ethics, 53 (1942): 27 Google Scholar; reprinted in Lasswell, , Analysis ot Political Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 122 Google Scholar.
3 Lasswell, Harold D., ed., Language of Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), p. 51 Google Scholar.
4 Of course a logical distinction of this sort is not to be confused with a differentiation in natural language. The meaning of any statement in natural language is a confused mixture of statements of various sorts arising from the multiple denotative meanings of words, their connotations, accent, emphasis, context, and sheer ambiguity. Thus the statement “Americans love apple pie” may be a pure report of facts drawn from a dietetic survey or if said by an American in an affective context it may be a normative expression of identification, or in many cases it may be a little of each in some indeterminate ratio.
5 Many scientists, of course, make sharp distinctions between their thoughtful and critical behavior in the laboratory and their behavior in such other realms as religion and politics. There is no a priori reason why a man's values should be maintained consistently across these different realms of life. One cannot exclude either the empirical existence of or the normative validity of such disjointed ways of life. Nonetheless, there is some psychological congruity between liberal values in general and the kind of scientific liberalism involved in being willing to listen to evidence and accept the conclusions on the basis of the evidence. It is therefore, understandable that most scientists in most societies tend (with many obvious exceptions) to a generally liberal persuasion.
6 The Persuasive Neutralists are supposed to be at the opposite end of some scale from the New Mandarins, yet I as the ostensible representative of the latter, can find nothing in the extensive quotations from Heinz Eulau, the ostensible representative of the former, with which I'm not in 100% agreement.