Reinhard Bendix, associate professor of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley, here examines perhaps the most basic and significant of the assumptions that guide work in the social sciences, or in any other intellectual discipline: the image of man in the mind of the scientist or scholar—for it is in terms of this image that he chooses his problems, decides how he is to work, formulates his conclusions, and determines to whom he is to address them. Mr. Bendix opens this broad question for discussion; we hope others will follow.
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A paradox rends the social sciences today. Two contradictory views of the nature of man are asserted simultaneously. On the one hand, we are told that it is possible to know and understand more and more about the nature of man and society, for man to use this increasing body of knowledge and theory to improve his condition, to reduce unhappiness and poverty, and to increase the joy and fullness of life. On the other hand, modern social science teaches us to regard man as a creature of his drives, habits, and social roles, in whose behavior reason and choice play no decisive part. Accordingly, man’s efforts to acquire knowledge about himself and society, and to use such knowledge, are beset with insuperable obstacles; men are regarded as unable to achieve objective knowledge or to be guided by it.
Of course, social scientists do not often hold either of these positions in so bold a form. Most of them gravitate to some compromise when they have occasion to reflect on the larger implications of their disciplines. Sometimes the belief in mass education—in which the social sciences are assigned a major role—is stressed; this implies that all men are capable in some measure of guiding their actions by the use of their rational faculties. At present, a more popular resolution of the dilemma is the attitude that some men are rational, but most men are not; and that the few can use their knowledge for the benefit of the many.
Despite such practical compromises the paradox remains, and the questions raised still need examination. Can reason direct human behavior? Is only a small elite capable of being guided by reason? Must the great masses of men be manipulated by elites for their own good? How can we expand the role of reason in human affairs? In the absence of answers to these questions we are left uncertain as to the future of the social sciences. Do the social scientists propose to increase the role of reason in Everyman’s guidance of his own destiny and human affairs generally? Or do they propose to expand the knowledge possessed by an elite as to the manipulation and control of the mass of the unreasonable? One view of man’s nature would logically lead us to take the first course; the other would require us to take the second. No more important task faces the social sciences today than to determine by which “image of man” they are to be led.
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Oddly enough, these two opposing views stem from one and the same source: the three-hundred-year-old effort to determine both the limits and the power of reason in the control of nature and human affairs.
During the 17th and 18th centuries men were inspired by a belief in human reason and human perfectibility. Steeped in theological traditions, they assumed that God, in establishing an orderly universe, had endowed man’s intellect with the ability to comprehend it. To understand the laws of nature meant the possibility of controlling the forces of nature. And it seemed logical to infer that the same might be true for society.
This view was given classic expression by Francis Bacon. It seemed obvious to him that the knowledge accumulated by the proper use of reason would always be of value to mankind. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced.” Men must guard against “deliberate and factitious despair, which cuts the sinews and spur of industry . . . all for the miserable vainglory of making it believed that whatever has not yet been discovered and comprehended can never be discovered and comprehended hereafter.”
Bacon applied his view of knowledge to the study of nature; the philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Diderot, Holbach, and Helvetius, applied it to the study of society. In applying to social affairs Bacon’s faith in man’s ability to acquire and use knowledge, these philosophers took for granted something that has since become less certain. Not only scientists or scholars but all men were believed capable of using scientific knowledge for a control of nature. Hence, in developing a science of society, the philosophers of the Enlightenment turned their attention to devising ways by which all men could be educated to control the forces of society. They believed that education would dispel prejudice, replace ignorance, and permit men to act rationally in human affairs. Acting within this tradition, for example, Jefferson gave education a central role in his hopes for an American democracy.
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Karl Marx challenged the Enlightenment’s view on both these points: he denied that knowledge was sufficient to redirect society, and that human minds could be opened to reason simply by education. With this challenge, he became the fount of one of the mainstreams of modern social science.
Marx was, of course, not the first to question the role of knowledge in society, nor was he the first to show the distorting influence that self-interest can have on our attitude towards human affairs. Previous writers had doubted the feasibility of a rational social order, and many had shown how self-interest leads to bias and prejudice in social thought. But in Marx’s view the role of ideas in society and the influence of self-interest on ideas become of overriding importance. To him the content of human history consisted in a series of class struggles, and ideas about society provided the contending classes with arsenals of symbols (ideologies) with which to fight each other. In this view, every idea was involved in this struggle and either intentionally obscured or—if analyzed as an ideology—unintentionally revealed certain aspects of society . .
Marx’s attitude towards human ideas and human rationality was basically skeptical. Yet Marx was not without hope. He made a heroic effort to regard man’s reason as a constructive force in human history, and he believed ideas were exempt in two important ways from the distortions created by the class struggle.
First, he believed there was a way by which men could surmount their class-conditioned ideologies and be induced to submit to reason. They would do so when the social conditions (i.e. the class struggle) which had led to these ideologies were radically altered. In a classless society, in the absence of human misery and human exploitation, men would be able to see and understand society as it really was; they would have a perfect insight into the laws of social life, and in obeying these laws they would experience the ultimate freedom of controlling the forces of society deliberately.
Second, Marx believed that even before the advent of this future society, while humanity was still in the period of capitalism, there would be some men (like Marx, for example) who, having attained a “premature” scientific knowledge of their society, would not have their understanding limited by class interest: “. . . In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution . . . within the old society assumes such a violent glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, that class that holds the future in its hands. . . . A portion of the bourgeois ideologists (in particular) have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” (The Communist Manifesto.`)
Marx’s critique of human reason thus aimed ultimately at an enhancement of reason. While exploring the many ways in which class interest turns social thought into an apology for things as they are, he was yet confident in his own ability to see through this deception, and he believed that some “bourgeois ideologists,” at first, and the masses of the working people, later, would see through it as well. With all his deep insight into the abuse of “knowledge” in society, he still believed that man could use knowledge to improve his condition.
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This belief was shared by another thinker who has had an enormous influence on modern social science, Sigmund Freud. If Marx questioned the meaning of ideas apart from the material interests and actions of men, Freud questioned their meaning apart from individual strivings and emotions. The ideas and actions of an individual make sense in Freudian terms only when we see them in the context of a man’s personal history. Every man seeks to increase pleasure and avoid pain; pleasure and pain are conceived as strictly organic, bodily experiences, and the most fundamental instinct around which they revolve is sex. Ideas, scientific research, artistic creations—in a word, all man’s intellectual endeavors—can be analyzed as products of the psychosexual life history of the thinker involved. And since, by definition, these activities yield less pleasure than the direct gratification of our instinctual drives, men create culture at the price of sexual renunciation and sexual frustration.
This appears an even more skeptical view of the value of man’s intellectual efforts, yet Freud by no means called for the abandonment of substitute gratifications (or sublimation). Rather, he hoped that man would be made happier in his renunciation of instinctual pleasure by a further expansion of reason; where the renunciation had been unconscious and led to torment, it was now to be made in the full light of intelligence and rendered harmless or at least manageable. In hoping for the psychological improvement of the individual, Freud assigned to human reason an important role. When a patient is accepted for treatment in psychoanalytic therapy, he is warned that analysis is arduous in terms of time and expense and that the emotional demands to be made upon him will be severe. But once the patient is accepted, then the success of his treatment depends upon his ability to utilize his rational insight into the origin of his present emotional difficulties. Thus psychoanalysis does take its stand on the side of human improvement through reason, however heavy may be its emphasis on the power of organic drives and on the relative weakness of human intelligence. Under favorable circumstances man is judged to be capable of assessing his personal history, and of reshaping his personal life on the basis of that assessment. To be sure, psychoanalytic therapy is by no means a purely rational process on the part of the patient; but the end product is a rational being.
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Marx and Freud contributed to the destruction of the 18th-century belief in human reason and perfectibility. Yet, as we have said, they did not argue that reasoning was altogether futile or that improvement was unattainable. Knowledge or reason, they agreed, are greatly hampered by human interests and personal emotions; to the extent that they demonstrated this, “knowledge” is often less “objective” than men believed. Marx and Freud did not fully share the Baconian and Enlightenment belief that “human knowledge and power meet in one.” Yet, despite this insight, they were confident that some men could attain an objective knowledge of man and history and that the scientific knowledge of the few would in the long run benefit the many. Their qualified optimism effected a compromise that combined a faith in the intelligence of the many with the conviction that, under present circumstances, there are only a few who are able to free human understanding of the distortion which results from its involvement with group interests and individual emotion.
Social scientists by and large have since, so it seems, departed from this compromise view. They are indebted to Marx and Freud for deep insights into the conditioned nature of man’s quest for knowledge. But they have also gone beyond them by discarding the belief that all men have a common capacity for reason and rational action, either now or in the future.
Marx’s view that ideas are embedded in self-interest and social action, taken out of the context of his philosophy of history, has come to mean that any idea must be misleading, any statement must be false, when its speaker or writer represents an interest group. And in assuming that the ideas of a man have no meaning apart from his actions and interests, these contemporary interpretations of Marx show little concern with the “abstract” meaning of the ideas a person expresses. They are concerned instead with learning who his friends are and how his ideas undermine the position of his enemies. This might be called the “pigeonhole theory of truth.” The content of a statement is examined in terms of whether its source commends or condemns it.1
And for every idea discredited by identification with an interest group, there is another that is not taken seriously because it is “emotionally biased.” This might be called the “poker-face theory of truth.” To find the “true” meaning of an idea, we need to ask, not “What did he say?” but “Why did he say it?” Thus only a man who can keep a straight face while telling an outrageous lie has a chance of escaping this inquisition into his motives. For the motives of a man become immediately suspect when he reveals that his emotions are deeply involved with the ideas he expresses.2
But once we judge what a man says according to who his friends are, we need think of him no longer as a person but only as a member of his group. And if a person is judged in terms of his suspected motives, what he says is. no longer important, and “verbalization” becomes “only” the surface manifestation of his subconscious. Reason, and efforts at reason, are thereby depreciated.
These vulgarizations have had a profound impact on the contemporary image of man, and particularly on the image of man in the social sciences. To go from Marx and Freud to the positions held in the social sciences to day takes only a short step: it involves simply the abandonment of the residual hope for the governance of men by their rational faculties which Marx and Freud permitted themselves.
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Yet is it not also true that the belief in science is stronger today than ever before? Would so many research projects be undertaken if those who initiated them did not believe that the findings produced would result in greater human happiness? And, indeed, most social scientists today believe that they are the true heirs of the 18th century, and are still loyal to its belief in reason and human perfectibility.
But I think that they have deceived themselves. I believe that a faith in science has superseded the earlier faith in reason.
What is the content of this faith in science, and how does it differ from the earlier faith in reason? Modern social scientists believe that economic interests and traditional beliefs, emotions and cultural conditions, distort our understanding. They no longer believe that men can rid their minds of these impediments to lucid thought: only scientists can. Social scientists have become persuaded of the ingrained irrationality of the many, and their own work repeatedly demonstrates to them how difficult it is—even for the expert—to attain objectivity. Their more intensive knowledge of the fallibility of human reason, which is itself an outgrowth of modern social science, leads many social scientists to accept as inevitable an unbridgeable gulf between themselves and the public at large. They assert that there is only one escape from the consequences of irrationality: that is by the application of scientific method. And this method can be used effectively only by the expert few. Research has revealed the many obstacles to understanding among the mass of men. Hence social scientists are less concerned today with improving the understanding of the mass of men, and they are more intent on insuring the objectivity of their own practices. This they do by the use of specific techniques: pre-testing of questionnaires, random sampling, calculation of standard errors, and so on.
The danger of this position is that the social scientists, in their concern to be objective or scientific, run the risk of losing perspective with regard to the ends of their knowledge. That danger is present, in one form, wherever social scientists shy away from a discussion of questions (such as those concerning the purpose of social science) to which the answers must remain tentative and unverified. If the only way to achieve understanding is marked out by the scientific method, and if that method is only accessible to the expert few, then the belief in the intelligence of all men is in effect abandoned. Instead of attempting to make people more rational, contemporary social scientists often content themselves with asking of them that they place their trust in social science and accept its findings. If people do this they will presumably put themselves on safe and sure ground and become free from bias, event though they cannot share in the inquiry that leads to knowledge, and will therefore remain ignorant of the premises and facts upon which it is based.
Inevitably, the methods of research in the social sciences are difficult to handle and equally difficult to explain in short order, and this was bound to alienate the social scientist from the public to some extent: so in speaking of the effects of the social scientist’s faith in science, we do not refer to his need to use technical tools. However, the social scientists also draw, from their faith in science, the conclusion that the social scientists must serve as instruments of the civil (or other) authorities, whoever they may be. This startling conclusion—expressed clearly in Alexander Leighton’s Human Relations in a Changing World (Dutton, 1949)—is, as we may see in Leighton’s book and elsewhere, the clear result of the belief that the social sciences as sciences must play the leading role in solving our social problems. For if we believe they must play this role as science, that is, as tools, rather than as means whereby men in general may be made more rational, as earlier social scientists believed, then we can only conclude that the contemporary social scientist should confine himself to a study of the facts pertinent to an implementation of policies, and not make suggestions of policies themselves; this is his duty as a value-free scientist, and it harms his science to do more. But further, to gain the material support necessary to expand social science as science—and this expansion, to the mind of the social scientist, also means an inevitable improvement in the condition of mankind—the social scientist must gain the support of the man of affairs. And how can he do this but by convincing the man of affairs that his work holds out promise of greater success in the conscious manipulation of social forces and of the “mass mind”?
Thus, beginning with the age-old belief in the liberating power of knowledge and reason, social scientists end up by becoming protagonists of a neutral social science which will facilitate the manipulation of social forces and of the general population, regardless of who does the manipulating and for what purpose. In their eagerness to make the social sciences more scientific, social scientists persuade others and themselves that human advancement is identical with the advancement of scientific knowledge—with their scientific knowledge.
As a result, social scientists have often become less concerned with the use to which their knowledge is put than with the question whether that use is compatible with the further development of social science. They emphasize that everything must be done to persuade policy makers that they should use the social sciences, and the problems to be investigated are often selected so as to demonstrate the usefulness or the scientific rigor of the social sciences to the political leader or administrator.
The most striking development in this respect is the increased role of the foundations and the diminished importance of university scholars. The external reason for this shift is, of course, financial, but the question is pertinent whether the allocation of large sums by foundation executives will not undermine the independent judgment of the individual social scientist with regard to what he regards as significant. Instances are known in which large funds have been allocated to a university department, not because the department but because the foundation wanted to emphasize a certain field of research. Individual social scientists have been more or less permanently diverted from their original research interests, simply because they did not resist the temptation of funds which were available for other projects.
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Some thirty years ago Max Weber addressed this question of the meaning of science in his lecture, “Science as a Vocation.” Weber stated that social science could serve three ends. It may enable us to control the forces of society, it provides training for future social scientists, and it makes for intellectual clarity.
It is a measure of how rapidly the 18th-century creed has disappeared in recent years that only the first and second of these ends still appear valid. A generation ago Weber had regarded “intellectual clarity” as one of the most important goals of social science. By receiving training in them the individual citizen would learn to judge alternative courses of action in the light of knowledge of their conditions and consequences. Weber believed that this was a worthy goal of the social sciences, even if they were often found to have no other apparent social utility. Yet, the majority of introductory courses in the different social sciences shows little evidence that intellectual clarity is still the goal today. Instead, these courses give the impression that they are designed for future specialists, not for the individual who seeks clarity on social and political issues. As an impartial examination of introductory textbooks will confirm, students are treated as budding experts, which in many instances will make them poorer citizens. Robert K. Merton, in his introduction to a recent text (Sociological Analysis, by Logan Wilson and William Kolb, Harcourt, Brace; 1949), points out that in recent years there has been a shift from an emphasis on a general, semi-philosophical “humanities” approach in sociology textbooks, to an emphasis on techniques and empirical studies. He does not, however, point up the educational implications of these changes.3
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The serious question which we all confront is thereby posed: must we pay for the greater technical resources arid the refined research methods of modern social science with the unconscious and uncritical subordination of intellectual endeavor to the dominant social and political forces of our time? Must we renounce reason for all to gain science for the few and the elites? Must we give up our faith that all men can become reasonable and instead hope that some men—the powerful—will learn to make use of the technical tools of science?
Each person who is concerned with this question will answer it in his own way. As I see it, a major desideratum is that each social scientist should be personally conscious of the link between his research and the social and political and moral forces of his society. Such consciousness can only enhance the intellectual integrity of his work. It should enter into his selection of research problems, wherever possible. This is usually interpreted as the need to make one’s values explicit as they are involved in the specific problems under discussion. We should, however, recognize that it is less our opinions on day-to-day problems and more our major underlying assumptions that call for explicit acknowledgment: our beliefs concerning the relation of knowledge and human power, the role of science in society, the position of the intellectual in the community—these are among the problems which we must clarify for ourselves.
There is nothing necessarily degrading in such work as opinion analyses for an advertising company, or anthropological field work for a colonial office, or analyses of price trends for a government agency, and when this work is useful we may properly be pleased—if nothing else is involved. But social scientists are placed in a dubious light when they claim that their work for hire is the ultimate goal of all social science research, and when they plead in extenuation for some of their “pure” work that what is not useful now may or will be useful tomorrow or the day after. It would be far more useful in the long run—from the point of view both of science and of humanity—to take one’s stand on the ground that our human life is enriched by worthwhile research in the social sciences, that such research is a token of high civilization, worth preserving as an integral part of our quest for knowledge, and that this quest manifests our abiding faith in the constructive and enriching possibilities of human reason. I do not claim that this is an “objective” statement. It is rather a declaration of personal belief that in a world torn by wars of nerves, arms, and words, the universities are institutions of detachment whose academic personnel have an important service to render in the community, one for which they may properly claim recognition from the powers that be. Social scientists, to reiterate, should place their abiding faith in reason rather than an exclusive concern with improving the techniques of social manipulations. This is the only position worthy of the great intellectual traditions of which they are the heirs. It is also the only position consistent with the intellectual defense against the threat of totalitarianism, from without and within.
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1 The most sophisticated expression of this view is contained in Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. In recent years it has influenced a species of writing that treats the history of ideas as a form of propaganda analysis. Both the telling insights and the glaring crudities of this approach are well illustrated by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1950), and, on the other side, by Georg Lukács’s Studies in European Realism (London, 1950). A similar view has inspired much political science writing that conceives of politics in terms of “who gets what, when, and how.”
2 The psychiatric analysis of ideas is emphasized in Elton Mayo’s work on human relations in industry. The same emphasis is contained in much of the work that seeks to understand the ideas that have been prominent in a nation’s history in terms of a “national-character structure.” This literature has been summarized and examined critically by Otto Klineberg, Tensions Affecting International Understanding (Bulletin 62; New York, Social Science Research Council, 1950).
3 There are some notable educational tendencies which point in the opposite direction, however. An interesting discussion of this problem and some striking suggestions are contained in Philipp Frank’s Modern Science and Its Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1949). A similar humanistic emphasis in the teaching of the. social sciences is found in the introductory courses taught at the University of Chicago, and at other institutions where the so-called “general” education approach has spread.
