[This article appeared
in VOX, the academic publication of the University Professors for Academic
Order, Spring 1990.]
American
intellect in the twentieth century fits amazingly well Dickens' description of
late-eighteenth century
"Modern art" has for many
decades flooded the world with bizarre and meaningless work which, although
touching' neither the intellectual nor spiritual sensibilities of its viewers,
has been welcomed with open arms by sophisticates and truckling hangers-on
alike -- which is to say, by the great majority of those whose voices have been
heard on the subject. And yet, amidst the effluvia some very good work has
managed to get done, so that when all the rest is forgotten, the twentieth
century will have left a significant legacy from the likes of the Wyeths and even the Salvador Dalis.
I
am struck by how much American social science resembles modern art in this
regard. One cannot read the works of an Edward Banfield
or an Ernest van den Haag without appreciating the excellent work that has been
done. And yet one cannot work within an American university for long without
sensing -- much less being hit squarely in the face by -- the flood of mediocrity that chokes the life
out of the academic setting and that makes the true intellectual fly to his solitude to do his best work.
Much
of this mediocrity can be laid directly at the door of the social sciences --
or, better yet, of the "social science establishment," which even
permeates such a professional college as a school of business. Economics is one
important, though only partial, exception.
A
complete explanation of what is wrong with either modern art or twentieth
century social science requires no less than a full exploration of the ills
that have afflicted the modern age as a whole. It would explore, among other things,
such factors as the collapse of consensus at the end of the Middle Ages; the
onrush of empiricism, with the simultaneous disavowal of theistic and
metaphysical perspectives; the alienation of the intelligentsia from the main
commercial culture, with all of the ideological warpings
that alienation has visited upon modern intellectual culture; and the rise of
average humanity in a democratic assertiveness that Jose Ortega y Gasset spoke of as "the revolt of the masses,"
with the corresponding demise of leisured, educated elites.
That,
of course, is a vast subject that we cannot undertake here. I refer to the need
for a complete explanation, though, because I feel the insufficiency of any
particularized explanation, including one that attributes twentieth century
social science's ills primarily to its origins in the German Historical School.
It is best to understand the specifics that I am about to cite as simply having
been the outer manifestations of much larger developments.
Before
we examine the origins of American social science a century ago, however, we
should pause to see just what is meant when critics speak of its
"mediocrity" and choking-quality.
During
my twenty-two years as a college professor, I have witnessed an irritating
stream of faculty and graduate student work that I have thought to be trivial,
devoid of meaningful content, naive, pseudo-scientific, pretentious, limited by
pedantic credentialism, and ideologically biased.
Accordingly, I thought seriously not too long ago of devoting five or ten years
to extensive reading in the social sciences, so that I could write a book that
would describe the problem and analyze its causes.
I
didn't get far into the literature, however, before I discovered that Stanislav Andreski has already
written such a book. It appeared in 1972 under the unfortunate title Social
Sciences as Sorcery. (The name is unfortunate because
Andreski's book
is by no means a polemic flawed by wild disdain; it is an extremely perceptive,
honest and well-reasoned account of American academic life and of the
contemporary social sciences. )
Here
are some of the problems Andreski points to:
1.
A "flood of publications" that pour onto the shelves from a vast number
of specialties and that "reveal an abundance of pompous bluff and a
paucity of new ideas." The massive literature includes, he says, a
"torrent of meaningless verbiage and useless technicalities."l
2.
Trivial content, reflecting a scattering of attention and a lack, on the part
of most practitioners, of what I call "a serious intellectual
project."
Andreski thus
confirms the insight voiced by C. Wright Mills (an insight worth acknowledging
despite good reasons not to admire Mills' work as a whole) when Mills spoke of
"the pretentious triviality that passes for social science."2
3.
Purely verbal innovations. "The fashionable sociological jargon consists
almost entirely of distasteful and confusing verbal innovations which represent
no new ideas whatsoever ...a tautological rephrasing which tells us nothing
that we did not understand before."3
4.
A corresponding decline in standards of literary expression. (This is
exemplified by the jargon spoken by so many school teachers today -- a jargon
that sets them off into a wholly separate and stilted world.)
5.
A slavish pursuit of intellectual fashions.
6.
A craving for novelty and for superficial innovation.
7.
A frequent use of reductionism, such as in behaviorist psychology, whereby a
partial truth is treated as though it is all that matters.
8.
The use of quantification to the exclusion of everything else. "What I am arguing against is the
soul-destroying taboo against touching anything that cannot be quantified, and
a superstitious reverence for every scribbling that looks like mathematics.”4
That this fetish for the purely quantifiable is
itself a mind-restricting form of reductionism is illustrated delightfully by
Antoine de Saint Exupery in his perceptive children's
story The Little Prince: "Grown-ups
love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never
ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, ‘What
does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect
butterflies?' Instead, they demand: How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his
father make?' Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything
about him."5
9.
The tedious accumulation of surveys. Andreski says
that "if we look at the types of data utilized by the protagonists of
quantitative methods outside economics, we can easily see that the overwhelming
majority consist of cumulations of responses to
questionnaires -- about the most superficial kind of information one can think
of."6
10.
The use of simulation models that cannot capture the complex reality of real
life and that are "used for the sole purpose of blinding the public with
science."7
I have spent my academic life within a college
of business. For many years, I have inquired incredulously whether "the
business world really uses the mathematical modeling and other esoteric
methodology that the faculty and administration consider the only legitimate
subject of professorial effort?" I have repeatedly been assured that it
does, but now I notice the following observation, inserted without the
elaboration it so richly deserves, in the recent Porter-McKibbin
study Management Education and Development:
“Interview data indicated that most corporate
respondents pay relatively little attention to research being produced by
business schools . . . In effect, they typically claim
that they can safely ignore most business school research with impunity.”8
11.
A slavish adherence to credentialism, or what Andreski calls a "class of salaried diploma
holders," with all of the restraint-on-intellectual-trade and artificial
boundary-drawing that such credentialism suggests.9
12.
Conformity. This marks a close adherence to the attitudes of the academic
peer-group, although it doesn't preclude somebody's putting on a show of
assertive contentiousness if in fact the ideas he puts forward are safely in
agreement with what his peers also believe.
13.
The meaninglessness of many doctoral degrees, which often no longer attest to
significant new inquiry.
14.
The existence of large numbers of academic drones. Although these people are schooled in
technique, they bring little that is really thoughtful to the process. No
wonder Saul Bellow can refer to "the disheartening expansion of trained
ignorance and bad thought."10
15.
The presence, at the same time, of the hard-driving academic go-getter. Andreski refers to "the smooth other-directed,
fund-raising and empire-building academic executive, who chooses his opinions,
stances and morals as he does his friends: that is, in accordance with their
usefulness to his career."ll
To this list, I would add the problem of
frequent ideological bias. The academic community as a whole is so steeped in
the worldview of the Left that the concepts and values of the Left often appear
unquestioned in the literature of modern social science. This is true even
though many purport to subscribe to Max Weber's prescription for a value-free,
scientific study of society, which Weber called a "Wertfreiheit."
Andreski
attributes modern social science's many shortcomings to the simple workings of
human nature. With Thucydides-like perception, he observes that a Byzantine
system such as this can arise from its practitioners' desire to serve their own
individual and collective interests; from the fact that people on the whole
really don't like to think all that much; and from the corresponding fact that
most people have no innate desire to seek the truth and are, therefore, more
attracted than repelled by the absurd and the obscure.
There is undoubtedly much truth to that sort
of explanation. There are, however, also the cultural-intellectual factors that
I referred to earlier. And it is worth asking, too, about the particular
process by which American universities got themselves into such a fix. After
all, the same "human nature" is present in other aspects of life but
does not invariably institutionalize mediocrity.
In
the second half of the nineteenth century, the American intelligentsia, for the
most part deeply alienated from America's commercial culture, sought out and
attained an ideological, academic consensus by migrating en masse to
German universities. Jurgen Herbst
tells us in The German Historical School in American Scholarship that
"between the years 1820 and 1920 nearly nine thousand American students
set sail for
This
had a telling impact on American university life. "With the opening of The
John Hopkins University in 1876, the massive influence of the German historical
school on American social science began," Herbst
tells us.13
Although
other influences inside late nineteenth-century
The
German Historical School began its ascendancy a generation before, with Roscher, Knies, Hildebrand and
Engel (a statistician, not the Engels who was Marx's
patron). It was the second generation, headed by Schmoller,
Bucher, Knapp, Brentano, Conrad, Lexis and Wagner, that presided over the
period that most influenced Americans. A third generation, according to Anthony
Oberschall, "contained the founding fathers of
German sociology, Weber, Tonnies, Simmel,
Sombart, and Troeltsch."14
If
we examine the characteristics of the Historical School, we come face-to-face
with the main contours of what later became twentieth century American social
science:
1.
Ideologically, the members of the Historical School were deeply alienated
against bourgeois culture. "...[T]he second
generation," Oberschall tells us, "was
especially fond of preaching and propagandizing from the university
classroom, which
earned them the mocking designation of ‘socialists of the chair.’” Accordingly,
they strongly opposed the influence of Herbert Spencer, and they sought to
undermine classical economics with a relativistic attack that
argued, in
effect, that a theory of a market economy only describes conditions in a
single, unique period of history. The argument between Gustav Schmoller of the Historical School and Carl Menger of the Austrian School of Economics is a famous one, and was a major
part of what is known as "the Methodenstreit"
( a long-running debate over methodology).
I
do not wish to oversimplify regarding the ideological complexion of the
Historical School, and of American social science as influenced by it.
Generally, the more rabid socialists threw themselves into the more militant
socialist movements, such as the German Social Democratic Party in which the
followers of Lassalle and Marx were contending for
dominance. The far Left has continued to criticize empirical social science
even though from another perspective we see that much of that social science
has shared the Left's worldview. During the New Left period, for example, C.
Wright Mills excoriated American social science for not making a radical
critique of the precise "liberal establishment" that it had helped to
create.
2.
A close relationship developed between the professors of the Historical School
and
3.
Most significantly for our present analysis, the methodology and tone was set
that has characterized American social science throughout the following
century:
The
German influence was so compelling that American academic life molded itself
rapidly in the image of the
Historical
School in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The
German-trained academics felt a strong desire to become organized and to
supplant existing structures. Accordingly, they established the American
Historical Association in 1884; the next year, Richard T. Ely formed the
American Economic Association; and the American Sociological Society emerged in
1905. The modern academic specialties came into existence, shattering
"political economy" into several pieces. (The continuing call for
"interdisciplinary teaching" reflects some dissatisfaction with this
fragmentation.)
The
current system, institutionalized, is self-perpetuating, and is not likely to
change itself except through a slow evolution. Certainly there is little chance
that reforms will be made from within unless a substantial number of academics
become conscious precisely of the fact that the existing system is a damaging,
self-limiting new Scholasticism. They need to become aware, in a much more
explicit and self-conscious way than they now are, of the system's inanities
and mediocrity. Thus, much of the solution will have to come from a heightened
criticism.
We live
at a time that is almost unprecedented in its openness to new intellectual
initiatives. We will never come to "an end of ideology," in my
opinion, since it is only through large systems of social philosophy that
mankind is able to mediate the complexities of social reality. But over the
past half-century we have seen a gradual and now-accelerating collapse of the
Left. Since none of the forms of the Right commands general acceptance, the
result is presently a void. This is a highly dangerous situation, but also one
that offers great positive potential if it is used to good advantage.
John
Stuart Mill, picking up an idea from Coleridge, argued more than a century ago
that a free society needs an "intellectual clerisy," an intellectual
culture appropriate to itself. I see this as an essential factor in the
maintenance and enrichment of an open and free society. It is a factor that a
society based on individual freedom, which is necessarily a
"bourgeois" society, has almost never enjoyed. A free society
desperately needs, however, as one of its permanent components, an intellectual
culture that is, at one and the same time, committed to the basic values of the
society (rather than deeply alienated against them) and idealistically
reformist in its hostility to all abuses and in its desire for moral and
aesthetic uplift.
If
such an intellectual culture can emerge out of the current void (and there is
no certainty that it will), one of its foremost tasks will be to critique and
to reform contemporary social science and the academic environment built around
it. Once there is the perception and the will, the reforms will not themselves
be difficult to make.
1.
Stanislav Andreski,
Social Sciences as Sorcery (London:
Andre Deutsch Limited, 1972), p. 11.
2.
Excerpt from C. Wright Mills' “On
Politics” published in Planned
Social Intervention (London:
Chandler Publishing Company, 1970), p. 11.
3.
Andreski, pp. 67, 68.
4.
Andreski, p. 136.
5. Antoine de Saint Exupery,
The Little Prince (San
Diego: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1943), trans. by Katherine Woods, pp. 16-17.
6.
Andreski, p. 125.
7.
Andreski, p. 119.
8.
Lyman W. Porter and
9.
Andreski, p. 30.
10.
Foreword by Saul Bellow to Allan Bloom, The
Closing of the American Mind (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 17.
11.
Andreski, p. 225.
12.
Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American
Scholarship (Cornell
University Press, 1965), pp. 1, 8.
13.
Herbst, p. 203.
14.
Anthony Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in
15.
Oberschall, p. 13.
16.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York:
Harper and Brothers Publishers, 2nd ed., 1947), p. 341.
17.
Herbst, p. 38.
18.
Oberschall, p. 86.
19.
Oberschall, p. 130.
20.
Oberschall, p. 4.
21.
Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., The History
and Prospects of the Social Sciences (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1925), p. 28.
22.
Herbst, p. 36.
23.
Herbst, p. 100.
24. Herbst, p. 100.