#22 Schumpeter on economics & sociology as sciences, save for the obstacle of ideology
But is economics a science?
The answer to [this] question depends of course on what we mean by ‘science’ … Only a small part of economics is ‘scientific’. Again, if we define science according to the slogan ‘Science is Measurement’, then economics is scientific in some of its parts and not in others. There should be no susceptibilities concerning ‘rank’ or ‘dignity’ about this: to call a field a science should not spell either a compliment or the reverse.
For our purpose, a very wide definition suggests itself, to wit: a science is any kind of knowledge that has been the object of conscious efforts to improve it. Such efforts produce habits of mind — methods or techniques — and a command of facts unearthed by these techniques which are beyond the range of the mental habits and the factual knowledge of everyday life. Hence we may also adopt the practically equivalent definition: a science is any field of knowledge that has developed specialized techniques of fact-finding and of interpretation or inference (analysis). Finally, if we wish to emphasize sociological aspects, we may formulate still another definition, which is also practically equivalent to the other two: a science is any field of knowledge in which there are people, so-called research workers or scientists or scholars, who engage in the task of improving upon the existing stock of facts and methods and who, in the process of doing so, acquire a command of both that differentiates them from the ‘layman’ and eventually also from the mere ‘practitioner’. Many other definitions would be just as good. Here are two which I add without further explanations: (1) science is refined common sense; (2) science is tooled knowledge.
Since economics uses techniques that are not in use among the general public, and since there are economists to cultivate them, economics is obviously a science within our meaning of the term. It seems to follow that to write the history of those techniques is a perfectly straightforward task about which there should be no doubts or qualms. Unfortunately this is not so. We are not yet out of the wood; in fact, we are not yet in it. A number of obstacles will have to be removed before we can feel sure of our ground — the most serious one carrying the label Ideology.
It goes without saying that we cannot afford to neglect the developments of sociology. This term we shall use in the narrow sense in which it denotes a single though far from homogeneous science, namely the general analysis of social phenomena such as society, group, class, group relations, leadership, and the like. And we shall use the term in this sense throughout, that is, for developments that antedate by centuries the introduction of the word. In a wider sense it means the whole of many overlapping and uncoordinated social sciences — which is the term we prefer and which includes, among other things, our own economics, jurisprudence, hierology, political science, ecology, and descriptive ethics and aesthetics (in the sense of sociology of moral behavior patterns and of art).
Factual work and ‘theoretical’ work, in an endless relation of give and take, naturally testing one another and setting new tasks for each other, will eventually produce scientific models, the provisional joint products of their interaction with the surviving elements of the original vision, to which increasingly more rigorous standards of consistency and adequacy will be applied. This is indeed a primitive but not, I think, misleading statement of the process by which we grind out what we call scientific propositions. Now it should be perfectly clear that there is a wide gate for ideology to enter into this process. In fact, it enters on the very ground floor, into the preanalytic cognitive act of which we have been speaking. Analytic work begins with material provided by our vision of things, and this vision is ideological almost by definition. It embodies the picture of things as we see them, and wherever there is any possible motive for wishing to see them in a given rather than another light, the way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them. The more honest and naïve our vision is, the more dangerous is it to the eventual emergence of anything for which general validity can be claimed. The inference for the social sciences is obvious, and it is not even true that he who hates a social system will form an objectively more correct vision of it than he who loves it. For love distorts indeed, but hate distorts still more. Our only comfort is in the fact that there is a large number of phenomena that fail to affect our emotions one way or the other, and that therefore look to one man very much as they do to another. But we also observe that the rules of procedure that we apply in our analytic work are almost as much exempt from ideological influence as vision is subject to it. Passionate allegiance and passionate hatred may indeed tamper with these rules. In themselves these rules, many of which, moreover, are imposed upon us by the scientific practice in fields that are little or not at all affected by ideology, are pretty effective in showing up misuse. And, what is equally important, they tend to crush out ideologically conditioned error from the visions from which we start. It is their particular virtue, and they do so automatically and irrespective of the desires of the research worker. The new facts he is bound to accumulate impose themselves upon his schema. The new concepts and relations, which somebody else will formulate if he does not, must verify his ideologies or else destroy them. And if this process is allowed to work itself out completely, it will indeed not protect us from the emergence of new ideologies, but it will clear in the end the existing ones from error. It is true that in economics, and still more in other social sciences, this sphere of the strictly provable is limited in that there are always fringe ends of things that are matters of personal experience and impression from which it is practically impossible to drive ideology, or for that matter conscious dishonesty, completely. The comfort we may take from our argument is therefore never complete. But it does cover most of the ground in the sense of narrowing the sphere of ideologically vitiated propositions considerably, that is, of narrowing it down and of making it always possible to locate the spots in which it may be active.
While it is hoped that the foregoing treatment of the ideology problem will help the reader understand the situation within which we have to work, and put him on his guard without imbuing him with a sterile pessimism concerning the ‘objective validity’ of our methods and results, it must be admitted that our answer to the problem, consisting as it does of a set of rules by which to locate, diagnose, and eliminate ideological delusion, cannot be made as simple and definite as can the usual glib assertion that the history of scientific economics is or is not a history of ideologies. We have had to make large concessions to the former view, concessions that challenge the scientific character of all those comprehensive philosophies of economic life — such as the Political Economy of Liberalism — which are, to many of us, the most interesting and most glamorous of the creations of economic thought. Worse than this, we have had to recognize, on the one hand, that although there exists a mechanism that tends to crush out ideologies automatically, this may be a time-consuming process that meets with many resistances and, on the other hand, that we are never safe from the current intrusion of new ideologies to take the place of the vanishing older ones.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, edited from a manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, Allen & Unwin 1954, Routledge 2006 [pp. 6, 23-24, 40-41]