#4 ‘The Archive’: When Max Weber curated a new social science newsletter in 1904 this is what he wrote
When a journal dealing with questions of social science, and especially with social policy, makes its appearance in this country, or new editors take over, the first question with which it is greeted usually concerns its “tendency”. We, too, have to furnish an answer to this question, and in this essay we want to go into it in a more fundamental way, further to what has been said in our Accompanying Remarks. This gives us the opportunity to shed light in various ways on the distinctive character of what we understand as “social science”; and even though we are dealing with points which usually “go without saying” – indeed: precisely because [they have that character] – [such a discussion] may be useful, if not for the professional, then at least for readers who are less familiar with the actual practice of scientific work.
The passage above is on page 100. The following on pages 106-107 —
Consequently, what will find expression in the columns of our journal is not only social science – the intellectual ordering of facts – but, inevitably, also social policy – the exposition of ideals; this will especially be the case in comments on legislation. But it would never occur to us to pass off discussions of [social policy] as “science”, and we shall, to the best of our ability, endeavour to keep them from being mixed up with and confused with [science]. [When social policy is discussed], it is no longer science that is speaking. Therefore, the second fundamental commandment of scientific impartiality is [that one should] in such cases at all times make clear to the reader (and, to repeat, above all to oneself ) that and where it is no longer the reasoning scholar who speaks, but the striving human being who takes over – where the arguments are aimed at our reason, and where they appeal to our feelings. One of the most widespread, but also most harmful, features of work within our discipline is that the scientific discussion of facts is constantly mixed up with evaluative argumentation. What the criticism in the preceding remarks is aimed at is this [practice of ] mixing-up, but certainly not standing up for, one’s own ideals. Lack of conviction has no inherent affinity whatsoever to scientific “objectivity”. – The Archive has never been … and shall never become a place for polemics against particular political parties or partisans of particular social policies, or for the promotion or denigration of political ideals or ideals of social policy; there are other organs dedicated to those purposes … No one who is prepared to place himself within the framework of scientific discussion is excluded …
[We] have to discuss what objective “validity” of the truth that we want to obtain can mean in our field. That this problem is genuine, and not just the fruit of empty speculations on our part, will be apparent to anyone who observes the conflict about methods, “basic concepts” and presuppositions, the constant shift in “viewpoints”, and the continual redefinition of the “concepts” employed – and who recognizes that the theoretical and the historical approaches are still separated from each other by an apparently unbridgeable gulf: “two sciences of economics!”, as a despairing examinee in Vienna once sorrowfully complained. What does “objectivity” mean in this context?
Page 114 —
The social science that we want to pursue is a science of reality. We want to understand the distinctive character of the reality of the life in which we are placed and which surrounds us – on the one hand: the interrelation and the cultural significance and importance of its individual elements as they manifest themselves today; and, on the other: the reasons why the[se elements] historically developed as they did and not otherwise.
And, finally, the whole penultimate paragraph —
We have come to the end of our exposition, the sole aim of which has been to indicate the (often hair-thin) line that separates science from belief and to show in what sense knowledge can be sought in the field of social economics. The objective validity of all empirical knowledge rests, and rests exclusively, upon the fact that the given reality is ordered according to categories that are in a specific sense subjective, in that they form the precondition of our knowledge, and that are based on the presupposition of the value of that truth which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us. With the means available to our science, we have nothing to offer a person to whom this truth is of no value – and belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures, and is not given to us by nature. He will search in vain, however, for another truth to take the place of science with respect to those features that it alone can provide: concepts and judgements that are neither empirical reality, nor reproductions of empirical reality, but that allow empirical reality to be ordered intellectually in a valid manner. As we have seen, in the field of the empirical social sciences of culture, the possibility of gaining meaningful knowledge of what is important to us in the infinite multitude of occurrences is tied to the unremitting application of viewpoints that have a specifically particular character and that are all in the last resort oriented towards value ideas. These value ideas may be established and experienced empirically as elements of all meaningful human action, but their validity cannot be proved on the basis of the empirical material. The “objectivity” of knowledge in social science depends on something else, [namely] that the empirically given is constantly oriented towards those value ideas that are the only source of its cognitive value, and that the significance of that knowledge must be understood in the light of those value ideas, but that, in spite of this, the empirically given is never construed as a basis for the demonstration of their validity – a demonstration that is empirically impossible. We all harbour some form of belief in the supra-empirical validity of those fundamental and sublime value ideas in which we anchor the meaning of our existence; but this does not exclude – on the contrary, it includes – the constant change in the concrete points of view from which the empirical reality derives its significance: the irrational reality of life, and its store of possible meanings, are inexhaustible; the concrete configuration of the value relation therefore remains fluid and subject to change far into the dim future of human culture. The light shed by those sublime value ideas falls on a constantly changing, finite part of the immense, chaotic stream of occurrences churning its way through the ages.
Max Weber, ’The Objectivity of Social Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy’, in Max Weber Collected Methodological Writings, edited by Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster, Routledge 2012. [Written late 1903, early 1904 on the occasion of Werner Sombart, Max Weber and Edgar Jaffé taking over as editors of the Archive — Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.]
As today, the early 20th century was a time of great political polarization. ‘The Archive’ sought to be an influential voice. Max Weber made the case for trying to maintain objectivity and impartiality in social science, and for keeping our ‘sublime values’ in check when evaluating the ‘chaotic stream of occurrences’ in the politics and geopolitics of his day. If a longueur post was ever needed, it is this one. My Social Science Files newsletter is new, and the first question that will be asked by anyone reading it is what is its “tendency”. It is “Weberian”. Among the very large number of sources to be included in Social Science Files, Weber is the most important because he successfully defined more permanently-useful cross-disciplinary concepts than any other.