Creating a New Framework for New Realities. Social Science as Public Philosophy (1985)

Creating a New Framework for New Realities: Social Science as Public PhilosophyAuthor(s): Robert N. BellahSource: Change, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1985), pp. 35-39Published by: Heldref PublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40164490Accessed: 05/10/2010 14:33

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CREATING A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR

NEW REALITIES Social Science as Public Philosophy

by Robert N. Bellah

de Tocqueville was following precedent when he wrote in the intro- duction to volume I of Democracy in

America, "A new political science is needed for a world itself quite new." Someone in almost every generation during the past sev- eral centuries has announced that such a new social science has begun or is about to begin. Often this claim meant that the social sciences were about to attain the status of the natural sciences. Yet those who expected social sci- ence to attain the same kind of cumulative- ness, agreement on paradigms, and obsoles- cence of predecessors as natural science have been perennially disappointed.

Change March/April 1985 35

the century and a half

since de Tocqueville wrote

Democracy in America, a

"hard" social science has not

emerged, but certainly a

"professional" social science with

significant achievements has.

Although de Tocqueville's contempo- rary and fellow countryman Auguste Comte was one of the most ardent dis- seminators of what we might call the myth of social science - the idea that so- cial science is soon to become like natu- ral science - there is no reason to believe that de Tocqueville shared that idea. In- deed, de Tocqueville's argument for a new science rested specifically on the no- tion that the object of study - namely, society in a new world - was new and therefore required a new approach. De Tocqueville returned throughout his life to several major figures in the tradition of French social thought: Pascal, Mon- tesquieu, and Rousseau. He did not be- lieve them outmoded or pre-scientific. Yet de Tocqueville saw that the task of appropriating and applying their in- sights to a new historical situation could not be automatic but was so demanding as to require the invention of something like a new science. In that sense, each generation, no matter how much it learns from tradition or how much it is aware that, unlike natural science, it

cannot forget its founders, must still cre- ate a new social science for new realities.

If we, too, have had to find a new way to deal with new realities, we have done so not by imagining that with us a truly scientific social science has at last arrived but by consciously trying to renew an older conception of social science, one in which the boundary between social sci- ence and philosophy was still open. Dur- ing the century and a half since de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in Amer- ica, a "hard" social science has not emerged, but certainly a "professional" social science with significant achieve- ments has. So much is this the case that many of our colleagues may look askance at the credence we give to de Tocqueville and his work. Isn't de Tocqueville merely a brilliant "human- istic amateur" whose work has long been outdated by the technical accom- plishments of professional social science?

It is certainly true that in many areas we have data of a sort entirely unavail- able to de Tocqueville. (It is even true that de Tocqueville did not always utilize the best available data in his own day.) And it is also true that we understand many particular social processes better than anyone did in the 1830s. Yet de

Tocqueville's sense of American society as a whole, of how its major compo- nents - family, religion, politics, the economy- fit together, and of how the character of Americans is affected by their society, and vice versa, has never been equaled. Nor has anyone ever bet-

ter pointed out the moral and political meaning of the American experiment. It is that synoptic view, at once philosophi- cal, historical, and sociological, that narrowly professional social science seems not so much incapable of as unin- terested in. It is in order to reappropriate that larger view that we must try to re- store the idea of social science as public philosophy. Such a social science does not need to be "reinvented," for the older tradition has survived side by side with narrowly professional social sci- ence and requires only to be encouraged and strengthened. To see how we might revive that older view, we should first consider the conditions under which narrowly professional social science first emerged.

When we look at the history of our own disciplines and their professionali- zation we see that during the nineteenth century the social world changed from being a community, a cosmos of call- ings, into an industrial-corporate society organized around competing profes- sional careers. Educational institutions were transformed in ways comparable to the transformation of other institutions. The American college through much of the nineteenth century was organized on the assumption that "higher learning constituted a single unified culture." The purpose of college education was to produce a "man of learning" who would have "an uplifting and unifying influence on society." Literature, the arts, and science were regarded as branches of a single culture of learning. It was the task of moral philosophy, a required course in the senior year, usu- ally taught by the college president, not only to integrate the various fields of learning, including science and religion, but even more importantly to draw the implications for the living of a good life individually and socially. Interestingly, most of what we now call the social sci- ences was taught, so far as it was taught at all, under the heading of moral philosophy.

was only late in the nineteenth century that the research univer- sity replaced the college as the

model for higher education - contem- poraneously with the rise of the business

ROBERT N. BELL AH is the Ford Profes- sor of Sociology and Comparative Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. This essay is adapted from his latest book, Habits of the Heart, copyright 1985, by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, Wil- liam M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life, $16.95, is available from the University of Calif ornia Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720.

36 Change March/April 1 985

corporation. The two institutions were manifestations of the same social forces. Graduate education, research, and spe- cialization, leading to largely autono- mous departments, were the hallmarks of the new universities. The prestige of natural science as the model for all disci- plined knowing and the belief that the progress of science would inevitably bring social amelioration in its wake par- tially obscured the fact that the unity and ethical meaning of higher education were being lost.

The early social sciences were caught up in this transformation. While they were concerned with establishing profes- sional specialties providing useful knowledge about an increasingly com- plex society, many social scientists still felt the older obligations of moral phi- losophy to speak to the major ethical questions of the society as a whole. This tradition has never died, but it has been driven to the periphery by an ever more specialized social science whose subdis- ciplines often cannot speak to one an- other, much less to the public. The early nineteenth-century "man of learning" became the twentieth-century "scientist."

There were great positive achieve- ments in this transformation of higher education. The new educational system prepared vastly larger numbers of peo- ple for employment in an industrial soci- ety, and it included as students those who, because of class, sex, or race, were almost completely excluded in the early nineteenth century. But we must be aware of the costs. One of the major costs of the rise of the research univer- sity and its accompanying professional- ism and specialization was the impover- ishment of the public sphere. As Thomas Haskell has put it, the new man of science had to "exchange general citi- zenship in society for membership in the community of the competent. Within his field of expertise, the worth of his opin- ions henceforth would be judged not by open competition with all who cared to challenge him, but by the close evalua- tion of his professional colleagues."

If we may again take de Tocqueville as our example, we may note that he was read by the leading intellectuals of his time - John Stuart Mill, for example - but he was also intelligible to any edu- cated reader. Today's specialized aca-

demics, with notable exceptions, write with a set of intellectual assumptions and a vocabulary shared only by their colleagues. This is not to say that the achievements of a specialized and pro- fessionalized social science should be forgotten. It is a necessary enterprise in a complex modern society. But, we believe that the competent social scientist does not have to cease to be a "general citizen of society." Specialization requires inte- gration; they are not mutually exclusive. A professional social science that loses concern for the larger society cannot do even its professional job, for there is too much of reality with which it cannot deal. And if we remember that "calling" or "vocation," with the implication of public responsibility, is the older mean- ing of "profession," then we would see that a really "professional social scien- tist" could never be only a specialist. He would also see social science as, in part, public philosophy.

Let us consider how such a social sci- ence differs from much current work. It is of the nature of a narrowly profes- sional social science that it is specialized and that each specialized discipline dis- avows knowledge of the whole or of any part of the whole that lies beyond its strictly defined domain. It is the govern- ing ideal of much specialized social sci- ence to abstract out single variables and, on the natural science model, try to fig- ure out what their effects would be if everything else were held constant. Yet in the social world, single variables are seldom independent enough to be con- sistently predictive. It is only in the con- text of society as a whole, with its possi-

bilities, its limitations, and its aspira- tions, that particular variables can be understood. Narrowly professional so- cial science, particularly in its most re- ductionist form, may indeed deny that there is any whole. It may push a radical nominalism to the point of seeing society as a heap of disparate individuals and groups lacking either a common culture or a coherent social organization. A philosophical social science involves not only a different focus of attention but a different understanding of society, one grounded in commitments to substan- tive traditions.

Being concerned with the whole does not mean a mere adding together of facts from the various specialized disci- plines. Such facts become relevant only when interpreted in terms of a frame of reference that can encompass them and give form and shape to a conception of the whole. It is not likely that such a con- ception will arise from research that is simply interdisciplinary in the usual sense of the word - that is, involving the cooperation of several disciplinary spe- cialists. For knowledge of society as a whole involves not merely the acquisi- tion of useful insights from neighboring disciplines but transcending disciplinary boundaries altogether.

The most important boundary that must be transcended is the recent and quite arbitrary boundary between social sciences and the humanities. The hu- manities, we are told, have to do with the transmission and interpretation of cultural traditions in the realms of phi- losophy, religion, literature, language, and the arts, whereas the social sciences

professional social science

that loses concern for the l larger society cannot do

even its professional job, for there is too much of reality with which it

cannot deal.

Change March/ April 1985 37

involve the scientific study of human ac- tion. The assumption is that the social sciences are not cultural traditions but rather occupy a privileged position of pure observation. The assumption is also that discussions of human action in the humanities are "impressionistic" and "anecdotal" and do not really become knowledge until "tested" by the methods of science, from which alone comes valid knowledge.

It is precisely that boundary between the social sciences and the humanities that social science as public philosophy most wants to open up. Social science is not a disembodied cognitive enterprise. It is a tradition, or set of traditions, deeply rooted in the philosophical and humanistic (and, to more than a small extent, the religious) history of the West. Social science makes assumptions about the nature of persons, the nature of soci- ety, and the relation between persons and society. It also, whether it admits it or not, makes assumptions about good persons and a good society and consid- ers how far these conceptions are em- bodied in our actual society. Becoming conscious of the cultural roots of these assumptions would remind the social scientist that these assumptions are con- testable and that the choice of assump- tions involves controversies that lie deep in the history of Western thought. Social science as public philosophy would make the philosophical conversation concerning these matters its own.

De Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill (and Marx and Weber and Durkheim, not to mention George Herbert Mead) knew that what they said had philosoph- ical implications and took conscious responsibility for their philosophical positions in a way that most social scien- tists today do not. But fortunately we still have more than a few exemplars: Louis Dumont, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Jiirgen Habermas among others. We cannot classify such scholars simply by their "discipline," any more than we could the pre-professional social thinkers of the past.

science as public philosophy, by breaking through the iron cur- tain between the social sciences

and the humanities, becomes a form of social self-understanding or self-

interpretation. It brings the traditions, ideals, and aspirations of society into juxtaposition with its present reality. It holds up a mirror to society. By probing the past as well as the present, by look- ing at "values" as much as at "facts," such a social science is able to make con- nections that are not obvious and to ask difficult questions.

A social science concerned with the whole of society would have to be histor- ical as well as philosophical. Narrowly professional social science has given us valuable information about many as- pects of contemporary society, but it of- ten does so with little or no sense of his- tory. Social historians have been ingen- ious in giving us information about the past that is often only slightly less rich than that discovered by social scientists about the present. Yet, what we need from history, and why the socal scientist must also, among other things, be a his- torian, is not merely comparable infor- mation about the past, but some idea of how we have gotten from the past to the present, in short, a narrative. Narrative is a primary and powerful way by which to know about a whole. In an important sense, what a society (or a person) is, is its history. So a Habermas or a Macln- tyre gives us his story about how modern society came to its present pass. Such stories can, and must, be contested, amended, and sometimes replaced.

The social scientist as public philoso- pher also seeks to relate the stories schol- ars tell to the stories current in the soci- ety at large and thus to expose them both to mutual discussion and criticism. So- cial science as public philosophy cannot be "value free." It accepts the canons of critical, disciplined research, but it does not imagine that such research exists in a moral vacuum. To attempt to study the possibilities and limitations of society with utter neutrality, as though it existed on another planet, is to push the ethos of narrowly professional social science to the breaking point. The analysts are part of the whole they are analyzing. In fram- ing their problems and interpreting their results, they draw on their own experi- ence and their membership in a commu- nity of research that is in turn located within specific traditions and institu- tions.

For instance, when our research group studied individualism in America,

we were studying something that is as much a part of us as it is of the people we interviewed. Furthermore, we brought to our study a set of assumptions about the personal and social implications of individualism that have been developed by previous social scientists, such as de Tocqueville, assumptions that are simul- taneously evaluative and analytical. What we learned as a result of our study is a contribution to our own self-under- standing as well as to social self-under- standing. It is impossible to draw a clear line between the cognitive and the ethical implications of our research, not be- cause we cannot make an abstract dis- tinction between the analysis of evidence and moral reasoning, but because in car- rying out social research both are simul- taneously operative. We cannot deny the moral relationship between ourselves and those we are studying without being untrue to both.

It can be argued that if the analyst is within the society he is studying, he is also within one or more of its traditions, consciously or not. There is no other place to stand. Even if the analyst is studying a different society, he is still within the traditions of his own society and will have to come to terms with tra- ditions in the society he is studying, so the problem is inescapable. Our society has been deeply influenced by the tradi- tions of modern individualism. One of our most important tasks today is the re- covery of the insights of the older bibli- cal and republican traditions. Public so- cial science is not unitary or monolithic; any living tradition is a conversation, an argument in the best sense, about the meaning and value of our common life. We expect that our interpretations will be contested by others with other views, and we expect that, on occasion, we will be shown good reasons to change our minds.

science as public philosophy is public not just in the sense that its findings are publicly available

or useful to some group or institution outside the scholarly world. It is public in that it seeks to engage the public in dialogue. It also seeks to engage the "community of the competent," the specialists and the experts, in dialogue, but it does not seek to stay within the boundaries of the specialist community

38 Change March/April 1 985

while studying the rest of society from outside.

Yet, the revival of public philosophy that would involve a genuine dialogue or conversation is clearly dependent on changes within the intellectual commu- nity itself, and perhaps in the structure of higher education. Here the funda- mental problem is the split between the social sciences and the humanities. This split is so pervasive, not only in the cur- ricula and organization of departments, but also in the minds of college teachers, that any attempt to overcome it might seem hopeless. However, it might be well to consider how recent and, in some respects, how local the split has been and then to examine some current tendencies to overcome the split.

In an article published almost twenty years ago, on the occasion of the estab- lishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities, John Higham dis- cussed "The Schism in American Schol- arship." He pointed out that the Ameri- can Council of Learned Societies De- voted to Humanistic Studies when it was founded in 1919 included economists, historians, and sociologists. The im- petus to found the new association came from Europe where "the human sci- ences" was a broadly inclusive category composed of all but the natural or "ex- act" sciences. But with the formation of the Social Science Research Council in 1923 a peculiarly American schism be- gan that would soon grow to major pro- portions. The initiative came largely from the social scientists, who not only wanted organizational independence but also had the intention of founding a "pure science of behavior" according to Higham, a science free of "any taint of the European, 'humanistic' propen- sity toward speculative thought or nor- mative judgment." Within two or three decades American academic life was deeply affected by this split. Not only were the social sciences modeled on a natural science methodology which they never entirely successfully or even en- tirely happily absorbed, but the humani- ties came to be defined in terms of their "common concern with values," an idea that was neither as traditional nor as clear as it seemed at the time. It is worth remembering that the word "value* ' used in this way is quite recent. As a result the social sciences confined themselves

largely to quasi-scientific description and analysis while the humanities devel- oped finely tuned discriminations of value, but almost exclusively of literary or aesthetic value. As Higham pointed out, in this intellectual division of labor moral and political evaluation ceased to be the serious responsibility of anybody in the academy. This was certainly the case in philosophy, where nineteenth- century moral philosophy became twen- tieth-century meta-ethics, the science of the techniques of moral reasoning. Until quite recently these splits and divisions of labor were largely taken for granted in American higher education.

Although formal academic structures do not show it, in the last two decades serious questions have been raised about the adequacy of our present way of split- ting up human studies. In literary stud- ies, a new concern with "theory" has meant in part an effort to be "scientific" but also an effort to rethink the connec- tion between literature and society, leading to evaluations that are moral and political in addition to aesthetic. Major philosophers have once again ad- dressed themselves to central ethical problems of modern society, even though there is little agreement about how best to do this. In the social sciences there has been a return to interpretive, political, and moral philosophical issues rather than an exclusive preoccupation with antiseptic "theory construction and testing." In all these initiatives Ameri- cans have been stimulated by Europeans

who have maintained less specialized re- search traditions in closer touch with the great issues of historical and philosophi- cal reflection.

But while there is much going on in the major research universities that may help us recover a broader and more pub- lic sense of what we are about as social scientists and humanists- that is, as common students of human studies- there is a sense in which liberal arts edu- cation has a peculiarly important role to play in overcoming the schism in our scholarship. It is true that the liberal arts tradition, whether in the liberal arts col- lege or as part of a larger institution, looks nervously at the research univer- sity as a role model and sometimes ideal- izes disciplinary nationalism as a guar- antor of academic excellence. But there are inherent features of liberal arts edu- cation that support a broader view of the human studies. In smaller departments individual teachers must teach a broader range of courses and synthesize fields of knowledge of which the research univer- sity professor often remains ignorant. The social proximity to those in other fields, the possibilities of team teaching across departmental and even divisional boundaries, and the invention of inte- grative curricula all provide opportuni- ties for a broad and synthesizing vision. Liberal arts education provided us with much of our cultural coherence in the nineteenth century. Perhaps it can again make a significant contribution to that end.

fan analyst is within the society he is studying, he is also within

one or more of its traditions, consciously or not There is no

other place to stand.

Change March/April 1985 39