The social science revolution in philosophical and historical context
Review of Consciousness and Society by H. Stuart Hughes
This book is about the moment when philosophy and the social sciences decisively diverged. It is intellectual history at its best, combining biography, political issues, and how they impacted the theories that were struggling to emerge. A generation steeped in Enlightenment optimism and the peace of the Belle Époque, the new social scientists believed in progress and trusted in human decency. After World War I, the movement ebbed into disillusion, self absorption, the rejection of reason, and acquiescence in the irrationalist ideologies then emerging, viz fascism.
The principal philosophical deadlock of the time was between positivism and idealism. Positivism represented the values of the Enlightenment as they were being applied to social questions. To put it simply, early social scientists were using analogies, expressed in crude scientific language, to explain human behavior. With this, they assumed, they could attain absolute knowledge – the complete truth – regarding our motivations and beliefs via the accumulation of facts that were painstakingly verified. One of these schools was Social Darwinism, which envisioned human society as an evolutionary phenomenon, whereby "survival of the fittest" (a phrase that Darwin never used) reflected the objective worthiness of the existing social hierarchy; the underside of this vision worked itself out in the racist and classist stereotypes that emerged as eugenics.
On the other hand, there were the idealists, who came from Hegel and survived in Marx, who argued that some transcendent idea was at the core of all human experience. This verged into everything from mysticism and ethno-nationalism to Marxist prophesies of proletariat revolution based on class conflict. Anchored as it was in the Romantics, it was less empirical than intuitive and emotional or religious, the stuff of grand systems that explained everything in a single phrase or animating spirit that was ultimately subjective and arbitrary.
According to Hughes, psychology (in Freud’s Psychoanalysis) and sociology (in Weber’s Antipositivist Liberalism) found an original way forward in the 1890s, marshaling new types of evidence and creating processes of investigation that enabled therapists or researchers to study irrational behavior within a rational framework i.e. with relatively empirical criteria - however tenuous and forever in need to adapt to incorporate refinements and corrections, they offered the promise of reaching an approximate explanation (or truth) of causes, their impact, and course of evolution. This conclusion was a revelation to me, an analysis of issues that have long puzzled me about the validity and method of the social sciences.
Freud's great discovery was the unconscious. Rather than stock formulas about man's ability to know himself strictly as a being of reason, Freud argued that experiences in childhood were buried in illusions to avoid pain, keeping secrets from oneself that resulted in neurotic behavior. Once the original trauma was recognized and brought to consciousness, he believed, an individual would be "cured", i.e. accept normal unhappiness and move on, instead of remain mired in neurotic delusion. This was deterministic, even though the therapist could never prove definitively that a given experience "caused" some pathological behavior - he had to rely on intuition in the psychoanalytic process (by free association and dream analysis).
For his part, Weber synthesized the German methodology of historical research and idealist philosophical conceptions with the Anglo-French positivist tradition of scientific rigor. He accomplished this by arguing that human behavior was determined by "natural laws"; however, as "causes" of human behavior, any analysis of them could only be a hypothesis that would have to adapt to changing realities and conceptions. To do so, the researcher had to: 1) rely on a psychological sympathy regarding his subject (e.g., the influence of the Protestant Ethic on capitalism) combined with empirical verification in accordance with a logically consistent theoretical system, the methodology of which was clearly articulated in the study; and 2) formulate "ideal types" of conceptual purity that served as "categories of objective possibility", i.e. models for understanding and discussion. None of this, he maintained, would result in immutable, monocausal, or eternal truths, but just provide a hold on reality at a given historical moment. It was inherently relativist.
The upshot of these ideas was a new level of abstraction, according to which any type of human behavior could be studied and perhaps understood in a non-doctrinal framework. For example, the study of religion had pitted believers against atheistic freethinkers, which limited the scope of their discussions to the unprovable “truth” of their respective doctrines (theologies in this case), that is, metaphysics. Prior to the social scientists, these philosophers could not investigate the impact of their actions or their unconscious thoughts and urges. In the new framework, truth might not have been absolute as positivists and idealists had previously argued, but nonetheless we should get a better approximation of social realities with the new tools.
While acknowledging their accomplishments, Hughes is very clear about the shortcomings of Freud and Weber: the former indulged in wildly speculative generalizations, while the latter opened the way to extreme skepticism and moral relativism, issues that would emerge in the following generations that were disillusioned by WWI and indeed rejecting of the middle-class certainties of their parents; they had lost their faith in the veneer of bourgeois civilization. This book offers essential perspective on a unique period of cultural explosion.
This is a great reading experience, at the high undergraduate level. Hughes is a superlative writer of clarity and accuracy, incorporating personal details and a vast array of intellectuals of the time, far too numerous to cover here. I had to read the book twice to attempt a review. He does occasionally go off on obscure tangents, which detracts from the narrative thread, but also introduces fascinating interpretations of such writers as Gide and Proust in his framework.