Ideology and the philosophy of science: an American misunderstanding

Transcription

1 Journal of Political Ideologies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Ideology and the philosophy of science: an American misunderstanding John G. Gunnell To cite this article: John G. Gunnell (2009) Ideology and the philosophy of science: an American misunderstanding, Journal of Political Ideologies, 14:3, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 22 Oct Submit your article to this journal Article views: 150 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [Dogu Akdeniz University] Date: 29 September 2016, At: 02:20

2 Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), Ideology and the philosophy of science: an American misunderstanding JOHN G. GUNNELL Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA ABSTRACT There are significant flaws in recent claims that Thomas Kuhn s work was an apology for American Cold War ideology and a manifestation of the transformation of logical positivism from a politically motivated philosophy to an apolitical account of the logic of science. These arguments present an inaccurate account of important aspects of the European origins of positivism and its post-emigration career in the United States, and they misinterpret the character and impact of Kuhn s work. Although significant elements of the image of science that Kuhn criticized originated in positivist philosophy of science, that image most distinctly took shape in peripheral fields such as political science where it was appropriated as part of a conservative defence against an attack, by another wave of émigré scholars, on the traditional American commitment to science and liberalism. In the end, it was Kuhn s work that provided the most significant basis for challenging the image of science that dominated the Cold War era. History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. Thomas Kuhn Introduction Some critics have argued that Thomas Kuhn s work threatened the objectivity of science, while others have suggested that his emphasis on the role of normal science depreciated the importance of scientific innovation. And occasionally, such as in the case of Karl Popper and of some of his followers, 1 these two lines of criticism converged in a characterization of Kuhn as a quiescent relativist. A variation on the latter theme has recently been resuscitated as part of an ISSN print; ISSN online/09/ q 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: /

3 john g. gunnell argument claiming that Kuhn s critique of the received view of the history and logic of science both reflected and affirmed American political ideology during the Cold War. 2 This argument is deficient, both historically and philosophically, and it is largely another manifestation of the underlying anxiety that Kuhn s work has evoked about the relationship between philosophy and its subject matter and about the relationship between language and the world. These issues have, from the 1960s to the present, continued to inspire distorted characterizations of Kuhn as the poster-boy of what is often construed as the contemporary relativist zeitgeist and as a promulgator of the thesis that knowledge is socially constructed. 3 George A. Reisch s How the Cold War Transformed the Philosophy of Science pitted a caricature of Kuhn against a revisionist account of the history of logical positivism. Reisch portrayed Kuhn s Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a philosophical validation of right-wing Cold War sentiments and as a consequence of the failed political aspirations that had originally informed logical positivism before it retreated to the Icy Slopes of Logic. Reisch posed the question of how the values and practical ambitions that had originally been represented in the positivist movement in Europe became diverted after being transplanted in the American context. His answer, which somewhat begged the question, was that the philosophy of science was transformed during the 1950s, at least partially, if not mainly, by political pressures that were common throughout the civic as well as intellectual life. This, he claimed, forced the discipline to take the apolitical highly abstract form that came to characterize it in succeeding years and to relinquish the ideas that were most fully represented in the work of Otto Neurath, Philipp Frank, and the Unity of Science movement. 4 Reisch argued that Kuhn s thesis was not only a symptom of the depolitization of the philosophy of science but that it significantly abetted and solidified this transformation. Although there were important interactions between politics and philosophy during the post-world War Two period and although it is necessary to recognize the extent to which trends such as McCarthyism affected university intellectuals, 5 including those involved in the philosophy of science, Reisch s account distorts both the politics of positivism and the role of Kuhn. It is necessary to view the post-emigration career of positivism both in the wider context of the history of the relationship between academic and public discourse in the United States and in the narrower context of the impact of émigré scholars who joined the American academy after fleeing from Nazism. 6 In recent years, there has been an unprecedented amount of research on the origins of logical positivism and its subsequent evolution in the United States. 7 Although Reisch s work is sometimes viewed as part of this body of material and although it has been widely and favorably noted, it has not been carefully and critically examined. The political character and context of logical empiricism have been discussed by others, 8 and Reisch s specific claims are not supported by the larger body of research. Many of the basic facts regarding the advent and emigration of positivism are not significantly disputed, but it is important to be clear about those facts. 318

4 ideology and the philosophy of science From logical positivism to logical empiricism The Vienna Circle and the Society for Empirical and Scientific Philosophy in Berlin, which, together, gave rise to logical positivism, derived, in large measure, from the philosophical, scientific, and political vision of Ernst Mach ( ). A disciple of Mach founded the predecessor of the Berlin group, and the Vienna Circle evolved from the Ernst Mach Society. Mach, who exercised a great influence on both natural science and philosophy in Europe (including the early work of Einstein) was appointed to the Chair in the History and Theory of the Inductive Sciences at Vienna in 1895, and Moritz Schlick, who eventually became the leader of the Circle, held the same Chair from 1922 until his murder in 1936 by a disgruntled student, who was also a Nazi sympathizer. Mach had championed a vision of unified interdisciplinary science, purified of metaphysics and in the service of humanistic and democratizing reform. The Society, in addition to its philosophical and scientific pursuits, sponsored such things as adult and workers education, and the Circle was representative of the Social Democratic sentiments that characterized Red Vienna from the advent of Austria s First Republic to the Anschluss. The actual origins of the Circle were, prior to World War One, in the activity of a group consisting of Frank, Neurath, Hans Hahn, and Richard von Mises. They focused on advancing modern logic, as conceived by individuals such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and its application to science. The more formal incarnation of the Circle began in 1924 and, in addition to Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, involved, on the periphery, individuals such as Karl Popper and Hans Kelsen. Various others such as Victor Kraft, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Menger, Friedrich Waismann, Kurt Gödel, and Gustav Bergmann joined, and there were occasional guests such as A. J. Ayer from England; Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. O. Quine from the United States; Hans Reichenbach and Carl Hempel from Berlin; Jørgen Jørgensen from Denmark; and Alfred Tarski from Poland. Schlick, and others such as Carnap, pushed strongly for consideration of Ludwig Wittgenstein s Tractatus, which they believed supported their empiricist disposition. This association sponsored a series of conferences between 1929 and 1941, including several meetings of the International Congress for the Unity of Science, which eventually gave rise to the monographs of the short-lived International Encyclopedia of Unified Science published at Chicago. Most of those in the Circle had studied fields such as mathematics and physics along with philosophy, and although the group has been famously associated with the idea of making philosophy more scientific, there was also an important sense in which they wished to make science more philosophical by providing it with logical and epistemological foundations subsequent to the crisis in physics, precipitated by the work of Einstein, which climaxed, with the triumphant revision of Newton s universe, at the end of November This crisis, which called into question the reality of Newtonian theory, raised significant philosophical questions about the nature of scientific theory and the grounds of scientific judgment, but the positivists found an answer in Mach s commitment to the idea that knowledge 319

5 john g. gunnell must be grounded in experience and observation rather than in what, at that point, seemed to be transient theories. They also argued that logical analysis provided the proper method for philosophy and the determination of linguistic meaning. While only Von Mises (economist), Neurath (political economist), Kaufmann, and Kelsen (legal theorists) were what might be categorized primarily as social theorists, nearly all were concerned with the application of science and scientific principles to society. They were part of the modernist movement which emerged in Europe after World War One and which was devoted to a reconstruction of society on the basis of new foundations as indicated in the Circle s 1929 manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis. Degrees and kinds of political involvement among these individuals differed considerably but there can be no doubt about their practical concerns and aspirations. For example, Reichenbach was a socialist activist in Berlin, Carnap was briefly imprisoned in 1919, and Neurath, at one point, was tried for high treason. Friedrich Adler, a brilliant scientist and friend of Einstein, attempted to meld the ideas of Mach and Marx, in opposition to Lenin s materialist/realist philosophy in the context of disputes between factions in the Russian revolution. He was, like his father, a passionate Social Democrat who gave up a number of academic opportunities in favour of political pursuits and eventually shot the Austrian prime minister. While the basic struggle in which the positivists engaged was within philosophy and focused on distinguishing metaphysics and theology from what they referred to as the scientific conception of the world, their work was also conceived as part of a struggle between different social and political forms of life. There were, however, among these individuals, various types of ideological commitment ranging from classical liberalism and marginal utility economics to versions of Marxism. The manifesto is worthy of careful textual attention. It was dedicated to Schlick on the occasion of his choice to remain in Vienna rather than accept an offer to move to Bonn. Schlick s decision crystallized the idea that, despite the intellectual and political diversity among these individuals, there was in fact a common ground which consisted of a basic scientific attitude and the goal of a unified science. What, they claimed, bound them together, and allied them with individuals such as Russell and Wittgenstein in England and William James in the United States, was the rejection of metaphysical and theologizing thought and the embrace of the opposite spirit of enlightenment and anti-metaphysical factual research, which, they claimed, had been facilitated by the climate of economic, philosophical, and political liberalism that had infused the intellectual life of Vienna and which had been inspired by the work of Mach. This scientific conception was linked to concerns about social and economic reform with which the members were in sympathy and sometimes inclined to actively further, but this conception was intended to transcend competing ideologies and function as a neutral source of intellectual authority. The authors stressed that the efforts for a rational transformation of the social and economic order, permeate the movement for a scientific world-conception. The reference to theology reflected what they believed was the hold that Austrian Catholicism maintained on society, and the 320

6 ideology and the philosophy of science rejection of metaphysics included not only a turn away from much of traditional philosophy and its influence on the university curriculum but the dismissal of philosophies such as realism and idealism as accounts of knowledge of the external world. They stressed the acceptance of experience, which rests on what is immediately given, as the criterion of what is real and the limit of legitimate science. The goal of a unified empirical science was to be pursued by applying the method of logical analysis to empirical material. They claimed that while once socialist attitudes involved in the fierce economic and social struggles of the present had been based on materialism, the masses had begun to lean toward a down-to-earth empiricist view, which has taken shape in the scientific world conception. The manifesto clearly reflected the philosophical arguments in Carnap s Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 10 published the previous year, as well as Neurath s more explicit focus on social issues. The document predicted that the Circle s principles would be met with hostility, and it noted that not every single adherent of the scientific world-conception will be a fighter. Some, glad of solitude, will lead a withdrawn existence on the icy slopes of logic and avoid mingling with the masses. They emphasized, however, that it was the basic philosophical vision, rather than the actions of individuals, that would constitute the principal vehicle for penetrating in growing measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, in upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and public life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life and receives it. 11 How this proposed philosophical penetration of society was to take place was not clearly indicated, particularly since the document listed the leading representatives of the scientific world-conception as Einstein, Russell, and Wittgenstein, who had quite disparate views about the nature and purpose of social advocacy. The general perspective, however, represented by Neurath, was less the achievement of democratic goals from the bottom up than by social planning from the top down. The purpose was to benefit the masses, but there was little sense of how mass and elite would be articulated. One might surmise that it was Wittgenstein, or maybe Schlick, who they hinted might remain on the icy slopes of logic, but the manifesto was far from a proposal representing any definite or uniform ideology and political program. From the beginning, their principal commitment was to what Wittgenstein would later criticize as the requirement of the crystalline purity of logic where the conditions were ideal but, like slippery ice, would provide little friction for traversing the rough ground. 12 Logic was the Archimedean point from which they wished to tip the world, and it was Wittgenstein s turn away, after the Tractatus, from formal logic, from the search for the foundations of mathematics, and from the belief in a phenomenal observation language that would, by the mid-1930s, estrange him from the positivists. Their concern about practical matters should not be allowed to obscure the fact that these individuals were primarily philosophers and basically focused on reconstructing the epistemology and logic of scientific explanation. They were, on the whole, socially marginalized figures, many of whom were limited, both politically and academically, by their Jewish heritage and who, consequently, 321

7 john g. gunnell like Einstein, would soon be forced to flee the Continent. Despite their individual skirmishes with the world of politics, they were, on the whole, far from being significant political actors or even major public intellectuals. Feigl, who coined the term logical empiricism, led the group that immigrated to the United States. He arrived in Iowa in 1930 (where Bergmann followed) and finally settled at Minnesota in Carnap came to Chicago in 1936 where Hempel joined him as his assistant in 1937 before moving on, in succession, to the City College of New York, Queens College of New York, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pittsburgh. Karl Menger went to Notre Dame in 1937, and in 1938, Kaufmann joined the New School for Social Research, and Reichenbach came to UCLA. In 1939, Frank became head of the Institute of the Unity of Science at Harvard, while, in the same year, Gödel joined Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Von Mises came to MIT before moving to Harvard in 1940, and Hans Kelsen joined the faculty at Berkeley in When they reached the United States, their intellectual and political background was far from clear to most Americans who were often equally mysterious to them. This was in part because their American intermediaries, such as Morris and Abraham Kaplan, attempted to create an image of philosophical continuity with American pragmatism and play down political ideas such as Marxism. Such continuity was by no means feigned but, despite, for example, Dewey s participation in the Unified Science project, there were also significant intellectual and political differences between positivism and pragmatism. Nearly all the scholarly émigrés of this period were scrutinized by the FBI (which, for example, had a large dossier on Einstein), and those less famous were even more sensitive about the implications of their political background. They all recognized, however, that their future was in the United States, and they adapted their work accordingly, which involved in part embracing American professionalism and its political and philosophical implications, which had traditionally included, in principle, a sharp distinction between science and politics. While the positivist attack on metaphysics and the pursuit of scientific methods was a challenge to political and social authority in Europe, it had limited critical resonance in the ecumenical atmosphere of American liberalism and technocracy. They arrived in the United States before the Cold War and at the height of the New Deal, which in many respects represented the political and social goals that they had embraced in Europe. Although Reisch provided interesting descriptive detail about such matters as the history of the Unified Science Movement and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, there were many problems with his attempt to explain the career of positivism in the United States. His book did not actually deal directly with the Cold War but rather, for the most part, with academic politics and various intellectual controversies, centering around individuals such as Sidney Hook, that were taking place before and during that period. His focus on Neurath and Frank, as representing what he referred to as these political philosophers of science, was misleading. Most of the positivists were not political philosophers at all. Neurath was not typical, and he was not among those who came to the United States. 322

8 ideology and the philosophy of science Compared to someone such as Hempel, Frank had little impact with respect to articulating the main tenets of logical empiricism. What had bound the positivists together was a commitment to science, liberalization, and modernization which in many respects were already epitomized in the United States. To the extent that the positivists, as a whole, were to any significant degree ideologically unified, but depoliticized, by their American experience, it was not so much by the climate of the Cold War as simply by being thrown anomalously into the American academic and political context where their particular social and political goals were not only less challenging but where they were forced to confront the characteristic dilemmas of American academic intellectuals regarding the relationship between scholars and politics. Furthermore, they clung, like most Americans, to a hope for the socially transformative power of scientism which entailed rejecting partisanship. It strains credulity to think that these refugees, while seeking refuge in a liberal society to whose values they were already committed, were inclined to launch a new program of social reform. Furthermore, by the point that Carnap had arrived in the United States, he, like Reichenbach, had relinquished any claim that values were meaningful components of knowledge and had embraced an emotivist and non-cognitivist theory of ethics. This depreciation of the meaningfulness of value claims was one of the things that would inhibit efforts to achieve a rapprochement between positivism and pragmatism. The philosophy of science, as a distinct academic field, as well as logical empiricism as anything approaching a doctrinal set of commitments, was, despite Reisch s phrasing, more created, than transformed, after the migration. It is simply not the case that it was their experience in America that drove the positivists to the icy slopes of logic or that positivism was primarily a political movement, which was derailed in the American context. Despite their social concerns, they had taken their stand on the icy slopes of logic before arriving in the United States. There were also politically and scientifically conservative implications of positivist philosophy, and its roots in philosophical idealism, which had already been noted and attacked by Lenin 13 and would continue to be criticized by the academic political left in Europe as well as in the United States. Kuhn and positivism A significant sub-text of Reisch s book, which was employed to bring into relief his picture of positivism as a political program, was the treatment of Kuhn. His interpretation of Kuhn, as well as much of his general account of the career of positivism, was, however, based on uncritically accepting the argument advanced in Steve Fuller s earlier polemic. 14 The line of argument pursued by Fuller and Reisch is difficult to reconcile with more balanced and carefully documented analyses of Kuhn s work. 15 Fuller attributed to Kuhn a variety of motives and consequences which had little basis in the work itself, the literature of the philosophy of science, or any biographical or autobiographical evidence. 323

9 john g. gunnell Fuller, a sociologist, presented himself as a social epistemologist and social constructivist who, while accepting the general assumption that knowledge is a collective achievement, wished, as opposed to some proponents of the sociology of knowledge, to pursue a critical and normative agenda. While initially drawn to Kuhn s approach, because of what he took to be its sociological perspective, Fuller eventually joined those who view Kuhn as a principal author of modern relativism and as motivated by and contributing to a conservative image of science which is potentially detrimental to creative thinking and the advance of knowledge. Most of Fuller s claims were based on allusion, guilt by association, and innuendo, but Reisch accepted the basic claims as authoritative. Both Fuller and Reisch stressed, for example, Kuhn s relationship with James Conant at Harvard. What one commentator has referred to as this paranoid vision of Kuhn s relationship to Conant 16 was, however, not supported by any clear demonstration that Kuhn subscribed to or sought to perpetuate Conant s wartime and post-war political ideas, which were themselves hardly constant or uniform. Kuhn s debt to Conant was primarily with respect to the latter introducing him to the history of science. According to Fuller, the success of Kuhn s book was less a matter of originality than the fact of Kuhn being there at the right moment the moment of the Cold War and the emphasis on science as apolitical. Although Fuller allowed that the book was more a symptom of the age than a cause and not entirely, for the worse, he claimed that the basic result represented a wide range of suspect and dangerous intellectual positions. He interpreted Kuhn s work as functioning as prescriptions for the conduct of both science and philosophy, and he claimed that the result had been to create an atmosphere of historical amnesia and political inertia, reward intellectual conformity, dull the critical sensibilities of the academy, and lead to a situation where an acritical perspective has colonized the academy. But, at the same time, Fuller alleged, Kuhn had aided the deleterious relativistic impact of the radical skepticism of deconstructionism and postmodern pluralism which accelerated the cancerous growth of specialization and precipitated a turn away from a search for substantive truth. He asserted that Kuhn s stance would make judgment across cultures impossible but that his book was also an example of Tory or Prig history which was unaware of its own historicity. While he suggested that Kuhn in some respects fell into the same category as someone such as Jacques Derrida, he also claimed that Kuhn advanced a hidden history of science which not only challenged more common conceptions of progress but partook of the kind of elitism represented both by Cold War politicians and by the work of Leo Strauss and others who would segregate those who really know the truth about history from the popular images embraced by the masses. Despite this alleged affinity with Strauss, Fuller also argued that Kuhn s work spelled the death of philosophical history and fostered an underlabourer image of philosophy. Fuller claimed that notwithstanding the revolutionary metaphors, Kuhn s paradigms represented little more than arrested social movements in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want. 17 In a later invidious comparison with Popper, 324

10 ideology and the philosophy of science Fuller continued his diatribe and described Kuhn as an intellectual coward who benefited from his elite institutional status in what remains the world s dominant society. 18 All of this emerges as counterfactual in light of the fact that it was Popper who was the quintessential philosophical liberal cold warrior who not only claimed that he was responsible for the death of logical positivism but defended the Open Society and its Enemies as his war effort. 19 Fuller s work on Kuhn was followed by an equally dubious defence of intelligent design as an alternative to evolutionary biology. 20 Reisch s argument explicitly followed Fuller s lead and, often referencing Fuller, claimed that the success of Kuhn s book was not a consequence of its philosophical power but rather was arguably due to the kind of relationship it posited between science and society, one that comported well with Cold War innovations in federal financing of science and military research. Reisch claimed that unlike Frank s insistence that philosophy and science should intersect, Kuhn took his historical picture of science to recommend professionalization and specialization in science studies and urged that the progress of science required a separation between science and philosophy as well as, again referencing Fuller, the promise of not only epistemic legitimacy but job security. Reisch simply stated that Kuhn s book was an exemplary document of the Cold War era which took Conant s politics of science as uncontroversial. 21 Kuhn never intended his work to be a vehicle of either social change or a defence of the status quo. The whole idea of the philosophy of science as a normative project was admittedly part of the positivist view from which Kuhn turned away. While it is true, for example, that certain social scientists initially found in Kuhn s image of paradigms a basis for alleviating their worries about achieving a scientific identity, this was because they had typically sought solace from the philosophy of science and assumed that Kuhn was just another resource, and particularly one that allowed them to equate their various, and largely noncompeting, conceptual frameworks with the concept of a paradigm. It very soon became apparent, however, that the philosophical implications of Kuhn s work were devastating to the basic assumptions of mainstream social science as well as to the basic claims of the philosophy of logical empiricism from which those assumptions had been derived. There is no evidence that Kuhn s work had any significant effect on either the political position of natural scientists or on the manner in which they conducted their research, but it did become an important element of debates within social science where ideas associated with logical empiricism had been deployed in defense of conservative academic and political positions. What came to be called the received view of science was less something easily identified with any particular logical empiricist than an intellectual residue that constituted the scientific ideology of fields such as social science. And by the late 1960s, some of the philosophical differences between Kuhn and the logical empiricists had already become somewhat blurred. Although Reisch projected Neurath as representing the basic spirit of the Vienna Circle, recent research has indicated significant similarities between the views of Neurath and Kuhn as well as 325

11 john g. gunnell between Carnap and Kuhn. Kuhn s manuscript was not only initially published, on Morris and Carnap s invitation, in the short-lived Encyclopedia of which Neurath was an editor, but aspects of Neurath s thought such as his antipathy for much of traditional epistemology and philosophy in general, his deviation from foundationalism, and his famous metaphor depicting science as a ship continually regenerated and reconstituted from its own timbers accorded in many respects with Kuhn s formulations, which, in the end, Carnap also came close to endorsing. And even Hempel, for whom Kuhn had considerable respect, and in part as a consequence of Kuhn s work, eventually relinquished the hard version of the theory/fact dichotomy which had been at the core of logical empiricism. So, it must be asked, what was the image by which, Kuhn claimed, we were possessed, and exactly where did it reside. Social science and the philosophy of science One might wish to quibble about the extent to which logical empiricism had ever incorporated a distinct set of mutually shared dogmas, the degree to which it ultimately conflicted with, and displaced, American pragmatism, and how much Kuhn s arguments diverged. There can be no doubt, however, about one location in which the central tenets associated with the orthodox or received account of scientific explanation were manifest and had been visible since at least midcentury. This was the image of what many social scientists understood to be the character and demands of scientific explanation. Neurath, in the Encyclopedia, had stressed the unity of social and natural science, and whether among those who wished to emulate natural science or those who rejected this model and embraced what they took to be an alternate methodology, the picture of natural science that held social scientists captive was one that they had appropriated from the literature of logical empiricism but often through the medium of secondary and tertiary accounts of that literature which reduced that picture to a programmatic set of commitments about such matters as the relationship between theory and fact and between fact and value. The impact of logical empiricism in the United States on philosophical and popular images of scientific method and on the theory and practice of the special sciences was particularly significant in the case of political science which, by the post-war period, was becoming increasingly anxious about its identity as a science. This anxiety was induced in part by concern about funding opportunities which depended on its status as a repository of objective research, and it was in part a continuing concern about adducing scientific foundations for liberal democracy. The latter concern had become particularly salient as a consequence of a new type of internal criticism of the scientific ethic. It might seem ironic that a philosophy of science that had been tied to an ideological vision became the basis of an American image of pure or value-free science, which seemed unburdened of the more overt partisan commitments of someone such as Dewey. This, however, is less surprising if one recognizes that the search for objectivity in American social science had always, as in the case of many Europeans such as 326

12 ideology and the philosophy of science Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, been motivated by the dream of achieving the kind of neutral epistemic authority that would provide a basis for speaking truth to power. The European Methodenstreit represented, for example, in the differences between Weber and Menger, was not simply about the methods of social science but about sources of intellectual authority, and this same issue was salient in the American context. The very idea of a social science in America, as it had emerged in the late 19th century, had been grounded in the search for a cognitive stance that could transcend conflicting ideologies and interests in a pluralist society and command attention with respect to matters of public policy. The history of academic intellectuals attempting to affect politics directly had, at least for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, been a story of unrequited hope and often personal tragedy. The assumption that the path to practical relevance and purchase was through the establishment of apolitical epistemic credentials was, after the turn of the century, at the core of progressive American social science and the founding of organizations such as the American Political Science Association (1903), and it became particularly emblematic of the program of the Chicago school of social science, which more than any other group came to embrace the positivist vision. 22 To the extent that the logical empiricists retained concerns about political influence, they still assumed that, as they had in Europe, and as Weber had claimed in his famous essay on objectivity, that such influence rested more on the authority accruing to a commitment to the separation of fact and value than on taking partisan positions. They believed that the way to affect politics was, ironically, to be apolitical, and this closely corresponded to the positivist vision. In Europe, from the midst of World War One to 1933, there had been an increasing reaction against Jewish science and its philosophy, and what had in part informed the strategy of the positivists in Europe had been an attempt to demonstrate that science was not ethnic or in any other manner linked to the personal characteristics of its practitioners. And when they arrived in the United States, the positivists encountered significant reservations about the acceptance of Jewish scholars, which were in fact far more limiting than any taint that might have attached to their diverse ideological backgrounds. The impact of logical empiricism on the image of science embraced by social scientists was especially and significantly apparent in what, by the mid-1950s, was becoming mainstream American political science. Political and scientific issues had been traditionally deeply entangled in this field, and here the logical empiricist reconstruction of science served not only as the source of a legitimating rhetoric of inquiry but as a kind of handbook for the practice of what came to be understood as empirical theory. And it was here that the ideas associated with logical empiricism often became, at least by the 1960s and through most of the Cold War period, the epistemic support for the principal arguments that were tied to a defence of the dominant American version of liberal democracy as it confronted Communist ideology during the Cold War. Although Reisch focused on Frank as one of those whose ideological propensities were stifled by the Cold War context, Frank, in fact, became a principal supporter of the typical American assumption of the symbiotic relationship between science and liberal democracy, and the ethic of 327

13 john g. gunnell relativism, as a hedge against totalitarianism. 23 The explanation of how logical empiricism became so deeply embedded in the intellectual psyche of political and social science requires, however, reference to the another group of émigré scholars who entered the American academic world at the same time as the positivists. 24 The political concerns of the latter group were more overtly expressed than those of the positivists but also much more inimical to the dominant ideology of American social science. While they shared the belief that philosophy was the key to practical purchase, they maintained that the source of intellectual authority should be based on a very different philosophical foundation. Although the 1930s is often considered the high point of American liberalism and its intellectual isolation, it was during this period that a wave of German scholarly immigration began to transform the dialogue about both democracy and science. Theorists, as diverse as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and a number of less wellknown individuals initiated critiques of the American conception of both science and liberal democracy. It was, however, largely their prior conceptions of positivism and liberalism, which had been formed in Europe and which they associated with the rise of totalitarianism, that they projected on American social science and politics. Despite the disparate philosophical and ideological perspectives among this group of scholars, their criticisms of positivism were strikingly similar. Although members of the Frankfurt School, such as Marcuse and Adorno, recognized the practical concerns that attended the origins of positivism, they believed it had become complicit in the solidification of capitalism as well as abetting authoritarian tendencies in modern society. 25 Conservative political theorists such as Leo Strauss, however, viewed positivism as the consolidation of relativist, and even nihilist, tendencies which undermined the recovery of natural right and the possibility of normative theory. 26 Prior to the late 1930s, it was very seldom that anyone had challenged the basic value of science or suggested, despite the often technocratic and elitist character of this image, that there might be a conflict between commitments to science and democracy. What has not been widely recognized is the extent to which the nativist defence against this rather sudden challenge, to what had historically been a largely unquestioned commitment to science and liberalism, was also a product of German philosophy the philosophy of logical positivism and empiricism. What was termed, by both proponents and opponents, the behavioural movement in American political science was devoted to the selfascribed task of emulating the methods of natural science. Despite its claim, long before the advent of Kuhn s work, to be a disciplinary revolution, this movement was, as Bernard Crick famously argued, the latest stage in a distinctively American science of politics in which the ideas of science and liberalism had traditionally been joined. 27 Behaviouralism represented, at its core, less a revolution than an attempt to consolidate, defend, and further propagate a shift in both democratic theory and research methods that had occurred in the 1920s. This movement was in large measure a conservative response to the challenge mounted by the émigré critics and their supporters as well as to certain more indigenous 328

14 ideology and the philosophy of science critiques such as that of C.W. Mills. 28 The irony of the behavioural revolution was that in seeking to vouchsafe the American science of politics, and a particular liberal vision of American democracy, it turned to a philosophical account of science that was also a product of the European intellectual exodus. Despite the emphasis that American political scientists had, for at least a halfcentury, placed on their discipline and profession as a science, there had never been a very detailed and coherent account of what was meant by this concept apart from an emphasis on such things as factual description, the use of quantitative techniques, and the search for empirical generalizations. The intellectual climate engendered by Dewey and pragmatism included the ideas of a symmetrical relationship between the values and logic of science and liberal democracy and of how a naturalistic social science could serve democratic reform. But even in the work of Charles Merriam, the early 20th century impresario of the scientific study of politics and founder of the Chicago school, the concept of science represented more a testament of faith than any distinct method or form of practice. The demand for value-freedom and objectivity had less to do with modes of research than with a rhetorical defence of the claim that social science was in a position to guide political action and that it could underwrite liberal democracy. When, beginning in the late 1930s, individuals such as Strauss began to advance their critique of political science and attending liberal values, and found allies, such as President Robert Maynard Hutchins at University of Chicago, who was turning against the scientism so deeply embedded in that institution s fields of both philosophy and social science, Americans were somewhat confounded. They did not really understand the intellectual sources of this attack, which were quite diverse and often a perpetuation of various threads of the Weimar conversation about philosophy and politics. There were, by this point, a number of reasons why political and social scientists wanted to adduce a more convincing account of themselves as scientists including the new opportunities associated with what could be justified as scientific research; the growing demands of professionalism and specialization; claims about the end of ideology; and the continuing, although now somewhat latent, search for public authority. It was, however, actually from positivism that they derived the very ideas that Reisch mistakenly attributed to Kuhn and that were tied to Cold War ideology. In the early 20th century, the philosophy of science had not existed as a distinct field of study, and there had been few attempts to provide a systematic account of the nature of scientific inquiry, let alone of how it applied to the study of social phenomena. By the 1930s, however, the beginning of the positivist influence, with its tacit support for American liberal values, was apparent, 29 and by mid-century, the fragmentary resources on this subject had been displaced by the more systematic literature of logical empiricism. American political scientists extracted from this literature a defence of a science of politics and what they construed as a methodological primer. But this material, and the background of its authors, was as philosophically opaque to American social scientists as the work of the émigré critics of science. Crick had argued that the American science of politics had been a product of the growth of scientism and professionalism in the context of a stifling 329

15 john g. gunnell form of unreflective, if not, from the standpoint of Louis Hartz, 30 absolutist form of liberalism and that the discipline had reached a point where it had not only lost its political significance but depreciated politics as a form of life and was at odds with America s better self. Crick found hope, however, in the post-war infusion of the work of scholars such as Strauss, Arendt, and Voegelin as well as American partisans and mediators such as John Hallowell who, together, he maintained, had broadened and leavened American political theory. This interpretation, however, constituted an egregious historical inversion. His assessment of the discipline, largely informed by visits to Berkeley and Harvard, which fuelled his critical attitude toward both science and liberalism, failed to recognize the extent to which the image of science that dominated American political science was, by then, far from home grown. There can be little doubt about why what, by the 1960s, came to be called traditional, historical, and normative political theory was often designated as the dead hand of the past against which the behavioural revolution had been mounted. While the sub-field of political theory in American political science, as represented in the work of individuals such as George Sabine, 31 had characteristically been devoted to attesting to the complementary progress of science and liberal democracy and providing a provenance for both, it was, by the 1950s, well on the way to becoming the vehicle of a vision of both politics and political inquiry that was distinctly threatening to the self-image of American political science a vision, embraced at a general level by émigré scholars who attacked scientism, secularism, pragmatism, pluralism, liberalism, social engineering, relativism, and world-historical optimism and almost everything else that was dear to the American intellectual identity. Those émigré scholars who entered the field of political science were in many ways an eclectic group: liberals such as Arnold Brecht; conservative romantics, such as Strauss and Voegelin, who introduced a theological perspective; and Marxists such as those associated with the Frankfurt School. Paul Lazarsfeld, who might be considered the founder of American survey research, had been a socialist who had conceived of such research from a positivist standpoint as a key to social planning. His work fitted well with the American propensity for quantitative analysis and would be a central aspect of the emerging field of behavioural political science. Brecht, a German liberal, also found not only the form but the methodological and normative content of American political science congenial, but most of those who distinctly joined the conversation of political theory antagonistically engaged the core premises of American political science. The American discourse of political theory in political science was the receptacle to which they adapted themselves and their ideas at the very same time that they contributed radically to its transfiguration and the reconstitution of its content. Just as one group of émigrés transformed political theory in the United States, another group did the same for the philosophy of science. And as political scientists, beginning in the 1950s, turned to the philosophy of science in search of an authoritative image of scientific explanation, the debates that characterized the behavioural era became, in effect, a confrontation between dislocated European 330

16 ideology and the philosophy of science philosophies. Americans, caught up in defences and critiques of positivism, were unconsciously playing roles in a drama that had been authored in Europe. The explanation of why logical empiricism was eventually able to displace pragmatism in the American academy is complex. Part of what was involved was that pragmatism did not really lend itself to formalization and formularization and that the pragmatists did not tend to produce disciples and create the kind of schools toward which émigrés as diverse as Strauss and Carnap (both at Chicago) were inclined. But in their concern with justifying political science as a science, Americans did not grasp some of the underlying tensions between their more traditional pragmatic assumptions and their embrace of logical empiricism. One of the basic differences was that pragmatism was not conceived as a philosophy devoted to providing foundations for science, which was understood as grounded in biological naturalism, but rather as providing a method for philosophy and as applying science to society. More than anyone else, however, it was Hempel who came to represent logical empiricism in the United States and what became the basis of the textbook image of science. 32 Hempel was, significantly, among those least involved in the political dimension of the positivist movement. He had been a student of Reichenbach in Berlin and was caught with his dissertation incomplete when his mentor was dismissed in He completed his work with the gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler before coming to the United States where he spent almost all his professional life and became famous as the author of the covering-law model of scientific explanation which, in a watered-down form, became catechistic for much of American social science. What in part made this philosophical account of science appealing to social scientists, in addition to its rejection of metaphysics and insistence on the difference between empirical and normative claims, was, first, that, notwithstanding its underlying technical complexities regarding such matters as the difference between phenomenalism and physicalism as bases for specifying scientific facts, its principal tenets, such as the logical symmetry of explanation and prediction, could be retailed somewhat apodictically. Second, despite the somewhat disingenuous insistence of some of its authors that it was neither a description of nor a prescription for scientific practice, this explication or meta-linguistic reconstruction was couched in a normative language regarding the nature and adequacy of satisfactory scientific explanation and often presented as a hypothetico-deductive method. Hempel, for example, graded science on a scale where physics came closest to approximating the logical structure of his model, while history was the furthest away from complete explanation, and social science, at least in its current state, was situated toward the bottom of the order. The logical part of logical empiricism was the claim that scientific explanation involved, and required, the deduction of sentences referring to particulars from laws or law-like statements which were in turn formally derived from an axiomatic theoretical system. The empirical dimension was the persistent commitment to the idea that some basic given experiential or observational datum constituted the foundations of scientific knowledge and the criteria in terms of which theoretically informed empirical claims could be tested 331