278 ANALYZING DATA
Indeed, by playing this nationalist card, Schumacher continued to lend a measure of support to
Adenauer’s contention that everyone who was not a Christian Democrat was advocating a return
to the policies that had gotten Germany into geopolitical trouble under the Nazi regime.
Schumacher’s critique was perhaps the best one that he could have practically offered, but it was
unable to gain purchase because of the tensions within it that Adenauer was able to exploit.
Adenauer, in turn, was only able to sustain the claim that he was not the “Federal Chancellor of
the Allies” by virtue of the rhetorical commonplace of “Western Civilization” on which he and
his policies stood. Precisely because he could advance a socially plausible claim to justify courses
of action that otherwise might easily have seemed like simple kowtowing to the occupying Allies,
he was able to hold together his party and his coalition long enough to institutionalize the com-
mitment of the new German state to “the West.” The commonplace of “Western Civilization” and
the pattern that Adenauer and his allies constructed around it made that outcome possible.CONCLUSIONMethodology is enacted philosophy. It is “philosophical” in that it embodies and stands upon
ontological and epistemological commitments. It is “enacted” in that it is not satisfied with
simply thinking these commitments, but endeavors to apply these ontological and epistemo-
logical commitments to concrete questions of how research is to be conducted. Methodological
reflection, then, is about designing prosthetics appropriate to the commitments that ground the
researcher and her or his research community. This is the logical prerequisite to applying such
prosthetics in a rigorous manner. That this is necessarily a value-laden enterprise does not
detract from its “scientific” character, inasmuch as scientific objectivity always involves bring-
ing values and data together. “A fact is a particular ordering of reality in terms of a theoretical
interest,” as David Easton argued a half century ago (Easton 1971 [1953], 53). M. Weber would
agree:There is simply no “objective” scientific analysis of cultural life—or, put perhaps some-
what more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes—of a “social
phenomenon” independent of special and “one-sided” points of view, according to which—
explicitly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously—they are selected, analyzed, and
representationally organized as an object of research. (1999a, 170; emphasis in original)Actual empirical situations are generally ambiguous enough to permit and sustain multiple
readings, but this general observation sheds little light on specific occurrences. Precisely which
aspects of a situation are picked out by a given scholarly analysis is, at least in part, a function of
the cultural values surrounding and informing the inquiry—which raises doubts about any cat-
egorical declarations that a particular interpretation is somehow universally or transcendentally
correct. But this situation is not unique to the social sciences; even as “naturalistic” an activity as
the study of the rock formation known as “dolomite” displays the contingency and value ladenness
flagged by Weber and Easton (Hacking 1999). Methodological questions are methodological
questions, regardless of their domain of application; in all cases they involve the effort to system-
atically reveal the world in one way rather than another.
In this essay I have argued for a methodology that respects both aspects of the double hermeneu-
tic as a way of preserving agency at the most fundamental level of a research project. Such a project
is an effort to produce “facts” that flow from a certain set of values, and as such is a contribution to
the preservation of those values in the sphere of the social sciences. By demonstrating some of the