agenda of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists in social scientific method.
In a manner not unlike contemporary rational choice theorists, the Logical
Positivists sought to purify philosophy and the social sciences of all perceived
metaphysical elements and restructure them according to the logic of empir-
ical science and mathematics. Thus, the members of the Circle focused on
analysing the propositions and rules through which empirically meaningful
statements could be formed and tested (Blumberg and Feigl 1931; Hanfling
1981).
Horkheimer vigorously criticized the reduction of knowledge to the results
of the empirical sciences or formal logic. In his essay from 1937, “Traditional
and Critical Theory,” he argues that “traditional theory” (the perspective of
the positivists) fails to acknowledge the social location of its assumptions.
He locates their understanding of science in a bourgeois society dominated
by techniques of industrial production, focused solely on eliminating con-
tradictions and the technical control of nature. Horkheimer states that the
context in which scientists and theorists operate is one that is saturated by
cultural learning and pre-scientific knowledge. If this environment in which
theories are developed remains unexplored, the empirical sciences are guilty
of operating within an unexamined horizon. He insists that this limited sub-
culture represents only one sector of social experience and perspective, so
that failing to examine the unquestioned assumptions of the scientific com-
munity risks leaving scientific research vulnerable to theoretical blindness
and ideological manipulation. Horkheimer argues that traditional theory fails
to acknowledge that facts and theories can “be understood only in the con-
text of real social processes” (1995b:194). Furthermore, he demonstrates that
the “instrumental” reasoning of natural science represents but one form of
possible knowledge. He defends a broader concept of reason; one that is con-
cerned not only with logic and empirical observation, but also issues of prac-
tical reason and aesthetic judgement.
Horkheimer describes the reality of “the contradiction-filled form of human
activity in the modern period” in the following manner:
The collaboration of men in society is the mode of existence which reason
urges upon them, and so they do apply their powers and thus confirm their
own rationality. But at the same time their work and its results are alien-
ated from them, and the whole process with all its waste of work-power
and human life, and with its wars and all its wretchedness, seems to be an
unchangeable force of nature, a fate beyond man’s control. (1995b:204)168 • Christopher Craig Brittain