V

Value Freedom

Value freedom is a methodological requirement of a useful social science, and
would be treated as one of the primary requisites in judging mostpolitical
science, though notpolitical theory, writing. It consists of the effort to carry
out analyses in the most impartial manner possible, and in not allowing
individual preferences to bias the research, data collection or conclusions
drawn. The model being invoked is, of course, that of the natural sciences.
It is believed by the advocates of value freedom that a physicist, for example,
has no private preference for any one theory of nuclear particles rather than
another, and therefore produces unbiased work. Similarly, it ought to be
possible to study the causes of social stability, or of voting behaviour, or of
the efficiency of presidential rather than prime-ministerial governments with-
out any bias resulting from personal conviction. As such it is a goal both long
established as ideal (Weberwrote extensively on the problem andComte
thought he had achieved it), and hotly contested by various schools of the
philosophy of science. There are two major points that raise doubt about the
possibility of such value freedom in social science research. The first is the
general argument that all people are subject to the dominantideologyof their
society. As a result truth, and especially truth about social reality, is inevitably
relative. A Marxist like Georg Luka ́cs (1885–1971), for example, would argue
that an economist working inside the framework of a capitalist society simply
cannot grasp thatcapitalismis doomed to collapse through its internal
contradictions and because of its exploitative nature, because to accept this
would be incompatible with their entire outlook. A second, more subtle
argument denies the utility of analogy with the physical sciences because they
too are seen as less than impartial. A physicist, because of training, career
expectations and individual creative limitations, is stuck inside a ‘paradigm’ in
which there is indeed a preference for one theory over another. A theory that
fits into the overall received view, rather than one which would force a general
rethinking, will be preferred. Thus political sociologists may be forced into
working towards, for example, arational choice theoryof voting both
because such a theory defends theliberal democracythey have been