healthy society. But that is because there is more agreement on what
an ill person looks like than on what is an ill society. However, such
ethical problems of objectives are seen as separate from scientific
problems as to how things work. In principle the authors would
accept this proposition, although this then drastically reduces the
likelihood of increasing social consensus by creating a science of
politics because scientific analysis cannot resolve the problem of
conflicting human objectives.
In social analysis, however, it has been impractical to create a
‘value-free’ vocabulary acceptable alike to social democrats, neo-
conservative free-marketeers, Marxists and feminists. Suppose we
try to describe a university staff meeting. A social democrat might
observe academic democracy at work. A neo-conservative may see
only a series of individuals asserting their interests. A Marxist may
see wage-slaves ideologically dominated by the imperatives of the
capitalist system. Meanwhile a feminist sees a series of males exert-
ing patriarchal domination.
Another example is the Internet, whose creators wanted infor-
mation to be freely available online, a value in its own right, but now
increasingly it is being challenged by a different value of those who
want to control and use such access to information. Thus the concepts
we use to observe social reality have values ‘built-in’ to them which
make ‘objective’ analysis difficult if not impossible.
An additional problem in applying scientific analysis to the social/
political arena is the complexity of the phenomena being studied.
Scientific method has so far been most successfully applied to phy-
sical systems, less successfully to biological systems composed
of physical systems, and with only limited success to human psycho-
logical systems composed of biological systems. So that it should be
no surprise that social systems comprising a still higher and more
complex level of system are most resistant to analysis.
Typically science is seen as characterised by the testing of hypo-
theses, through experiment. The experimental method is largely
closed to political scientists since they do not possess the power to
dictate to whole human societies how they should behave. In any case
experiments require identical control groups for comparison which, it
is arguable, cannot be created. Some small-scale laboratory simu-
lations of human power situations have been attempted with interest-
ing results (e.g. Milgram, 1965), but the applicability of the results of
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