Value judgment dispute

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In German sociology and economics, a dispute over the question of whether the social sciences should make normatively binding statements about the measures to be taken by politics or whether political actions can be scientifically justified is called a value judgment dispute .

In the years before the First World War , the dispute was mainly between the members of the Verein für Socialpolitik . The main opponents were Max Weber , Werner Sombart and Gustav Schmoller . In 1909 he strongly motivated the establishment of the German Society for Sociology .

The debate between the proponents of critical theory and critical rationalism during the 1960s is sometimes referred to as the "second value judgment dispute" ; better known as the positivism dispute .

the initial situation

The dispute over value judgments , especially in the years before the beginning of the First World War, was not about empirical questions, but about the relationship between science and politics. In a narrower sense it was about the field of social policy . The question arose here of what objective science could do for politics, whether it could set up generally binding values, value judgments or “should” sentences.

There were two groups facing each other in the Verein für Socialpolitik . On the one hand, younger scientists, especially Max Weber and Werner Sombart , took the position that science by itself cannot lead to any value judgment, and that research must always be strictly separated from evaluative considerations. They were confronted by the Kathedersozialisten , for whom the scientific activity also included the position on socio-political problems, such as those on the social question .

The arguments about these questions had already started about 20 years earlier, as documented by the article by Lujo Brentano from 1896, which this liberal-minded author and founding member of the Verein für Socialpolitik with a new preliminary remark 15 years later in the Archives for Social Science and Social Policy under the The title “About value judgments in economics” was published again after the value judgment dispute had flared up in all sharpness among the German-speaking social scientists.

The Chair Socialists

The term Catholic Socialism has a polemical origin; it marked a group of university professors who actually were largely hostile to socialism. Gustav Schmoller, for example, one of the leading thinkers in this direction, saw the social policy he was calling for as the only way to prevent a revolution . In his view, a revolution must necessarily arise from an imbalance between the various social classes; only a balance of the groups involved in the production process in the state can ensure social stability. The yardstick for this equilibrium is exclusively the distribution of property, whereby, however, by no means equality - Schmoller was convinced of the "natural inequality" of people - but rather "justice" should be sought. The ultimate means to achieve social justice, however, and to achieve the balance of classes saw Schmoller just in a comprehensive state social policy. Lindenlaub differentiates in the "Kathedersozialismus" from this "conservative" , above all on the equalization of the classes and ultimately aiming at the state welfare , for example Schmoller's the "liberal" , which in contrast emphasizes the individual rights and the freedom of the individual. However, this group also did not renounce to see the state as the main carrier of social measures.

Social policy in the German Empire

The Verein für Socialpolitik , within the framework of which the dispute on value judgments discussed here essentially took place, was founded in 1873 “as a group of men [...] who had recognized that society wanted to be reformed in a peaceful way with the help of social reform they escape the revolution ” . In fact, from 1878 onwards , Bismarck began to pursue socio-political goals and, in parallel with the view of the Verein für Socialpolitik , he saw them primarily as a vehicle for national integration policy. For example, he wanted “the by Napoleon III. Take over state workers' pension funds set in motion for France for Germany and in this way generate conservative pensioner attitudes among the workers. Could the worker, with such care, still stand up against his benefactor? ” Hans-Ulrich Wehler - he headed a relevant chapter with “ Social insurance instead of social reform ” - takes the view that Bismarck's social policy wanted to prevent social restructuring.

After the end of Bismarck's reign in 1890, social policy was continued by his successors, with noticeable effects, and "the fundamental mistrust between the state and the workers was replaced for the first time by a new form of partnership" . As before, social policy was an “element of German reasons of state” , maybe - here the assessments fluctuate - no longer as exclusively as before, but certainly to a large extent still interested in the weakening of the labor movement. After 1890, as can be seen from the development of social democracy, it apparently achieved this goal better than before.

The value judgment in science

When the actual value judgment dispute began in 1909, the socio-political situation in Germany had changed significantly since the time when the Verein für Socialpolitik was founded . The association may have contributed to this change to a certain extent; The fact is that he strived to exert influence on politics to a greater extent, as well as that he himself hindered his effectiveness through often contradicting demands that some of his members made on politics.

Schmoller's starting position

The demand for freedom of science from evaluation is not only found in Max Weber and Werner Sombart. Schmoller had already expressed this in 1893.

“Anyone who presents freedom, or justice, or equality [...] as an isolated supreme principle, from which one can deductively deduce the correct action with inexorable strict logic, completely misunderstands the true nature of these ethical postulates; they are guiding stars and target points [...] which, in the right combination, dictate good behavior, [...] but which do not represent empirical truths from which one could further syllogistically infer. "

- Schmoller p. 25

Science can achieve the “irrefutable truth” the more it renounces teaching an ought; Although the “ultimate goal of all knowledge” is a practical one, an ought always only emerges from the “context of the whole” .

Weber's Objectivity Essay

As early as 1904, Max Weber formulated his point of view very clearly. It could "never be the task of empirical science [...] to determine binding norms and ideals in order to be able to derive recipes for practice." "The creation of a practical general denominator for our [social or political] problems in the form of generally applicable last Ideals [...] as such would not only be practically insoluble, but also absurd in themselves. ” But even if values ​​could not be the result of empirical science, they are still accessible to it as research objects. In this way, social science will become practically relevant again. The distinction between “ends” (i.e. values) and “means” to achieve these ends is part of the logical set of empirical social science. This could:

  • assess the appropriateness of a remedy for a given purpose,
  • judge a purpose in a certain historical situation as meaningful or meaningless (obviously this means attainable or unattainable),
  • show further consequences of the means used and thus provide the material for consideration (the decision in favor of one or the other consequential effect is a question of value and logically inaccessible to empirical science),
  • check the inner contradiction of the purposes,
  • tracing the given purposes back to secretly underlying "ultimate" purposes.

But otherwise values also play an important role in science: the selection of the research object is based on values ​​- namely the research interest - that the researcher applies to his object. If Weber's position was later referred to as that of a “value-free” science, especially during the so-called positivism dispute, this is based on a misunderstanding that may have been caused by the overly one-sided title of Weber's second essay ( The sense of “value freedom” etc.) has been promoted: Weber's assertion is only that the validity of values ​​cannot be scientifically proven; Incidentally, he sees values ​​intervening in the work of the scientist in many ways.

According to Weber, the logical separation between end and means amounts to a functional, personal separation: In order to find the means appropriate to an end, a specialist, a scientist, is required; the decision about the ends, on the other hand, is politics. He was by no means of the opinion that a scientist should stay away from this; he himself interfered in the politics of his time. Of course, the scientist cannot represent his political values ​​as a "scientist"; at the moment of the evaluation he changes his function in society and becomes a "politician".

The ways in which politics and empirical science arrive at their results and decisions therefore have fundamentally different structures for Weber; With empirical science, Weber could perhaps rephrase this, the methodically clean transformation of statements into other statements, but not that of statements into imperatives. The fact that there is a structural limit in empirical science and that leaving values ​​out of science is not itself a question of value is shown by the term “ creep ” used in the debate of 1909 : trying to find values ​​with scientific means is not simply based on another view of the social function of the scientist, but is methodologically dubious.

The 1909 debate

Werner Sombart and Max Weber

Both the relationship between pure science and practical political demand as well as the arbitrariness of the should sentences derived from science play an important role in Sombart's oral contribution, which triggered the actual discussion, in a debate by the Verein für Socialpolitik on September 29, 1909. Reason for Sombart's remarks was a lecture by Eugen von Philippovich : “The national economy as a means to achieve national prosperity or, if we call this ability productivity, the productivity of the national economy is the real object of our science.” Against this “everywhere ethically saturated” equation of productivity and Sombart turned to an unspecified public prosperity :

“Does building a church mean promoting prosperity? The believing man will of course say: Certainly, that is part of it, [...] and the atheist will say: It is a shame that a church is being built again, wasting the money for such unproductive expenses [...] Everything works the subjective evaluation into it and the subjective evaluation evades the objective determination [...]. "

- Negotiations p. 568

According to Sombart, science can only determine which practical effects can occur under which practical conditions, and in this way arrive at unquestionable results, but in no way make practical demands or norms. The reduction to “establishing and objectively proving that something is” is a prerequisite for “an objective understanding about something that is” , and the need for such an understanding is all the greater as an “increasing personality and value differentiation “ Leave the mere establishment of the objectively existing as the final point of unification. Furthermore, the subjective evaluations on which a scientific investigation is based, either tacitly or subliminally, are responsible for the fact that the demands ultimately made on practice are often completely different from one another among different scientists; this apparent (albeit scientifically disguised) arbitrariness is responsible for the fact that science loses not only its “reputation” , but also its effect on practice.

In his first contribution to this debate, Max Weber first addressed the contribution by Robert Liefmann that immediately preceded him . The latter had claimed to fully agree with Sombart's statements about value judgments, but then used the terms “prosperity” and “productivity” in such a way that Weber accused him that it was exclusively business interests on which the basis was based. In the further course Weber presented some theses from his objectivity essay from 1904 (to which Sombart had implicitly referred). Thereupon Weber spoke about the concept of productivity from the point of view of the subjective evaluations contained therein and recommended that it be "thrown into the orcus" .

Rudolf Goldscheid

Sombart and Weber experienced the most definite contradiction in the debate from Rudolf Goldscheid . Like Sombart and Weber, Goldscheid insisted on a strict separation of value-free and judgmental considerations, but declared a "normative economy" to be sensible and necessary. In fact, a value-free economy is not possible at all, and before what should be can sneak in "through a back door" again, one has to get to know the value prerequisites by which one can orient oneself. It is not entirely clear in what form Goldscheid saw values ​​become relevant for science; evidently, in his opinion, it is not just a matter of prerequisites, but also of the results of research, such as the formulations “normative economy” and “we can only arrive at differentiated ideals if […]” emerges. In addition, Goldscheid stated that the selection of scientific topics was already based on values, that 'general value requirements' were necessary in order to master the 'infinity of problems'.

In his second contribution, which concludes the debate, Max Weber pointed out that he had been advocating the latter for a long time, but rejected Goldscheid's other remarks on the problem of values ​​without, however, going beyond what had already been said.

The dispute over value judgments produced a wealth of publications in the following years. Among other things, the committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik , which had the task of discussing the selection of the problems to be presented to the General Assembly , dealt with this . The meeting is not recorded, but the written comments were published in manuscript in 1913. This volume contains the original version of Max Weber's 1918 Freedom of Value essay (pp. 83–120).

The answer of a Catholic Socialist: Gustav Schmoller

In his objectivity essay from 1904, Max Weber opposed a scientific justification of the maxim of balancing the parties: "The 'middle line' is no more scientific truth than the most extreme party ideals from the right or the left" . This, like the demand for value-free science in general, represented a factual attack on the standpoint of the chair socialism, in that "the demand for a balance between the classes was logically placed on the same level as the standpoints of class and party interests" . Apparently this can be traced back to the revision to which Schmoller subjected his views on value freedom from 1893 in 1911. In the additions to his work from 1893, he wrote that ethics was becoming "more and more an empirical science" and that there were "alongside subjective, objective value judgments" . “Anyone who believes in the increasing triumph of objective judgments over the one-sided, moral and political ideals in science and in life will not become as contemptuous as he [d. i. Max Weber], think of their penetration into science ” . "[...] we will be able to claim that the higher the moral and intellectual education of a people is, the sooner it will be possible for the parties and classes to converge, however much the daily quarrel keeps dividing them" . As the objective good that continues to develop in the historical process, the common good appears here again , which for Schmoller had already established the demand for party and class equalization. Basically, the establishment of moral norms is no longer the task of science, since what must come out as a proposition at the end has already been determined by Schmoller. At most, by presupposing the objective good , science can arrive at individual practical demands that are intended to serve the realization of the presupposition - but this procedure has already been commented on under the keyword fraud . - In his Freedom of Values ​​essay, Max Weber sharply criticized Schmoller's point of view: one should in no way "calm down scientifically with any [...] factual self- evident fact that certain practical statements, however widespread, are scientifically created by convention" .

aftermath

In 1959 Christian von Ferber wrote : “In contrast to Max Weber's resigned impression, […] [meanwhile] the prevailing view, which is even put forward by well-known representatives of 'judgmental' economics, is that the point of view developed by Max Weber is reflected in his arguments than the stronger one ” . Whether Ferber's statement means that Max Weber's intellectual claim is actually being honored in contemporary economics remains to be seen here. The theses presented in the two fundamental essays by Max Weber, however, repeatedly occupy the discussion of methods in economics and social sciences; that they belong to the foundations of modern social science is a generally divided consensus today.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Hans Albert : Economic Ideology and Political Theory , Göttingen 1972. P. 10
  2. ↑ See Otthein Rammstedt , The Question of Freedom of Values and the Founding of the German Society for Sociology , in: Lars Clausen / Carsten Schlüter [-Knauer] (eds.), Hundred Years “ Community and Society ” , Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1991, Pp. 549-560.
  3. ^ The differences of opinion among economists , Cosmopolis Vol. 2 (1896), April issue
  4. ↑ on this paragraph cf. Lindenlaub pp. 86-95
  5. ↑ quoted from Lindenlaub pp. 89/90
  6. ↑ Lindenlaub p. 86
  7. ↑ Lindenlaub p. 1
  8. ↑ Stürmer, Michael : The restless realm. Germany 1866-1918. Berlin 1983. (= The Germans and their Nation Vol. 3) p. 226
  9. ↑ Wehler, Hans-Ulrich: The German Empire 1871-1918. Göttingen 51983. (= German history, edited by Joachim Leuschner. Volume 9) p. 136
  10. ↑ a b Striker p. 269
  11. ^ "... the revisionists in the SPD received a boost" Stürmer p. 269
  12. ↑ "[...] an association without any influence on the working class world, but which had a considerable effect on the government and especially on Bismarck [...]" Patrick Verley in: Palmade, Guy (ed.): Das bürgerliche Zeitalter. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, (= Fischer Weltgeschichte Bd. 27) ISBN 3-596-60027-8 , p. 306. - For more details: Lindenlaub pp. 14–83; 141-153 et al.
  13. ↑ cf. Linden leaves p. 19
  14. ↑ Schmoller p. 29
  15. ↑ Weber, objectivity -Aufsatz S. 149
  16. ↑ Weber, objectivity -Aufsatz p.154
  17. ↑ Weber, objectivity -Aufsatz S. 149-151
  18. ↑ Objectivity essay z. BS 181/182
  19. ↑ z. B. Sombart in: Negotiations, p. 570
  20. ↑ The nature of economic productivity and the possibility of measuring it , negotiations, p. 329 ff.
  21. ^ Negotiations, p. 358
  22. ^ Negotiations, p. 571
  23. ↑ negotiations pp 567-570
  24. ^ Negotiations, p. 577
  25. ↑ negotiations pp 582-583
  26. ↑ negotiations pp 595-597
  27. ↑ Objectivity essay, p. 154
  28. ↑ Lindenlaub p. 441
  29. ↑ cf. Lindenlaub pp. 440-443
  30. ↑ Schmoller pp. 78–81
  31. ↑ Weber p. 502
  32. ↑ Ferber p. 165

See also

literature

  • Albert, Gert: The value judgment dispute . In: Georg Kneer / Stephan Moebius (Hrsg.): Sociological controversies . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, pp. 14–45
  • Albert, Hans , Topitsch, Ernst (eds.): Value judgment dispute , Darmstadt 1971
  • Comments on the discussion of value judgments in the committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik. - Printed as a manuscript in 1913.
  • von Ferber, Christian: The value judgment dispute 1909/1959. Attempt at a scientific interpretation. In: Topitsch, Ernst (ed.): Logic of the social sciences. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 8th edition 1972. (= New Scientific Library 6, Sociology) ISBN 3-462-00405-0 or ISBN 3-462-00406-9
  • Glaeser, Johannes: "The dispute about value judgments in German national economy. Max Weber, Werner Sombart and the ideals of social policy", Marburg 2014 (= contributions to the history of the German-speaking economy) ISBN 978-3-7316-1077-9
  • Lindenlaub, Dieter: Directional struggles in the association for social politics. Science and social policy in the German Empire primarily from the beginning of the “New Course” to the outbreak of the First World War (1890–1914). Part I / II. Wiesbaden 1967. (= supplements to the quarterly journal for social and economic history No. 52/53)
  • Mittelstraß, Jürgen : Value judgment dispute , in: Encyclopedia: Philosophy and Philosophy of Science , 1996, (there also further literature)
  • Schluchter, Wolfgang : Freedom of values ​​and ethics of responsibility , Tübingen 1971
  • von Schmoller, Gustav: The economics, the economics and their method. First published in 1893 in: Concise Dictionary of Political Science. 1st edition Jena 1890–1897; in an extended version 1911 in: Concise Dictionary… 3rd edition Jena 1909–1911. Quoted here from the 1949 edition of Frankfurt am Main.
  • Negotiations of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Vienna, 1909. Leipzig 1910. (= Writings of the Verein für Socialpolitik Vol. 132)
  • Weber, Max: Collected essays on science teaching. Edited by Johannes Winckelmann. Tübingen 1988. ( Page-identical reprint of the 6th edition 1985), ISBN 3-16-845373-0 - In it the essays: The "objectivity" of sociological and sociopolitical knowledge. (First published in: Archive for Social Science and Social Policy. Volume 19. 1904) as well as: The sense of the "freedom of values" of the sociological and economic sciences. (First published in: Logos. Volume 7, 1918)

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