I was deeply affected by the “rationalistic turn” in the social sciences which coincided with my University days from 1960-64. My initial field of study had been modern languages simply because I had been good in school at French and German but I was soon seduced by economics and politics and duly switched in my final two Honours years to those subjects
It’s only recently that some
books have started to appear pointing to just how much military funding
and the Cold War had contributed to the new focus of the social sciences on
rationality.
Robert McNamara best embodied
the spirit of calculation first in the Ford Company, then in the US Department
of Defence – where he introduced the idea of PPBS during the Vietnam war - and
finally in the World Bank
But it was to be a decade
later before I got properly into the works of people such as Herbert Simon, Etzioni,
Lindblom and Wildavsky and indeed I studied them closely only in the 1980s as
part of the UK’s first MSc course in Policy Analysis with Lewis Gunn in which I
enrolled in the early 1980s
And it was 1992 before I came across “Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of Reason in the Western World” which I barely understood but loved - and was to be an early warning shot across the bows of the technocrats in what has, since the onslaught of populism in the past 5 years, become a continuous salvo.
So it’s about time we sought some clarity - and perhaps balance – in this fraught debate about rationality and The Enlightenment. Particularly because the latest knight to present himself in the lists - in all his shining armour – is none other than Steven Pinker, the Panglossian Optimist and author of Enlightenment Now who has a new book called “Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters” with the embedded discussion thread being fairly useful.
I sense, however, that getting through the bibliography below is going to be a long haul – so let me just flag the key reading up and we’ll see how it goes
Background Reading
Crisis of expertise CEU 2021 syllabus A fascinating outline of a recent course run by the Central European University
The
Dialectic of Enlightenment; by Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) It was these German
emigrees of the 1930s who brought to America the critique of the enlightenment
which arguably sparked the recent right-wing backlash. Ironic that they did so
at a time when scientism was taking off with a vengeance!
The Origins of American Social Science Dorothy Ross (1990) Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from historical change and from the mass poverty and class conflict of Europe. Before the Civil War, this vision of American exceptionalism drew social scientists into the national effort to stay the hand of time. Not until after the Civil War did industrialization force Americans to confront the idea and reality of historical change. The social science disciplines had their origin in that crisis and their development is a story of efforts to evade and tame historical transformation in the interest of exceptionalist ideals. This is the first book to look broadly at American social science in its historical context and to demonstrate the central importance of the national ideology of American exceptionalism to the development of the social sciences and to American social thought generally.
Reclaiming the Enlightenment – toward a politics of radical engagement by Stephen Eric Bronner (2004) The start of the left’s comeback
Shaky Foundations – the politics-social science nexus in post-war america Mark Solovey (2013) embraced a strategy that rested on two key commitments, to scientism and to social engineering. The first commitment involved accepting, in a broad sense, a unity- of- science viewpoint, which assumed that the social sciences lagged behind the more mature natural sciences and which posited that the former should follow in the footsteps of the latter. Often this viewpoint meant the social sciences needed to rid themselves of their involvement with a wide array of humanistic forms of inquiry, including “soft” qualitative, philosophical, historical, and normative forms of analysis. Just as importantly, social scientists had to establish a clear distinction between scientific social inquiry and other value- laden spheres of social action, such as politics, social reform, and ideology, and especially Marxist or socialist perspectives.
More positively, this viewpoint implied that the path to scientific credibility and progress lay in the pursuit of more rigorous, systematic, and quantitative investigations that promised to yield accurate predictions about what individuals, social groups, and social systems, including economic and political systems, would do under stated conditions. The other key commitment, concerning the social sciences’ practical value, indicated that this work would contribute to the national welfare and human betterment more generally through social engineering applications. This commitment often rested on an instrumental viewpoint, which regarded social science knowledge, techniques of analysis, and expertise as apolitical, nonideological, and value free. A very common idea associated with this position suggested that basic or pure scientific inquiry, whether in the social or the natural sciences, produced value- neutral knowledge of a fundamental sort. Such knowledge, in turn, provided the basis for realizing desired practical goals in a couple of ways, depending on the specific domains of investigation. Certain lines of investigation sought to place the processes of decision making on a rational basis. Other lines promised to facilitate control over individuals, social groups, and social systems. Both manners of realizing social sciences’ practical value rested on a technocratic outlook, as their proponents generally assumed that leaders and managers in various sectors of society, especially in government, comprised the most relevant audiences for social science knowledge
As
the first chapter’s consideration of the NSF debate indicates and as subsequent
chapters explain more fully, basic questions about the scientific identity,
practical utility, and political import of the social sciences attracted
extensive attention and provoked considerable controversy in the early postwar
years. The second, third, and fourth chapters examine the stories of the
military, the Ford Foundation, and the new NSF, respectively, to describe how
each patron staked out its importance within the context of a transformed and
largely new Cold War patronage system, to analyze the ways patrons and the
scholars who worked most closely with them addressed long- standing questions
and contemporary disputes about the social sciences and their funding, and to
illuminate pointed challenges that arose as these patrons sought to advance
scholarship grounded in scientistic and social engineering commitments.
By
midcentury nobody doubted that the recently unified Department of Defense (DOD)
was and would remain the dominant patron of American science for the
foreseeable future. So for social scientists seeking support for their work in
the Cold War years, the enormous defense science establishment naturally had
great significance. Building on a sizable body of work about the military–
social science partnership that includes many excellent accounts of specific
disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, chapter 2 focuses on the
development of military funding policies and programs and examines the struggles
of social scientists to establish their presence in the natural
science–oriented defense science establishment. These scholars encountered
persistent conservative suspicions and often found it hard to gain support from
their superiors in the defense science establishment, including skeptical
physical scientists.
Under these conditions, social scientists had little choice but to argue strongly for scientistic forms of inquiry and their social engineering applications. Such ideas then became pervasive in military social science agencies and programs, thereby providing valuable support to many influential fields of research in ways consistent with those social engineering commitments. Moreover, these developments stimulated the growth of the military– social science partnership, which became increasingly important to American military operations and Cold War strategy by the time of the Kennedy administration.
Cold
war social sciences – knowledge production, liberal democracy and human nature
ed M Solovey and H Cravens (2012)
https://www.academia.edu/7398929/Cold_War_Social_Science_Specter_Reality_or_Useful_Concept
The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis;
Aaron Wildavsky (originally 1979) but special edition with foreward by B Guy Peters
(2018). This was the analyst who almost single-handedly held the rationalist school up to ridicule and showed how political judgement came into every key decision....
Nervous States – Democracy and the decline of Reason; William Davies (2019) A Fantastic and highly original book - reviewed here by one of my favourite political science writers - David Runciman
"When Michael Gove announced before the Brexit vote that the British public had had enough of experts, he was thought to have introduced something new and shocking into our politics. As his interviewer Faisal Islam responded incredulously at the time, Gove sounded like an “Oxbridge Trump”. Davies’s book wants to give us a sense of perspective on this feeling of outrage. We shouldn’t really be so shocked, because what Gove said is at some basic level true: the claim to expertise is deeply alienating to many people. And for that reason it is nothing new – the battle between the experts and their critics has been going on for centuries.
Davies traces it back to the 17th century and to two key developments in the evolution of modern politics: the attempt to distinguish reason from emotion and the desire to separate out war from peace. A peaceful politics built on reason created the space for expertise to flourish, including the birth of modern science and the launch of learned societies to champion its cause. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying – and stable politics depends on the authority of the state. The problem is that these categories can quickly get jumbled up. Experts start to present themselves as the ultimate authorities and to view their specialist knowledge as the voice of reason. Instead of politics making expertise possible, experts come to assume that they are the ones making politics possible. That arrogance is what alienates people, and it helps to undermine the basic distinction between reason and emotion on which modern politics depends. It makes us feel bad.
Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying. This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state. Davies also identifies many of the reasons why this fight has become so fraught in recent years. Some of it has to do with the pace of change. Expertise depends on our ability to fix the world in place long enough for an agreed version of the facts to take hold: it needs time to stand still for a moment. That doesn’t happen any more. As Davies writes: “The promise of digital computing, by contrast, is to maximise sensitivity to a changing environment.” Disruption is the watchword of Silicon Valley and it spells the death knell of conventional expertise.
The other great advantage that the new breed of data analysts has over technocrats and bureaucrats is that it appears to be on the side of our emotions in an increasingly emotional age. “The hostility directed towards experts stems from a deep-lying sense that, in their attention to mathematical laws and models, they are not really interested in individual people, their desires, fears and lives. Facebook doesn’t suffer the same alienation because its ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ are so utterly different. Its users express themselves in their own words and feelings.” Unlike analogue expertise, the digital version hides behind a touchy-feely interface, notwithstanding that what lies underneath is more technically complex than ever. “As the maths has become more and more sophisticated, the user no longer even experiences it as mathematical.”
These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can’t decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren’t any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon.
For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies’s argument is often based on versions of the same. In one instance, he uses surveys to describe the current state of popular opinion without saying anything about the limitations of such an approach. He cites a 2017 survey that showed that while 53% of Ukip supporters believe torture works, 56% think it should be permitted, meaning 3% of Ukip supporters think that we should torture people just for the hell of it. “This is a political vision,” Davies writes, “in which the infliction of physical pain, and even death, is how authority should work, whether that be in the criminal justice system, school, security services or the family.” But that is a big claim to base on the views of such a tiny number of people (given Ukip supporters in this survey would have been a minute fraction of the whole, since almost no one was voting Ukip in 2017, we are talking about only a handful of respondents). What four or five people might think doesn’t sound like the basis of a political vision to me.
The notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon. Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time. He draws on the statistical work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to show that falling life expectancy in the US is driving feelings of insecurity, particularly in regions that voted for Trump. But he also wants to argue that these same people feel more insecure because experts routinely ignore their bodily experiences. No doubt evidence of suffering and ignorance of suffering are both part of the story. But Davies does not explain how they are related. Sometimes the facts he uses are simply wrong. He states that we now live in societies where “around 50% of people go to university and 50% don’t”, something that divides us down the middle. But while it is true that around half of young people now go to university, among older generations the figures are much lower, which means that the large majority are still not university educated. Brexit is inexplicable unless this fact is taken into account.
This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it, which covers many concerns in our age of political upheaval – from drone warfare and safe spaces to imperialism and the Anthropocene. It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities.
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