Fragile Normativity and the Politics of the Social Sciences, c. 1940-1975
This dissertation reconstructs the interactions between German-speaking émigré intellectuals and social scientific debates in the mid-century United States. While classical interpretations often assume émigré thought was founded upon a humanistic rejection of American social scientific method, this dissertation argues that skepticism about the social sciences was far more complicated and wide-ranging from the 1940s to 1970s. Many figures, not just émigrés, began to question the methodological and epistemological premises of the social sciences. Above all, intellectuals wondered how and to what degree one could make normative claims while maintaining an objective conception of social scientific inquiry. These questions were strikingly similar to those asked by prior generations in fin de siècle Germany. In Chapter One, I trace back this intellectual lineage back, examining how Max Weber entered many neo-Kantian concerns about the social sciences into his writings in the 1910s and 1920s. The following chapters then pick up in the 1940s, and move chronologically into the 1970s, showing hidden continuities between these earlier Weberian problems and those in the mid-century. Chapter Two looks at how Alfred Schutz, Eric Voegelin, and Hans Kelsen laced together their philosophies of the social sciences with American democratic theory. Chapter Three follows Theodor Adorno back to the Bundesrepublik, examining how his reception ofWeber coincided with his thinking on values and political ethics. Chapter Four centers around Hannah Arendt, the Committee on Social Thought, and the role of intellectual responsibility during Vietnam. Chapter Five looks at Herbert Marcuse’s critique of social science alongside the New Left’s rejection of prescriptive political philosophy. In studying the historical and institutional dimensions of these mid-century debates about values and the social sciences, I contend that we can further clarify the constraints placed upon political thought. Extensive doubts about expertise, objectivity, and normativity led many thinkers to shy away from blueprints, favoring flexible modes of threading together politics and ethics. This produced a distinct modality of political thinking undergirded by what I call fragile normativity, a vision of political thought that rejected strong normative claims, as well as social scientific neutrality. This dissertation therefore contributes more broadly to the history of mid- century political thought, arguing for understanding the manifold shapes in which political thinking could appear—the numerous countercurrents running against, or between, both value- free social science and prescriptive political philosophy.
Critical Theory, Intellectual History, normativity, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, values
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