Speaking precision to power: the modern political role of social science

Social Research, Winter, 2006 by Theodore M. Porter

THE MODERN COMPACT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THE STATE ALLOWS FOR the flow of public money to research and an expectation that politicians will generally not meddle with the scientific work--on condition that the science, reciprocally, should stay clear of politics. That seems at first a harmless constraint, for what could be political about the formation and breakdown of atmospheric ozone, the dynamics of ocean currents, or the neurological development of a fetus? Yet in none of these areas can scientific research now stand apart from charged public issues. Indeed, while political pressures on science have grown in contemporary America, and especially in the current millennium, states and churches have never been indifferent to conceptions of nature. Still less can social knowledge pretend to be free of implications for policy and politics. The claim for its ideological neutrality depends on consigning social science to the realm of facts rather than values, while conceding the legitimacy of political judgment in deciding how to use this information as a basis for action. Not its objects--which, being social, political, economic, and historical, are very human--but its methods, rigorous and impersonal, are taken as the ground for social science objectivity.

Methodological rigor, often with an emphasis on quantification, has been part of the drive to make a science of society that can hold its head up in the company of physics, chemistry, and engineering. It is also part of the distancing from politics, which, ironically, underlies the accepted policy role for social science--not as the science of the legislator, but as a resource, untainted by ideology, to which legislators can look for information and analysis. This ideal is threatened by the current flourishing of partisan think tanks. Yet their prevalence, ironically, makes a reputation for objectivity all the more precious. I am concerned here less with the explicit politicization of social science than with the sacrifices required to shore up a reputation for rigor and freedom from ideology. Typically, this has required focusing on objects and problems that can be examined impersonally and trying to minimize the explicit invocation of judgment or insight. In the idiom of quantification--a pervasive idiom in this context--social science has been preoccupied with precision, with neutral information, even when the thing measured or characterized is not exactly what we are trying to comprehend.

QUANTIFYING SOCIETY

A wish to claim (or achieve) the status of science is not the only reason to measure and calculate in the human domain, and indeed the impulse to social quantification was not at first a scientific one. Numbers occur spontaneously and copiously in modern processes of economic exchange, and the rise of social statistics was driven by administrative ambitions as much as by scientific or mathematical ones (Desrosieres, 1998). The bureaucratic and the scientific, each with a claim to authority based on what Max Weber called objectivity, seem sometimes to meld together. An alliance of administration and science was part of the project of Enlightenment under eighteenth-century absolutism, and was especially fundamental to Condorcet's mathematical vision of what could be achieved by the French Revolution. Condorcet, significantly, had little place in his theories for politics as a contest among self-interested actors, preferring to see it as a collective endeavor to identity the true or correct course of action (Baker, 1975; Brian, 1994).

His conception of social science, though mathematical, was not based on specialized experts conducting research in towers of ivory, but of engaged, enlightened citizens who were ideally fitted to hold high offices. It was not wholly distinct from the ideal of an enlightened monarch who would take counsel from the most knowledgeable of his subjects. And while functionaries before and during the revolution were never too interested in the mathematical theory of juries and elections, they did take a keen interest in economic and demographic measures, including probabilistic estimates when a complete census was not possible. In the last decades of the old regime, and especially during the turbulence of the revolution, elite science assumed a role in the direction of the state that was without precedent, and that would not soon be equaled (Gillispie, 1980, 2004).

A very different form of social science was practiced by the mid-Victorian National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, which was founded in 1857. In this regime of gentlemanly aristocrats and flourishing public opinion, mathematics could scarcely have had much importance for high-level decisions. Here again, though in a different form, social science assumed its role not as something detached and objective, but as a form of knowledge appropriate for the highest echelons of state power. The active membership of the social science association included titled nobles, cabinet ministers, and top civil servants, who hoped through systematic investigation and discussion to raise government to a higher level of wisdom and efficiency (Goldman, 2002). Similar ambitions animated the American Social Science Association, established in 1865, though its membership, more professional and less elite, did not have the same access to political power. It declined in the 1880s as a new model of social science, grounded in disciplines linked to universities, began to take hold (Haskell, 1977).