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1048

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 2. A Methodological Note on Facts and Valuations in Social Science - 3. The History and Logic of the Hidden Valuations in Social Science

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1048 An American Dilemma
concepts have taken over the role of the conservative variant of the old harmony doc-
trine. It is, of course, possible to utilize them in a purely instrumental manner and
the success of generations of economists in gradually perfecting our knowledge of
economic relations is due to such a utilization of the various notions of social equi-
librium and disequilibrium. The “assumptions” of economic theory have been useful.
But their load of inherited static and fatalistic valuations is heavy, and they will often
turn into convenient covers for biases in this direction.
The direction is loose and general, however. Like “welfare” and “harmony of
interest,” those concepts can be bent considerably. Their role for the underhand
presentation of practical conclusions is rather the formal one of providing objective-
sounding, technical terms for the subjective valuations which are actually pressing for
expression. They thus permit entrance of the biases of a time, a social setting or a
personality. These biases may be conservative or “radical” (radical in the sense of
being Marxian). The relation between, on the one hand, the specific biases in research
and, on the other hand, these value-metaphysical thought-structures forming the
frame for economic theory and research, is primarily this: that the arbitrariness inherent
in the structures allows the specific biases room for play which, under the rules of
scientific strictness, they should not have had. But it is equally important to remember
that they do not give absolutely free leeway. They are headed in one definite direc-
tion. As long as economics keeps its valuations implicit and hidden, the utilization of
those concepts will tend to insert in scientific work a do-nothing bias.
The younger social sciences have followed much the same track. A few remarks,
mainly by way of illustration, will be made concerning American sociology, particu-
larly as it has influenced the study of the Negro problem.
Few have had more influence on contemporary American social science thinking than
William Graham Sumner. He was a political economist of strong laissez-faire lean-
ings before he became a sociologist, and he continued to indoctrinate generations of
Yale undergraduates with the economic doctrines of Manchester-liberalism.® Sumner
is usually believed to have had two sides: on the political side he advocated Social
Darwinism’* and was a conservative; on the scientific side he was the great observer
of “folkways and mores.” These two sides were closer than is commonly thought. His
observations that there were folkways and mores which gave societies a static stability
buttressed his belief that social change was difficult to achieve. His desires to maintain
the status quo led him to conclude that there should be no attempt to change the folk-
ways and mores. The unification of the two streams in Sumner’s thinking gives us an
example of the fallacious attempt to draw practical conclusions from purely factual
premises:
The great stream of time and earthly things will sweep on just the same in spite of
us . . . Everyone of us is a child of his age and cannot get out of it. He is in the stream
and is swept along with it. All his science and philosophy come to him out of it. There-
fore the tide will not be changed by us. It will swallow up both us and our experiments
‘Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization^ Vol. II, (1927),
pp. 236-237, 429 and 430.
**
Social Darwinism refers to that continuation of the laissez-faire movement after it took
on the Darwinian terminology of ‘^struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest.” The
ideological father of Sumner was the founder of Social Darwinism—namely, Herbert Spencer.

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