Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
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
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Appendix 2. Note on Facts and Valuations 1047
ered only by this vague phrase, directly to his material or factual data. Statements that
something is, or is not, desirable from the viewpoint of “society” will surprisingly
often appear even in statistical work without any conclusive argument about how such
a value judgment has been reached and precisely what it means.
From the beginning of social science the idea of a “harmony of interests” was
closely associated with the idea of “common welfare.” “Social value” was originally
conceived of as a value common to all participants in a society. The harmony doctrine,
obviously, made the calculation of the social value out of individual interests so much
easier, and this fact, undoubtedly, has been an advantage in its use which has given
it much of its survival strength.® We want to believe that what we hold to be desirable
for society is desirable for all its members.
The harmony doctrine is essential to “liberalism” as it has historically developed out
of the philosophies of Enlightenment (the term “liberalism” is here used in its most
inclusive sense). From the very beginning liberalism was split into two wings, a
radical one and a conservative one. The radical wing upheld the opinion that a harmony
of interests would exist only in a society where the institutions—^and primarily the
distribution of property—were changed so as to accord with the precepts of these
philosophies. The “natural order” studied by the radical liberals was, therefore, a
hypothetical society where the “natural laws” functioned undisturbed by “corrupted
institutions”: where, thus, for example, all “natural” titles to property—with Locke
the “fruits of labor”—^were retained, but society was purified of all monopolies and
privileges and, consequently, from “exploitation.” The conservative wing, on the
other hand, proceeded to apply the harmony doctrine directly to the unreformed
society (which, incidentally, was a corruption of thought, as they all usually adhered
to a philosophy which reserved the concepts “natural order” and “social harmony”
for a society purged as severely as the radicals wanted it). The radical wing became
the reformers, the visionaries, and the Utopians: it gave birth to various schools of
communism, socialism, syndicalism and anarchism. The conservative wing profited
from its “realism.” In its practical work it abstained from speculating about a “natural
order” other than the one that existed; it studied society as it was and actually came
to lay the foundations for modern social science. For this we have to be grateful to
conservative liberals. But they perpetuated in modern social science, also, their static
and fatalistic political bias, a do-nothing liberalism. The harmony doctrine in this
setting was, of course, even less well founded than the radical liberals’ idea that only
in a very diflferent “natural order” would human interests be mutually compatible.
Economics—or “political economy,” to use the old-fashioned but much more ade-
quate term (the attribute “political” has been dropped for convenience and as a
tribute to the purity of science) —is the oldest branch of social science in the sense
that it was the earliest to develop into a system of observations and inferences organized
under the principle of social laws.*’ In economics we can most conveniently study
the influence of the static and fatalistic general bias upon the development of a social
science discipline. From natural science it early borrowed the concept of “equilibrium.”
This concept, as well as the derived concepts of “balance,” “stability,” “normal,” are
all often heavily loaded with the static and fatalistic valuations. To an extent these
• Myrdal, Das PoUtische Element in der Nationalokonomischen Doktrinbildung.
^
History and political science are, of course, older, but they never reached agreement
upon a system of causation.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
