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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 4. Jg 1935, Heft 1 |
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From philosophy he may have derived some of that cosmic irony and cosmic wrath which gave power and distinction to his writings. On the whole American preparation for the social sciences has been positive, empirical, fragmentary, not classical or philosophical or totalitarian.
Reference must also be made to another source of American training and inspiration in the social sciences, namely, German universities. From these institutions American scholars have drawn some of their best and worst features. From Germany were borrowed enthusiasm for patient research, minute inquiries, and that elusive and deceptive thing called "objectivity". From a country so differently conditioned in social and economic respects as Germany was in the Bismarck-Wilhelminic age, in comparison with the United States, our scholars imported that which was easily exportable, namely, the merest technicalities of science. To the same source of inspiration is thus due a large part of the passion for classification, formalism, and airy speculation which have done so much to sterilize thought in the social sciences.
As may be imagined from what has been said, the spirit of American scholarship in the social sciences is intensely empirical. The assumption has been made that the method of the physical sciences can be applied in the study of social phenomena and that the data of the social sciences are identical with, or analogous to, the data of the physical sciences. Thus it is commonly taken for granted in academic circles that if a volume on history is dry, extensive, accurate as to specific facts, and well documented, it is scientific, that is, true in some sense of the word. It seems to be widely believed also that the selection, amassing, and organization of social data can proceed in a kind of vacuum, beyond the influence of assumptions, hypotheses, and predilections. The belief appears to be held as a truth, rather than cherished as a method or device for influencing thought and action or as a dodge for escaping the pressures of primitive notions in the community.
This is no place to argue the question whether the data of the social sciences are identical with, or analogous to, the data of the physical sciences or the other question whether the method of the physical sciences is really applicable to the data of the social sciences. But there are signs that these issues are dogging the steps and haunting the dreams of American students, and that a disruptive conflict over them is approaching. When the conflict breaks in full force it may split American intellectual life as wide open as the introduction of humanistic learning into Western Europe at the time of the Renaissance. But this is merely an aside.
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 4. Jg 1935, Heft 1. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1935, Seite 63. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_-_Jahrgang_4_-_Heft_1.pdf/65&oldid=- (Version vom 29.8.2022)
