The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
H.H. Chartrand
May 2002
Eugene F. Miller
Positivism, Historicism, and Political
Inquiry
American Political Science
Review
Volume 66, Issue
3
Sept. 1972,
796-817
Index
Introduction
Epistemological Issues That Divide Positivism and
Historicism
The Revolt Against Positivism in the Philosophy of
Science
The Growth of Historicism in American Political
Science
Conclusion: Beyond Positivism and Historicism in
Political Inquiry
Historicism has developed into an intellectual force of
extraordinary significance; it epitomizes our Weltanschauung (world
view). The historicist principle
not only organizes, like an invisible hand, the work of the cultural sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften), but also permeates everyday
thinking.
Karl Mannheim
1
Recent controversy in American political science about
the nature of political inquiry reflects an older and deeper conflict at the
level of epistemology between rival theories of knowledge. It is generally recognized that the
“behavioral revolution” brought into ascendancy an approach to political inquiry
whose epistemological roots lie in positivism and, ultimately, in classical
British empiricism. In the 1950s
and early 1960s the major theoretical opposition to behavioralism came from
writers whose own views about the nature of human knowledge were more or less in
agreement with the epistemological tradition deriving from Plato and Aristotle.
But what of the opposition to
behavioralism that developed in the late 1960s, producing what David Easton has
called “the post-behavioral revolution”? 2 Does it give expression to an
epistemological position that opposes modern empiricism?
The importance of a theory of knowledge within the
discipline of political science does not always correspond to its importance at
the time in the broader field of philosophy. It is fair to say that the political
scientists who fashioned the behavioral approach vastly overestimated the
standing of logical positivism or logical empiricism both in philosophy
generally and in the philosophy of science in particular. By 1950, positivism was virtually
dead as a philosophical movement.
It had come under strong attack even in the philosophy of science. The leading theory of knowledge by this
time was one whose foundations lie in the work of Kant and Hegel or, more
precisely, in the radicalization of the Hegelian tradition which occurred in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. The transformation of Hegelianism led to
a distinctive conception both of the world and of human knowledge. The world, or nature, came to be
understood in terms of flux, change, or becoming rather than fixity, permanence,
or being. Knowledge was now
conceived in terms of creation rather than discovery. Worldviews and theories were seen as
individual or social creations, which are shaped decisively by subrational
forces. It was denied that the
human mind can grasp the character of “reality” or “nature” in any final,
objective, or absolute way. The
position which I have described was developed comprehensively by Friedrich
Nietzsche in the 1800s. Yet a
number of other thinkers at that time and in the decades that followed came to
similar conclusions, often independently of the influence of Nietzsche or of
each other. This position was
expressed in a distinctively American idiom in the pragmatist movement,
particularly by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. 3
It was developed in
*This is a revised version of a paper presented at the
1970 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association.
1. Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul
Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 84. The lengthy essay from which this
quotation is taken is entitled “Historicism.”
2. “The New Revolution in Political Science,” American
Political Science Review, 63 (December, 1969), 1051-1061. This address is reprinted in David
Easton, The Political System, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp.
323-348.
3. For recent discussions of the development of American
pragmatism from Peirce to Mead, see H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968) and Charles Morris, The Pragmatic
Movement in American Philosophy (New York: Braziller, 1970). For Dewey, see especially his
Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1950),
Logic:The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), and The
Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960). For discussions of Dewey’s theory of
knowledge which bring out its relativistic aspects, see particularly the essays
by John Herman Randall, Bertrand Russell, and Arthur E. Murphy in The
Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston: Northwestern
University, 1939). This volume also
contains an interesting rejoinder by Dewey. A valuable collection of Mead’s writings
is contained in Anselm M. Strauss, ed., The Social Psychologv of George
Herbert Mead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). See also John W. Petras, ed., George
Herbert Mead: Essays in his Social Philosophy (New York: Teachers’ College
Press, 1968).
796
Wittgenstein. 4 In
This new theory of knowledge had a profound influence on
American historians after the turn of the century, especially on those who wrote
about the history of political theory.
I wish to examine the recent debate about the nature of
political inquiry in light of the deeper conflict in epistemology, now almost a
century old, between positivism and its principal foe. A major difficulty in this undertaking is
to decide on a name for the relativistic theory of knowledge that stands in
opposition to positivism. Among the
terms that might be applied to it are “perspectivism,” “subjectivism,”
“relativism,” and “instrumentalism.” I shall employ the more widely-used term
“historicism,” which grows out of German epistemological debate. The term “historicism” has been given a
variety of meanings since it became a part of German academic debate late in the
nineteenth century. Friedrich Hayek
and Karl Popper have used it primarily in a methodological sense to
denote the view that the main task of the social scientist is to discover the
laws by which whole societies develop and, on the basis of these laws of
historical development, to make predictions about the future. A few years earlier the historian
Friedrich Meinecke, in a work entitled Die Entstehung des Historismus
(1936), had used the term in referring to the emphasis, originating with
certain eighteenth-century writers, on the singular or unique character of all
historical phenomena. I shall be
using the term in an epistemological sense to denote the view that all human
knowledge is essentially relative to time and place. This seems to have been the principal
meaning of the term since the great debate about historicism in
Historicism is a far more potent and pervasive force
today than a half-century ago when
2. Schiller’s position is discussed in Thayer, Meaning
and Action, pp. 273-303. For
Collingwood, see especially An Autobiography (London: Oxford University
Press, 1939) and The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1951). Collingwood’s historicism is
treated by Leo Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” Review of
Metaphysics, 5 (June, 1952), 559-5 86. I discuss Wittgenstein later in this
essay.
3. Of importance here are Bergson’s views on intelligence
and intuition as approaches to knowledge of reality. See Bergson’s Creative Evolution,
trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), pp. 98-185. Bergson’s theory of knowledge is treated
by Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle L.
Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955) and by William James, “Bergson
and his Critique of Intellectualism,” in A Pluralistic Universe (New
York: Longmans, 1909), pp. 225-273.
For Bergson’s relation to James and American Pragmatism, see Ralph Barton
Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown,
1936), II, 599-636. For
Sartre, see especially Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
For Merleau-Ponty’s theory of knowledge, see especially The
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Cohn Smith (New York: Humanities Press,
1962) and Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964). See also
Thomas Langan, Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Reason (New Haven: Yale Press,
1966) and Albert Rabil, Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social
World (New York: Columbia Press, 1967). engthy discussions of both Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty, along with bibliographies, are contained in Herbert Spiegelberg,
The Phenomnenological Movement, 2 vols.; 2nd. ed. (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1969).
4. See “The Decline of Modern Political Theory,”
Journal of Politics, 13 (February, 1951), 36-58; and The Political
System (New York: Knopf, 1953).
7. For a concise discussion of the history of this term,
along with a useful bibliography, see Maurice Mandelbaum, “Historicism,” in
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press,
1967), IV, 22-25. See also
Mandelbaum’s The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York: Harper and
Row, 1967) and Ludwig Landgrebe, Major Problems in Contemporary European
Philosophy, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1966).
797
cause of its very pervasiveness, than it was in
Epistemological Issues That Divide
Positivism and Historicism
The philosophers who belong to the positivist tradition
have shared a deep admiration for modern empirical science and a desire to serve
its advancement. Their theories of
knowledge are designed to support the method of modern science or at least to
conform to it. If we go back to
Hume, who was identified later by positivists as the chief precursor of their
movement, we find that his analysis of human understanding was intended both as
an application of the new experimental method of Bacon and
It is helpful to begin a reconstruction of positivist
epistemology by considering the view of modern science that emerges in the
positivist literature. One commonly
finds a distinction between the empirical sciences and the nonempirical
disciplines of logic and pure mathematics. The empirical sciences are distinguished
by their effort to formulate in general terms the conditions under which events
occur in the world. These general
principles will serve as the basis for explanation and prediction. The concepts, laws, and theories of
empirical science are said to be different from those of other accounts of the
world, such as metaphysics, because they conform to the world as men can know it
from observation. Scientific
statements are tested by empirical evidence, that is, by the facts of experience
as they are accessible to all competent observers. Inasmuch as scientific principles have an
objective basis in sensory experience, they can be true independently of time,
place, and circumstance, although they are always subject to revision in light
of subsequent experience.
Given this view of science, the critical task for a
positivist epistemology is to uphold the assumption that our generalizations
about the external world are reliable if and only if they are constructed from
or tested by the raw material of experience. Accordingly, positivists have typically
argued that perception makes us directly aware of something “given,” something
which has not yet been affected by our judgments. Furthermore, these given data are taken
(individually or in combination) to represent the facts of the external world.
Positivists would come to disagree
as to just what is given in experience, e.g., private sense-data or
representations of the objects and events of common sense, but they would
largely agree that we directly perceive something, some particulars,
prior to our conceptualization and reasoning. These data serve as the ingredients of
reasoning without being essentially transformed by it. Our general notions or concepts are
abstracted or constructed from these primitive and unconceptualized data. This epistemological viewpoint asserts
further that the human mind, when it operates normally or naturally, perceives
the same things in the same way regardless of time and place. It is for this reason that knowledge
based on experience has an “objectivity” that no other claims to knowledge can
possess. In order to be meaningful,
our statements about the external world must be tested against the data of
experience. This requirement is
embodied, for example, in the famous “verifiability principle” of logical
positivism, which holds, in its loosest form, that no statement is factually
meaningful unless it can, at least in principle, be shown to be true or false,
or rendered probable, by reference to empirical observation. 8
8. An examination of the epistemological foundations of
positivism and its conception of science should begin with classical British
empiricism, especially with Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. I discuss Hume’s importance for
positivistic approaches to the study of man and society in “Hume’s Contribution
to Behavioral Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,
7 (April, 1971), 154-168. The
development of logical positivism out of the logical atomism of Russell and
Wittgenstein is discussed by J. 0. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). A primary source for the epistemological
foundations of logical positivism is Moritz Schlick’s Allgemeine
Erkenntnislehre (Berlin: J. Springer, 1918). This work and subsequent epistemological
developments in the positivist movement are discussed by A. J. Ayer in his
“Introduction” to Logical Positivism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959)
and by Herbert Feigl, “The Origin and Spirit of Logical Positivism,” in Peter
Achinstein and Stephen F. Barker, eds., The Legacy of Logical Positivism
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 3-24. For Rudolf Carnap’s development from the
time of his early work, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin: Weltkreis
Verlag, 1928), see [the various essays in Paul
Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, Ill.:
Open Court, 1963). There are
selections from Carnap in Ayer’s Logical Positivismn. Ayer, a student of
Schlick and Carnap, deals with epistemological issues in Language, Truth, and
Logic (New York: Dover, 1952), The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge
(London: Macmillan, 1940), and The Problem of Knowledge (London:
Macmillan, 1956). For general
accounts, see Victor Kraft, The Vienna Circle, trans. Arthur Pap (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1953) and Joergen Joergensen, The Development of
Logical Empiricism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Recent works in the philosophy of
science that stand in the positivist tradition include Ernest Nagel, The
Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), and Carl
Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press,
1965).]
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798
Whereas positivism grows out of classical British
empiricism, historicism stems from the revolution in philosophy that was
initiated by Kant and carried forward in the nineteenth century by such German
thinkers as Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Historicism, as it emerged in
9. For the position of Dilthey and his school in German
philosophy in the early decades of this century, see Werner Brock, An
Introduction to Contemporaryy German Philosophy (Cambridge, University
Press, 1935). Only a few of
Dilthey’s writings, collected in twelve volumes as Gesammimelte Schniften
(Stuttgart and Göttengen: Teubner, 1957-1960), have been translated into
English. For useful accounts of
Dilthey’s thought, see, in addition to the aforementioned works by Mandelbaum
and Brock, H. P. Rickman, ed., Pattern and Meaning in History (New York:
Harper, 1962); H. A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey: An introduction (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944); and H. A. Hodges, The Philosophy of Wilhelm
Dilthey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952). Karl Löwith treats Dilthey’s relationship
to the Hegelian tradition and his differences from Hegel in From Hegel to
Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1964), pp. 60-65, 120-127.
The writings of Oswald Spengler may be considered in this
context. Though not of Dilthey’s
school, Spengler depicts culture and thought as manifestations of ‘life’ and
gives to one of his own works, Der Mensch und die Technik (München: Beck,
1931), the subtitle: “Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens.” This work is translated by Charles
Francis Atkinson as Man and Technics:A Contribution to a Philosophy of
Life (New York: Knopf, 1932). We learn from Spengler’s correspondence
that his work was admired by such members of Dilthey’s school as George Misch
and Ortega y Gasset. See Letters
of Oswald Spengler: 1913- 1936, trans. and ed. by Arthur Helps (New York:
Knopf, 1966), pp. 67-68, 72-74, 102, 194-195, 198-199, 317. Spengler popularized important ideas of
Nietzsche, such as the will to power and the relativity of truth. He held that there are no eternal truths,
even in mathematics. Every
philosophy is an expression of the spirit of its age. See especially the Introduction to The
Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York:
Knopf, 1926-1928). The first volume
of this work, whose German title is Der Untergang des Abendlandes,
appeared in 1918. It was
awarded a prize by the Nietzsche Archive in 1919. In 1924, Spengler delivered an address at
the Nietzsche Archive commemorating Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday. This address, entitled “Nietzsche and his
Century,” is contained in Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays, trans. Donald
0. White (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), pp. 179-197. Useful appraisals of Spengler’s work are
presented by H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New
York: Scribner’s, 1952) and Anton M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in Semen Zeit
(Mbnchen: Beck, 1968).
10. For Cassirer’s theory of knowledge, see The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale
Press, 1953-1957) and The Problem of Knowledge, trans. William H. Woglom
and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale Press, 1950). Useful essays on Cassirer, along with a
full bibliography of his voluminous writings up to 1946, are contained in Paul
Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston: The
Library of Living Philosophers, 1949). Of particular interest in connection with
our present problem are the essays by Helmut Kuhn, Fritz Kaufmann, and David
Bidney.
11. Husserl’s critique of Dilthey’s historicism is
contained in his work entitled “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” which is
reprinted in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, ed Quentin Lauer
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965). For the historicist tendencies in
Husserl’s own work, see, in addition to [the
works cited in Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism (New Haven: Yale Press, 1969),
pp. 103-104, the following sources: Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History
of Science,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed.
Marvin Farber (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 143-163; and Robert Welsh
Jordan, “Husserl’s Phenomenology as an ‘Historical’ Science,” Social
Research, 35 (Summer, 1968), 245-259.
The first volume of Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement
contains a detailed discussion of Husserl and Heidegger along with extensive
bibliographies. For Heidegger, see
especially Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper, 1962). The issue
of The Southern Journal of Philosophy for Winter, 1970 (Vol. 8, No. 4) is
devoted entirely to analyses of Heidegger’s thought by leading scholars. Heidegger’s historicism is treated as
such by Helmut Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness (Hinsdale, Ill.: Henry
Regnery, 1949) and Stanley Rosen, Nihilism. See also P. Christopher
Smith, “Heldegger’s Critique of Absolute Knowledge,” The New Scholasticism,
45 (Winter, 1971), 56-86.]
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799
Historicism, as a theory of knowledge, typically
contradicts positivism at the following points:
(1) No direct awareness of pure sense-data.
Positivism has tended to assume that the data of sensation are present to
consciousness in their original or pure form and that these data correspond in
some manner to the facts of the external world. Experience is prior to concepts and
theories or, in the language of Hume, impressions are prior to ideas. Sense-data are the “given” from which
concepts are abstracted and by which theories are tested. It is assumed that we can reach an
unbiased view of nature by adhering to experience. Historicism, by contrast, is
distinctively Kantian in its interpretation of sense perception. Kant had argued that sense-data are
inaccessible to consciousness in their original or pure state. We apprehend them only as unified and
structured by a priori principles or categories of the mind. Historicism agrees with Kant that the
mind is an active and creative agent in the process of cognition and not merely
a passive recipient or register of sensations. The experience of which we are aware has
already been selected and shaped by the mind itself. We cannot assess our fundamental
concepts by working our way back to pure experience because these concepts are
already presupposed in experience as it presents itself to consciousness. By the same token, we can never determine
if the mysterious source of our experience corresponds to our picture of the
objective world. For reasons that
will emerge presently, the data of experience are assumed to undergo a somewhat
greater transformation in our reflections about man and society than in our
reflections about the physical world.
(2)The historicity of the human mind. In
holding that our perceptions are known to us only as transformed by the
mind, historicism takes the side of Kant against empiricism. Yet Kant was not an historicist. He agreed with Hume that the principles
of the understanding are natural, i.e., that they are constant from one epoch or
society to another. Historicism
follows Hegel in asserting that the very ordering principles or categories of
the mind have varied with the succession of epochs and cultures. Historical inquiry discloses that there
is no single view of the objective world but instead a variety of perspectives
or worldviews. Hegel had understood
this diversity in terms of the working out of an internal logic of reason. Later historicists have preferred to
explain it in terms of the adjustment of men and groups to life under different
historical and social conditions. Each epoch or culture develops a
characteristic view of the world in its totality; and essential differences will
be found from one epoch or culture to another in the presuppositions, values,
and categories upon which cognition is based. Historicists have disagreed as to whether
all thought and perception within a given society must conform to the prevailing
worldview or whether creative individuals can free themselves from prevailing
assumptions and project an independent view of reality. There is agreement, however, that all
knowledge is perspectival in character and arises not so much from discovery of
the real character of nature as from social or individual
creation.
(3) The relativity of truth. Philosophical
or scientific inquiry was traditionally understood as a quest for truth, for
final and definitive insight, about the nature of the whole of which man is a
part or at least about the nature of man himself. By insisting on the historicity of the
human mind, historicism calls into question the very possibility of knowledge
that is true or “objective” in the sense of grasping nature as it really is.
Whatever “truth” might mean for
historicism, it cannot mean the congruence in some sense of thoughts and things.
If the experience by which we
interpret the world and ourselves enters consciousness only after its
transformation by presuppositions or categories of thought which are themselves
essentially variable and arbitrary, then all claims to absolute knowledge must
be regarded as baseless in principle. Writers in the historicist tradition have
found different ways of dealing with the epistemological relativism that is
inherent in their position. Hegel
and Marx attempted to avoid relativism by teaching that the succession of
historical epochs reflects a necessary development toward a final epoch, whose
viewpoint
800
will represent a true account of the historical process
as a whole. Since Nietzsche,
however, historicists have generally denied that the succession of cultures
reflects an inner necessity or rationality. They have largely agreed with Nietzsche
that the modern epoch is distinguished not by the finality or absoluteness of
its view of man and the world but rather by its insight into the essential
relativity of all such worldviews. If any final truth is to be admitted, it
is the principle that no final truths about the nature of things are possible.
There is no possibility of a
supratemporal truth which can be grasped from above the historical
stream.
It is clear that historicism challenges the claims that
positivism has advanced on behalf of modern science, but the full extent of that
challenge has only recently become evident. American pragmatism represented itself as
favorable to the advancement of natural and social science; while early German
historicism, though strongly opposed to the effort of positivists to impose the
method of natural science on the human studies (Geisteswissenschaften)
typically conceded that the scientific method is authoritative in the study
of natural phenomena. Historicists
such as Dilthey and
The early historicists separated the natural sciences
from the human studies in speaking of the relativity of knowledge, but one could
argue on historicist grounds that any application of the scientific method, even
in the area of natural science, must be relative to the scientist’s perspective
or worldview. One might thus hold
that even the theories and interpretations of natural science rest on
presuppositions about man and the world that are historically variable and, in
the final analysis, arbitrary and irrational. As we shall now see, this
reinterpretation of natural science in accordance with historicist principles
has been in progress in the philosophy of science for more than a
decade.