Abstract
‘How scientific are the social sciences?’ was the title of a lecture given by Gunnar Myrdal at Harvard University in 1971.
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Notes
- 1.
‘How scientific are the social sciences?’ This lecture has been republished, in original English, in ‘Cahiers de l’Institut des Sciences Economiques Appliquées’ (Isea) Paris, (Serie: H.S., n.14, August 1972) and later in The Journal of Social Issues, Vol XXVIII. N.4 1973. Myrdal republished this paper and many others in a further collection of his writing under the title Against the stream: critical essays on economics (1973), under Pantheon Press, New York (as Chap. 7). Also again included as Chapter VII in that book: (1973). Reference to the pages here will be made to the Macmillan later edition, 1973.
- 2.
By ‘logical’ plane, I intend an interpretation in which people examine whether propositions are well proposed and not contradictory; in our case, this could concern the questions: can the social sciences know and supply objective rules for man’s behaviour in social relations? Are there no contradictions between the pretensions of such knowledge and the assumption of the ethical (behavioural) freedom of man or of the social groups to which he belongs? By ‘ philosophical plane’ I intend an interpretation in which people examine the nature, the possibility, the limits of the knowledge of man; in our case this could concern the question: does the knowledge acquired in positive or normative ways from the social sciences have a meaning and value, and what are these meanings and values? (I have already alluded to the subject in the General Introduction and will return to it once more in the Conclusive Considerations (to Vol. III of this Trilogy).)
- 3.
This very important writing appears as Chap. 12 in Myrdal’s 1957 book Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions and was reprinted, appropriately, in the quoted collection of writings by Myrdal edited by Paul Streeten under the title Value in Social Theory (1958) with the same title, ‘The logical crucial point of every science’.
- 4.
I want to recall here, for the reader less familiar with this kind of literature, that the ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’ (Thesen über Feuerbach) by Karl Marx is a very short note, composed of 11 propositions (numbered) as comments to the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) on his work The Essence of Christianity (1841). Feuerbach and Marx were contemporaries, and both were scholars of Hegel (when they were students together in Berlin) and members of a group that called itself ‘Hegelian youth’ or ‘Hegelian left’. Feuerbach would not be very influential in the development of German philosophy, if not for the attention—maybe exaggerated—given to him by Marx and Engels. The theses on Feuerbach, according to Engels, were written in Paris in 1845, three years before the drafting of The Communist Manifesto. However, they remained unpublished until they were included as an Appendix to an essay that Engels himself published on Feuerbach after Marx’s death (Engels 1886). In any case, the Marxian theses were interlaced naturally, in some way, with another work—later widely known—written by Marx and Engels together, The German Ideology (Die Deutsche Ideologie), a critique, more philosophical than economic, of the political visions emerging in Germany after Hegel (written in Brussels in 1846, after they had again been exiled from their country). The authors failed to publish this important work during their lifetimes, nor did Engels, alone, when he dedicated himself (in the 12 years between the death of his friend and his own) to the publication of all works and manuscripts, individual or joint, remained unpublished, and that wasted away in the drawers of both. The German Ideology came to light only in 1932, when the original text was edited by David Riazanov for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow; it was then translated into English for the 1938 Lawrence and Wishart edition of the Works of Karl Marx.
- 5.
Perhaps it is due to this kind of opinion and sentiment that I owe, in my own life, a kind of academic abandonment, at the age of 22, of my dear and severe university studies in philosophy and history in favour of economic studies, particularly the study of the management of economic and social ‘policies’.
- 6.
Among these ‘others’, it would not be correct to omit the role of Ludwig von Mises, and those connected to the approach named ‘ praxeology’, although von Mises gave praxeology an outlet inconsistent with its epistemological premises that makes it extraneous to a good deal of the thesis of this book (as we will see in the Chap. 1, Vol. II).
- 7.
The most encompassed by P. Streeten in an Opening Address at the Conference of the British Sociological Association, 1953, pp. 210–42 (reprinted in the collection of Myrdal’s essays edited by Paul Streeten, Value in social theories: a selection of essays on methodology, Harper & Brothers, New York 1958).
- 8.
On the choice of the term ‘programming approach’, see Sect. 5.1.
- 9.
Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), an economist of the so-called Austrian school, was known more for his tenacious academic fights against any kind of state interventionism in the economy and against ‘socialism’ than for his acute reflections on economic epistemology.
- 10.
See below the Myrdal quotation from the lecture ‘How scientific are the social sciences?’ (1972), reprinted in Against the Stream, etc. (1973) Macmillan edition, p. 139.
- 11.
On the role of positivism in the social sciences, I would like to point out the collection of essays edited by Anthony Giddens, Positivism and Sociology, 1974, which includes essays by Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, Alain Touraine, Jurgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse.
- 12.
Concerning this ‘new science’, synthetic and operational, elsewhere I have used, as already noted, the term ‘planology’, with the intent to strengthen through it the interdisciplinarity of the sciences that it should absorb, and, in the ‘programming approach’, substitute, but also with the intent to strengthen their traditional scientific character (using therefore a hybrid term, deriving from the Greco-Roman cultural tradition, that I believe it is still appropriate to respect). See my essay Introduction to Planology, etc. (Archibugi 2006, 4th ed.).
- 13.
See my Planning Theory: from the Political Debate to the Methodological Reconstruction, Springer 2007. A previous methodological process, limited to regional planning, can be found in my book Principles of regional planning (1980, only in Italian) (Archibugi 1980). In another book (always in Italian), Introduction to strategic planning in the public domain (2005), I discuss the main aspects of planning. I have also prepared as a textbook for government officers another booklet, Compendium of strategic planning for the public administrations (2004). And I am preparing a Handbook for Strategic Planning, dedicated to decision-makers and managers of governmental and non-profit agencies (see references in the Bibliography at the end of the Volume).
- 14.
For instance, he made reference to the case of ‘some problems of experimental psychology’ which ‘are clearly of the natural science variety, even if they have to be combined with quite different types of insights in order to be at all complete in explaining a psychological problem in personality terms’; and another reference was made to the case in which economic analysis and planning ‘has to integrate elements of knowledge from almost all the natural sciences, for instance climatology or soil chemistry, and also a number of special technologies’ [Myrdal 1973, Against the Stream, etc. Macmillan, already cited, p. 139].
- 15.
Reason, which in Kant is called, more specifically, ‘practical Reason’.
- 16.
I will gladly avoid discussing the general theme of the epistemological foundations of the social sciences (which has been and continues to be the subject of an extensive and important literature). I have chosen to focus on the selected opus of Myrdal in this volume for two reasons: (1) he is more consonant with the programming approach and (2) he seems to me more than other authors at the crossroads of an economic theory crisis, and poorly familiar to the general debating above recalled, that it would brought as more far than necessary. However, I cannot avoid confirming my recollection of the readings edited by Anthony Giddens, of the 1970s, entitled Positivism and Sociology. It seemed to me very peculiar that the work of the economist Myrdal could be completely ignored by the authors, all sociologists, of the readings in question—evidence of the gap between the academic cultures, rather than their integration, on the same arguments. Was this a sign of a real diversity of approaches, or only a lack of awareness of channelising the readings? I attempted an integrated evaluation in Associative Economy (2000) through an examination of the technological, economic, historical-institutional and sociological approaches to the ‘structural change’ of contemporary society. The conclusion was that a true diversity of approaches does not exist and that the academic labels deform and mystify the real problems, which are substantially meta-disciplinary—as Myrdal never ceased to state.
- 17.
Always the same Myrdal’s, quotation, ibid. p. 139.
- 18.
This page is masterly in its acuteness and conciseness, as it appears to conform—in the daily experience of us all—to the choices and the behaviours of people. And it is inversely proportional to the ‘practice’, either academic or political, whereby in moments of evaluation, scientists of the problems are always more rare, and we always pursue a stubborn acephalous ‘sectorialisation’ and specialisation of problems, which delegate their so-called solutions to everything (to case, to luck, to arrogance, to cleverness, to the endless ways of providence, to non-existent physical/natural automatisms, etc.) except conscious and elaborated communitarian choices and decisions.
- 19.
Do compare—on this matter—what Myrdal states in another writing (quoted below in the Sect. 1.5 of this chapter) concerning his thinking about the future of ‘economics’.
- 20.
Myrdal remarks, moreover, that this type of modelling has also spread in recent years to the other social sciences; therefore it could be said that ‘the researchers apparently seek to emulate the economists’ [Myrdal, ibidem p. 143].
- 21.
On the other hand, he had already noted that ‘recent attempts to emulate the methods, or rather the form, of the simpler natural sciences will be recognized largely as a temporary aberration from realistic truth-seeking’ [Myrdal, ibidem, p. 144].
- 22.
See the well-known earlier book The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory [Myrdal 1953]. This work goes back to the years 1928–29 (it must have been used for the degree dissertation whose subject was later changed): in any case, it was published in Swedish for the first time in 1930, and translated into German in 1932. It must be noted that meanwhile in Italy it was translated by the publisher Sansoni in 1944, receiving much attention and notoriety, while in English it was available only from 1953 (translated by Paul Streeten for Routledge). I am very attached to this book, because it was the first book on economics and the history of economics that I read in Italian (as an 18-year-old Italian student in philosophy, with a yet-unfinished war), as it appeared in Italian nearly ten years before it became available to the English reader.
- 23.
Additional note: Let me reproduce here the entire Contents page of that book, as a solid basis of its mooring:
Beyond the Welfare State. Economic Planning in the Welfare States and international Implications (Macmillan 1958)
Contents:
Preface
The World Perspective
Introduction
Chapter 1 A stale and confused controversy
A Tautology
The Innocence of Marx
The Analogies from the Soviet Union
The Disparity between Ideologies and Facts
The Under-developed Countries
A Declaration of Non-participation
I. The trend towards planning
Chapter 2 the impact of the international crises
Planning an Unplanned Development
The Liberal Interlude
State Intervention precedes State Planning
The Sequence of International Crises
Effects on the Structure of our Values
The Crumbling of the Gold Standard
Chapter 3 Internal forces
Changing Structure and Role of the Market
Changed Outlook
Democratisation and Equalisation
The Egalitarian Motive for State Action
Planning for Development
Chapter 4 The organizational state
The Organisation of the Markets
Collective Bargaining instead of Free Market: Economy
The Infra-structure of Organised Society
The Quest for Democratic Participation
The Special Case of the United States
A Historical Note
A Fundamental Difference
Chapter 5 Planning in the Welfare State
The Historical and Causal Order
From Intervention to Planning
“Full Employment”
The Fiscal Budgets
Converging Political Attitudes
A “Created Harmony”
Not the Liberal Harmony
Chapter 6 The state and the individual
A Regulated Society
People Like It
Replacing State Interventions
The Next Phase
The Utopia and the Reality
Chapter 7 Planning and democracy
A Strengthened Democracy
The Historical Perspective
Democracy a Danger for Planning?
Inflationary Pressures
Collective Bargaining between the Producers Alone
Not Soluble by Financial and Monetary Measures
Chapter 8 Planning in the two other
Planning in the Soviet Union
Planning in the Under-developed Countries
The Legacy from the Western World
The Soviet Way
In the Under-developed Countries
Building up an Infra-structure
A Fundamental Difference
II. International implication of national planning
Chapter 9 International disintegration
Fifty Years Ago
Disintegration
The Weakening of International Law
The New International Organisations
West-European Economic Integration?
The Liquidation of Colonialism
The Cold War
National Integration versus International Integration
The Role of National Planning in International Disintegration
Chapter 10 Economi nationalism in the Western World
The Welfare State is Nationalistic
A Moral Ambivalence
Resistance to the Welfare State
The Old School of Internationalists
A Forlorn Hope
The New School of Internationalists
International Coordination of National Economic Policies
The Difficulties
Chapter 11 The institutional and psychological levels
Introversion of Interests
An Institutional Bias
The Emotional Charge
Opportunism and Instability
Hostility and Aggressiveness
International Ideals
Chapter 12 Economic nationalism in the under-developed countries
A Wider Perspective
Rational Grounds for More Nationalistic Economic Policies
The Political Need for Nationalism
Nationalism Beyond Reason
Interest Clashes
International Instability
A Parallel
Marx in a World Setting
The Cold War
Chapter 13 Towards a new world stability
Conditions
Their Mutual Isolation
A Problem of Planning
The Future
The Interest of the Rich Countries
Not Only Aid
Trade
Special Trade Problems
Credits
No Easy Solution
Aid
The Direction of Aid
The Nationalisation Issue
The Beam in Our Eye
The Disentanglement of Economic Colonialism
Chapter 14 The growth of inter-governmental economic
National Economic Planning Leads to the Need for Inter
national Planning
The Surge of Organised Inter-Governmental Cooperation
A Relative Failure
The Credit Side
They Do Exist
The Force of the Ideal
The Illusion of False Optimism
Why has this Happened
Not the Responsibility of the Communists The Fault of the Western Powers
National Integration and International Disintegration
The Mechanism of Nationalism
- 24.
See also Myrdal’s Objectivity in Social Research, published in 1969.
- 25.
Myrdal 1953, preface to the English edition, explaining that in rewriting the book he would have to constrain himself in rendering the book more suitable to opinions about the ‘value problem’ which he had developed ‘after further study and experience’, thereby avoiding making it consonant with his actual positions.
- 26.
Myrdal’s notoriety is based, apart from this initial study of the 1930s, on the socio-economic research he directed in the United States from 1938 to 1942 on behalf of the Carnegie Corporation on the ‘Negro problem’. The research was published in 1944 with the title An American Dilemma: the Negro problem and Modern Democracy (1944). The other research for which he is rightly celebrated was begun in 1957 on behalf of the ‘Twentieth Century Fund’ on the economic and the political trends of the South Asian countries. It was published in 1968 in three volumes (2264 pages) under the title Asian Drama: an enquiry into the poverty of Nations (in 1972 a reduced edition was published and edited by Seth S. King) (I don’t believe the paraphrase of the Smithian ‘The Wealth of Nations’ was only casual). In 1970 Myrdal published a book of ‘political conclusions’ drawn from the research (The Challenge of World Poverty: etc., 1970).
- 27.
Myrdal was a Social-Democrat senator in 1934. From 1942, after a stay in the United States, he was a member of the Council of Bank of Sweden and Minister of Foreign Commerce (1947–49), a position he left to become Executive Secretary for the United Nations Commission for Europe in Geneva. In 1961, he went back to Sweden, founding the Institute of International Economic Studies at the University of Stockholm. More information can be found in the recent book by Avner Offer & Gabriel Söderberg, The Nobel Factor. The prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn. Princeton University Press 2016.
- 28.
This is evident in the recurrent reflections and repetitions of the theme in all his works and research. From 1958, his pupil and friend Paul Streeten tried to compensate for this significant but uneasy dispersion of Myrdal’s methodological reflections, collecting them in a volume under the title, not completely indicative, of Value in Social Theory (Myrdal 1958). The book contains an illuminating introduction by Streeten, aimed at synthesising the crux of Myrdal’s thinking on this subject (at least until 1958) and from which I have extracted the above exegetical conclusions. Three chapters of central importance are ‘appendices’ to the research on the Negro problem in the USA (with the significant title ‘Evaluations and Convictions’, Chapter Five; ‘Facts and Evaluations’ Chapter Seven; and ‘the Accumulation Principle’, Chapter Nine). And Chapter Eleven, finally, ‘The Logical Crux of all Science’ draws on another book by Myrdal on the relationship between economic theory and underdeveloped regions (Myrdal 1957). The other interesting chapters for us in this volume are extracted from contributions in journals that are difficult to find: ‘The Relation between Social Theory and Social Policy’ (from British Journal of Sociology), 1953, Page 210–42); ‘Ends and Means in Political Economy’ from Zeitschrift fur Nationaloekonomie, 1933, Volume IV, No.39). The book ends with a postscript by Myrdal himself, a short essay on intellectual autobiography, in which the stages of his thinking on the subject of research methodology are revisited, in connection to the environment of economists which shaped and formed him and where the centrality of his abovementioned methodological and epistemological problems clearly emerges. Myrdal didn’t miss, after 1958, coming back again to the subject, feeling himself as ‘again out of step with the evolution of economic science’ (Myrdal, ‘Crises and cycles in the development of economics’, article published in the Political Quarterly (January 1973) and republished in the book cited Against the Stream, etc., 1973, p. 11). This article—together with the lecture from 1972 on which I have mainly based this chapter on the ‘scientificity’ of the economic sciences—represents one of the last Myrdalian performances; it is also a readaptation of a lecture to a meeting of the American Economic Association on the same theme of the ‘crisis and cycles in the development of the political economy’ (1972), which we will examine in Chap. 2 (Vol. I).
- 29.
Myrdal, as is well known, was among the first to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (1974) after its establishment (1969). The official motivation for the prize, however, did not do him justice. It was jointly given to Prof. Von Hayek (a well-known classical and liberalist economist whose contribution was totally divergent from Myrdal’s concerns) with the generic motivation: ‘for its pioneering work on the theory of money and economic cycles and for the penetrating analysis of the interdependencies between economic, social and institutional phenomena’. Even in the short introduction to the prize giving (given by Eric Lundberg on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) it was acknowledged that in his great work on the American Negro problem he has focused attention on the interdependencies between a great number of social and economic factors (for instance, education, health, life conditions, job satisfaction, discriminatory attitudes from employers and unions) and showed how the cumulative processes of deterioration can rise (“vicious cycles”) making it impossible to pinpoint particular factors as the final causes. Whilst he ‘has in his work indicated multiple factors of which until the 60’s was not taken into account in the economist’s analytical models’.
It seems to me that we are still with a generic encomium for an interdisciplinary vision of development economics, common to many others, but not to the specific acknowledgement of the Myrdalian contribution, to the approach methodology and to the theory of knowledge, not only in economics but in all social sciences. Maybe the moment has arrived for someone to take account of these specific contributions publicly (assuming that others have not already done so); for me it is a joy and an honour to do so now, in the next Chap. 2 (Vol. I).
Bibliographical References to Chapter 1 (Vol. I)
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Archibugi, Franco. (2005). Introduction to Strategic Planning in the Public Domain, Planning Studies Centre.
Archibugi, F. (2006), Introduction to the Planology. Towards a New Scientific Paradigm in the Social Sciences, Rome: Planning Studies Centre.
Kant, Immanuel. (1785). Grundlegung of the Metaphysics of Moral, Preface
Myrdal, Gunnar. (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. (First Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers).
Myrdal, Gunnar. (1957). Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions. London.
Myrdal, Gunnar. (1958). ‘The Logical Crux’ in Value in Social Theory, A Selection of Essays on Methodology, Edited with Introduction, very important on the contribution of G. Myrdal, by Paul Streten (pp. ix–xivi), Harper, New York.
Myrdal, Gunnar. (1972). ‘How Scientific are the Social Sciences?’ Cahiers de l’ISEA, Serie H.S. 14. [republished in Against the Stream, etc. (1973)].
Myrdal, Gunnar. (1973). Against the Stream: Critical Essays on Economics. London: Macmillan 1973.
Streeten, P. (ed). Value in Social Theories: A selection of essays on Methodology, Harper & Brothers, New York (1958).
von Schmöller, Gustav. (1883). Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics.
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Archibugi, F. (2019). How Scientific Are the Social Sciences?. In: The Programming Approach and the Demise of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78057-3_1
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