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A NEW
CREATING
FRAMEW
FOR
NEW REALIT
Social
Science
as
Public
Philosophy
by Robert N. Bellah
March/April 1985
35
the
since
and
century
half
de
Tocqueville wrote
Democracy in America,
"hard"
social
science
has
not
with
has.
cannot forget its founders, must still create a new social science for new realities.
If we, too, have had to find a new way
to deal with new realities, we have done
so not by imagining that with us a truly
scientific social science has at last arrived
but by consciously trying to renew an
older conception of social science, one in
which the boundary between social science and philosophy was still open. During the century and a half since de
Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, a "hard" social science has not
emerged, but certainly a "professional"
social science with significant achievements has. So much is this the case that
many of our colleagues may look
askance at the credence we give to de
Tocqueville and his work. Isn't de
Tocqueville merely a brilliant "humanistic amateur" whose work has long
been outdated by the technical accomplishments of professional social
science?
It is certainly true that in many areas
we have data of a sort entirely unavailable to de Tocqueville. (It is even true
that de Tocqueville did not always utilize
the best available data in his own day.)
And it is also true that we understand
many particular social processes better
than anyone did in the 1830s. Yet de
Tocqueville's sense of American society
as a whole, of how its major compowas only late in the nineteenth
nents- family, religion, politics, the
century that the research univereconomy- fit together, and of how the
character of Americans is affected by
sity replaced the college as the
their society, and vice versa, has never model for higher education- contembeen equaled. Nor has anyone ever bet- poraneously with the rise of the business
Change
March/April 1 985
March/April 1985
bilities, its limitations, and its aspirations, that particular variables can be
understood. Narrowly professional social science, particularly in its most reductionist form, may indeed deny that
there is any whole. It may push a radical
nominalism to the point of seeing society
as a heap of disparate individuals and
groups lacking either a common culture
or a coherent social organization. A
philosophical social science involves not
only a different focus of attention but a
different understanding of society, one
grounded in commitments to substantive traditions.
Being concerned with the whole does
not mean a mere adding together of
facts from the various specialized disciplines. Such facts become relevant only
when interpretedin terms of a frame of
reference that can encompass them and
give form and shape to a conception of
the whole. It is not likely that such a conception will arise from research that is
simply interdisciplinary in the usual
sense of the word- that is, involving the
cooperation of several disciplinary specialists. For knowledge of society as a
whole involves not merely the acquisition of useful insights from neighboring
disciplines but transcendingdisciplinary
boundaries altogether.
The most important boundary that
must be transcended is the recent and
quite arbitraryboundary between social
sciences and the humanities. The humanities, we are told, have to do with
the transmission and interpretation of
cultural traditions in the realms of philosophy, religion, literature, language,
and the arts, whereas the social sciences
professionalsocial
that
loses
is
too
cannot
for
the
do
cannot
larger society
its professionaljob,
for
there
much
of reality
with
which
l
even
concern
science
it
deal.
37
involve the scientific study of human action. The assumption is that the social
sciences are not cultural traditions but
rather occupy a privileged position of
pure observation. The assumption is
also that discussions of human action in
the humanities are "impressionistic"
and "anecdotal" and do not really
become knowledge until "tested" by the
methods of science, from which alone
comes valid knowledge.
It is precisely that boundary between
the social sciences and the humanities
that social science as public philosophy
most wants to open up. Social science is
not a disembodied cognitive enterprise.
It is a tradition, or set of traditions,
deeply rooted in the philosophical and
humanistic (and, to more than a small
extent, the religious)history of the West.
Social science makes assumptions about
the natureof persons, the nature of society, and the relation between persons
and society. It also, whether it admits it
or not, makes assumptions about good
persons and a good society and considers how far these conceptions are embodied in our actual society. Becoming
conscious of the cultural roots of these
assumptions would remind the social
scientist that these assumptions are contestable and that the choice of assumptions involves controversiesthat lie deep
in the history of Westernthought. Social
science as public philosophy would
make the philosophical conversation
concerning these matters its own.
De Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill
(and Marx and Weber and Durkheim,
not to mention George Herbert Mead)
knew that what they said had philosophical implications and took conscious
responsibility for their philosophical
positions in a way that most social scientists today do not. But fortunately we
still have more than a few exemplars:
Louis Dumont, Alasdair Maclntyre,
and Jiirgen Habermas among others.
We cannot classify such scholars simply
by their "discipline," any more than we
could the pre-professional
social
thinkers of the past.
March/April 1 985
March/April 1985
fan
he
one
is
the
analyst is within
studying, he is also
or
more
consciously or
other
to
place
of
not
its
society
within
traditions,
There
is
no
stand.
who have maintained less specialized research traditions in closer touch with the
great issues of historical and philosophical reflection.
But while there is much going on in
the major researchuniversitiesthat may
help us recover a broaderand more public sense of what we are about as social
scientists and humanists- that is, as
common students of human studiesthere is a sense in which liberal arts education has a peculiarly important role to
play in overcoming the schism in our
scholarship. It is true that the liberal arts
tradition, whether in the liberal arts college or as part of a larger institution,
looks nervously at the research university as a role model and sometimes idealizes disciplinary nationalism as a guarantor of academic excellence. But there
are inherent features of liberal arts education that support a broaderview of the
human studies. In smaller departments
individual teachers must teach a broader
range of courses and synthesize fields of
knowledge of which the researchuniversity professor often remains ignorant.
The social proximity to those in other
fields, the possibilities of team teaching
across departmental and even divisional
boundaries, and the invention of integrative curricula all provide opportunities for a broad and synthesizing vision.
Liberal arts education provided us with
much of our cultural coherence in the
nineteenth century. Perhaps it can again
make a significant contribution to that
end.
39