Werner Stark

In Search of the True Pareto

T F A MAN is genuinely intent on reaching his goal, he must keep his | eyes on the road ahead and not look sideways over his shoulder. XUnfortunately, this is precisely what far too many sociologists have done and are still doing. Instead of asking what methods will help them most to master the problems offered by social life, they watch what methods are being applied in the physical sciences and then try to apply them, by hook or by crook, to their own chosen field; instead of deciding what forms are most appropriate for the embodiment of sociological truths, they set mathematical and mechanistic propositions up as their models and squeeze what insights their labours will yield into that narrow mould. Down to the seventeenth and then again in the nineteenth century, it was biology that was aped; in the eighteenth and now in the twentieth century, it is rational mechanics. The results of this pathetic endeavour have often been downright ridiculous. Even great men, like Bishop Berkeley with his Principles of the Moral Attraction, have fallen into deep absurdity not to speak of lesser men like Spencer and Schaffle or Fourler and Carey. Vainly have the greatest social philosophers, from Vico to Max Weber, pointe d out that one kind of science cannot possibly cover two kinds of reality; that the social world which men have made is different, in essence, and hence a different challenge to the mind in pursuit of knowledge, from the physical world which men have not made; that the social sciences, admittedly inferior in other respects, are superior to the physical sciences in that they can not only know about their object, but also understand it the naive imitation of physics and physiology goes on. Indeed, it has become steadily worse. Some of the assertions of the would-be social physicists and physiologists of yesterday were so outrageous that they will not be repeated again: who would dare nowadays to suggest with Spencer that Sheffield is an iron-secreting organ in the social organism of Great Britain, or with Carey that Ireland is a country in which the socio-electric batteries are wrongly connected up? But just because these inanities have become impossible, the imitation of the natural sciences has assumed less obvious and more sophisticated forms; and the underlying trend continues. The task of exposing this truth-inhibiting factor has become correspondingly more difficult.