Creating a New Framework for New Realities: Social Science as Public Philosophy

Author(s): Robert N. Bellah

Source: Change, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1985), pp. 35-39
Published by: Heldref Publications
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40164490
Accessed: 05/10/2010 14:33
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=held.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Heldref Publications is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Change.

http://www.jstor.org

A NEW
CREATING
FRAMEW
FOR
NEW REALIT
Social

Science

as

Public

Philosophy

by Robert N. Bellah

de Tocqueville was following

precedentwhen he wrote in the introduction to volume I of Democracyin
America, "A new political science is needed
for a world itself quite new." Someone in
almost every generationduringthe past several centurieshas announcedthat such a new
social science has begun or is about to begin.
Oftenthis claimmeantthat the social sciences
were about to attain the status of the natural
sciences. Yet those who expected social science to attain the same kind of cumulativeness, agreement on paradigms,and obsolescence of predecessorsas naturalscience have
been perenniallydisappointed.
Change

March/April 1985

35

the
since

and

century

half

de

Tocqueville wrote
Democracy in America,

"hard"

social

science

has

emerged, but certainly a

social
science
"professional"
significant achievements
Although de Tocqueville's contemporary and fellow countryman Auguste
Comte was one of the most ardent disseminators of what we might call the
myth of social science- the idea that social science is soon to become like natural science- there is no reason to believe
that de Tocqueville shared that idea. Indeed, de Tocqueville's argument for a
new science rested specifically on the notion that the object of study- namely,
society in a new world- was new and
therefore required a new approach. De
Tocqueville returnedthroughout his life
to several major figures in the tradition
of French social thought: Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. He did not believe them outmoded or pre-scientific.
Yet de Tocqueville saw that the task of
appropriating and applying their insights to a new historical situation could
not be automatic but was so demanding
as to requirethe invention of something
like a new science. In that sense, each
generation, no matter how much it
learns from tradition or how much it is
aware that, unlike natural science, it
ROBERT N. BELLAH is the Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley.
This essay is adapted from his latest book,
Habits of the Heart, copyright 1985, by
Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven
M. Tipton.
Habits of the Heart, Individualism and
Commitment in American Life, $16.95, is
available from the University of California
Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA
94720.
36

not

with
has.

ter pointed out the moral and political

meaning of the American experiment. It
is that synoptic view, at once philosophical, historical, and sociological, that
narrowly professional social science
seems not so much incapable of as uninterested in. It is in order to reappropriate
that larger view that we must try to restore the idea of social science as public
philosophy. Such a social science does
not need to be "reinvented," for the
older tradition has survived side by side
with narrowly professional social science and requiresonly to be encouraged
and strengthened. To see how we might
revive that older view, we should first
consider the conditions under which
narrowlyprofessional social science first
emerged.
When we look at the history of our
own disciplines and their professionalization we see that during the nineteenth
century the social world changed from
being a community, a cosmos of callings, into an industrial-corporatesociety
organized around competing professional careers. Educational institutions
were transformedin ways comparableto
the transformation of other institutions.
The American college through much of
the nineteenth century was organized on
the assumption that "higher learning
constituted a single unified culture."
The purpose of college education was to
produce a "man of learning" who
would have "an uplifting and unifying
influence on society." Literature, the
arts, and science were regarded as
branches of a single culture of learning.
It was the task of moral philosophy, a
required course in the senior year, usually taught by the college president, not
only to integrate the various fields of
learning, including science and religion,
but even more importantly to draw the
implications for the living of a good life
individually and socially. Interestingly,
most of what we now call the social sciences was taught, so far as it was taught
at all, under the heading of moral
philosophy.

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

corporation. The two institutions were

manifestations of the same social forces.
Graduate education, research, and specialization, leading to largely autonomous departments, were the hallmarks
of the new universities. The prestige of
naturalscience as the model for all disciplined knowing and the belief that the
progress of science would inevitably
bring social amelioration in its wake partially obscured the fact that the unity
and ethical meaning of higher education
were being lost.
The early social sciences were caught
up in this transformation. While they
were concerned with establishingprofessional specialties providing useful
knowledge about an increasingly complex society, many social scientists still
felt the older obligations of moral philosophy to speak to the major ethical
questions of the society as a whole. This
tradition has never died, but it has been
driven to the peripheryby an ever more
specialized social science whose subdisciplines often cannot speak to one another, much less to the public. The early
nineteenth-century "man of learning"
became
the twentieth-century
"scientist."
There were great positive achievements in this transformation of higher
education. The new educational system
prepared vastly larger numbers of people for employment in an industrialsociety, and it included as students those
who, because of class, sex, or race, were
almost completely excluded in the early
nineteenth century. But we must be
aware of the costs. One of the major
costs of the rise of the research university and its accompanying professionalism and specialization was the impoverishment of the public sphere. As
Thomas Haskell has put it, the new man
of science had to "exchange general citizenship in society for membershipin the
community of the competent. Within his
field of expertise, the worth of his opinions henceforth would be judged not by
open competition with all who cared to
challenge him, but by the close evaluation of his professional colleagues."
If we may again take de Tocqueville
as our example, we may note that he was
read by the leading intellectuals of his
time- John Stuart Mill, for examplebut he was also intelligible to any educated reader. Today's specialized acaChange

March/April 1985

demics, with notable exceptions, write

with a set of intellectual assumptions
and a vocabulary shared only by their
colleagues. This is not to say that the
achievements of a specialized and professionalized social science should be
forgotten. It is a necessaryenterprisein a
complex modern society. But, we believe
that the competent social scientist does
not have to cease to be a "general citizen
of society." Specialization requiresintegration; they are not mutually exclusive.
A professional social science that loses
concern for the larger society cannot do
even its professional job, for there is too
much of reality with which it cannot
deal. And if we rememberthat "calling"
or "vocation," with the implication of
public responsibility, is the older meaning of "profession," then we would see
that a really "professional social scientist" could never be only a specialist. He
would also see social science as, in part,
public philosophy.
Let us consider how such a social science differs from much currentwork. It
is of the nature of a narrowly professional social science that it is specialized
and that each specialized discipline disavows knowledge of the whole or of any
part of the whole that lies beyond its
strictly defined domain. It is the governing ideal of much specialized social science to abstract out single variablesand,
on the natural science model, try to figure out what their effects would be if
everything else were held constant. Yet
in the social world, single variables are
seldom independent enough to be consistently predictive. It is only in the context of society as a whole, with its possi-

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.

science as public philosophy,

by breaking through the iron curtain between the social sciences
and the humanities, becomes a form of
social self-understanding or self38

interpretation. It brings the traditions,

ideals, and aspirations of society into
juxtaposition with its present reality. It
holds up a mirrorto society. By probing
the past as well as the present, by looking at "values" as much as at "facts,"
such a social science is able to make connections that are not obvious and to ask
difficult questions.
A social science concerned with the
whole of society would have to be historical as well as philosophical. Narrowly
professional social science has given us
valuable information about many aspects of contemporary society, but it often does so with little or no sense of history. Social historians have been ingenious in giving us information about the
past that is often only slightly less rich
than that discovered by social scientists
about the present. Yet, what we need
from history, and why the socal scientist
must also, among other things, be a historian, is not merely comparable information about the past, but some idea of
how we have gotten from the past to the
present, in short, a narrative. Narrative
is a primaryand powerful way by which
to know about a whole. In an important
sense, what a society (or a person) is, is
its history. So a Habermas or a Maclntyre gives us his story about how modern
society came to its present pass. Such
stories can, and must, be contested,
amended, and sometimes replaced.
The social scientist as public philosopher also seeks to relatethe stories scholars tell to the stories current in the society at large and thus to expose them both
to mutual discussion and criticism. Social science as public philosophy cannot
be "value free." It accepts the canons of
critical, disciplined research, but it does
not imagine that such researchexists in a
moral vacuum. To attempt to study the
possibilities and limitations of society
with utter neutrality, as though it existed
on another planet, is to push the ethos of
narrowly professional social science to
the breakingpoint. The analysts are part
of the whole they are analyzing. In framing their problems and interpretingtheir
results, they draw on their own experience and their membershipin a community of research that is in turn located
within specific traditions and institutions.
For instance, when our research
group studied individualismin America,

we were studying something that is as

much a part of us as it is of the people we
interviewed. Furthermore, we brought
to our study a set of assumptions about
the personal and social implications of
individualism that have been developed
by previous social scientists, such as de
Tocqueville, assumptions that are simultaneously evaluative and analytical.
What we learned as a result of our study
is a contribution to our own self-understanding as well as to social self-understanding. It is impossible to draw a clear
line between the cognitive and the ethical
implications of our research, not because we cannot make an abstract distinction between the analysis of evidence
and moral reasoning, but because in carrying out social researchboth are simultaneously operative. We cannot deny the
moral relationship between ourselves
and those we are studying without being
untrue to both.
It can be argued that if the analyst is
within the society he is studying, he is
also within one or more of its traditions,
consciously or not. There is no other
place to stand. Even if the analyst is
studying a different society, he is still
within the traditions of his own society
and will have to come to terms with traditions in the society he is studying, so
the problem is inescapable. Our society
has been deeply influenced by the traditions of modern individualism. One of
our most important tasks today is the recovery of the insights of the older biblical and republicantraditions. Public social science is not unitary or monolithic;
any living tradition is a conversation, an
argument in the best sense, about the
meaning and value of our common life.
We expect that our interpretations will
be contested by others with other views,
and we expect that, on occasion, we will
be shown good reasons to change our
minds.
science as public philosophy
is public not just in the sense that
its findings are publicly available
or useful to some group or institution
outside the scholarly world. It is public
in that it seeks to engage the public in
dialogue. It also seeks to engage the
"community of the competent," the
specialists and the experts, in dialogue,
but it does not seek to stay within the
boundaries of the specialist community
Change

March/April 1 985

while studying the rest of society from

outside.
Yet, the revival of public philosophy
that would involve a genuine dialogue or
conversation is clearly dependent on
changes within the intellectual community itself, and perhaps in the structure
of higher education. Here the fundamental problem is the split between the
social sciences and the humanities. This
split is so pervasive, not only in the curricula and organization of departments,
but also in the minds of college teachers,
that any attempt to overcome it might
seem hopeless. However, it might be
well to consider how recent and, in some
respects, how local the split has been and
then to examine some currenttendencies
to overcome the split.
In an article published almost twenty
years ago, on the occasion of the establishment of the National Endowment
for the Humanities, John Higham discussed "The Schism in American Scholarship." He pointed out that the American Council of Learned Societies Devoted to Humanistic Studies when it was
founded in 1919 included economists,
historians, and sociologists. The impetus to found the new association came
from Europe where "the human sciences" was a broadly inclusive category
composed of all but the natural or "exact" sciences. But with the formation of
the Social Science Research Council in
1923 a peculiarly American schism began that would soon grow to major proportions. The initiative came largely
from the social scientists, who not only
wanted organizationalindependencebut
also had the intention of founding a
"pure science of behavior" according to
Higham, a science free of "any taint
of the European, 'humanistic' propensity toward speculative thought or normative judgment." Within two or three
decades American academic life was
deeply affected by this split. Not only
were the social sciences modeled on a
natural science methodology which they
never entirely successfully or even entirely happily absorbed, but the humanities came to be defined in terms of their
"common concern with values," an idea
that was neither as traditional nor as
clear as it seemed at the time. It is worth
'
rememberingthat the word "value* used
in this way is quite recent. As a result the
social sciences confined themselves
Change

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.

largely to quasi-scientific description

and analysis while the humanities developed finely tuned discriminations of
value, but almost exclusively of literary
or aesthetic value. As Higham pointed
out, in this intellectual division of labor
moral and political evaluation ceased to
be the serious responsibility of anybody
in the academy. This was certainly the
case in philosophy, where nineteenthcentury moral philosophy became twentieth-centurymeta-ethics, the science of
the techniques of moral reasoning. Until
quite recently these splits and divisions
of labor were largely taken for granted
in American higher education.
Although formal academic structures
do not show it, in the last two decades
serious questions have been raised about
the adequacy of our present way of splitting up human studies. In literary studies, a new concern with "theory" has
meant in part an effort to be "scientific"
but also an effort to rethink the connection between literature and society,
leading to evaluations that are moral
and political in addition to aesthetic.
Major philosophers have once again addressed themselves to central ethical
problems of modern society, even
though there is little agreement about
how best to do this. In the social sciences
there has been a return to interpretive,
political, and moral philosophical issues
rather than an exclusive preoccupation
with antiseptic "theory construction and
testing." In all these initiatives Americans have been stimulated by Europeans

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