A comment on Jeffrey Isaac's article, "Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War" (2004), in which he argues that scholars must defend academic values when they are under attack, but should not take partisan political stances. In light of the US war in Iraq, a political scientist could exercise impartiality while demonstrating which positions are incoherent, self-defeating, & potentially realizable but with questionable consequences. Max Weber's ethic regarding responsibility for "foreseeable" consequences could be interpreted in many ways, & Isaac pursues a minimal argument to gain the widest possible agreement among political scientists to defend the fundamental liberties that make their work possible. War should prompt scholars to test their partisan commitments against scientific clarification. 7 References. L. A. Hoffman
Although it is well-recognized that Max Weber was of central importance to many of the emigre social scientists who fled Hitler, commentators have overlooked both Weber's attempt to found a new dynamic political science that would test partisan commitments and the endeavors of emigre political scientists to develop this project. This article lays out this new Weberian political science and assesses the fate of the various attempts on the part of the emigres to translate it into their new setting. It shows that Weber forged a notion of political science that combined an existential notion of politics as inexorable power struggle with a sociology of the business of politics that provided the setting in which that struggle was to take place. It also shows that the central purpose of this political science was to aid political partisans in clarifying the meaning of their political commitments by forcing them to view these commitments as they are shaped in the socio-political context that determines the struggle for power. I then show that Mannheim sought to radicalize this approach to political science by seeking to construct the political backdrop for the testing of political ideas out of a political field not out of parties, politicians, and state institutions but out of competing ideologies, each of which could be shown to have some insight into the dynamics of political conflict. For Mannheim we could now test political ideas against political reality by playing them off against each other. I call this project of testing political ideas against existential and sociological notions of the political field the Weber–Mannheim project. I then show how three emigre political scientists – Arnold Brecht, Hans Morgenthau, and Franz Neumann – sought to carry on the Weber–Mannheim project in their new setting. I argue that, of the three, Franz Neumann in his great work Behemoth, was most successful in staying true to that project. For he was able to find in his analysis of the Weimar Republic and the fascist regime a way of demonstrating the dynamics under which democracy and dictatorship fail or succeed while still maintaining openings for political will. Both Brecht and Morgenthau seem to have flattened the dynamic aspect of the Weberian and Mannheimian notions of a prudential political science – though it was Morgenthau who had the most successful reception in political science.
The explanation of everything by economic causes alone is never exhaustive in any sense whatsoever, in any sphere of cultural phenomena, not even in the economic sphere itself. Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy (1904)
