10 - Scientism

Summary

The sciences of liberal change that were forged during the second decade of this century captured substantial support in the social science disciplines. Inherently unstable, designed to grasp the reality of historical change by reaching to a natural process within history, they did not survive intact. The self-conscious search for scientific method, which they had themselves inaugurated, quickly gained ascendancy and transformed them, as it transformed the larger disciplinary traditions.

The advent of scientism

Like aestheticism, scientism was a response to the modernist historical crisis, an effort to make the achievement of science an end in itself and thereby to find order amid historical flux. It was also the result of a long-standing commitment perennially deferred, an effort to make good on the positivist claim that only natural science provided certain knowledge and conferred the power of prediction and control. With science now defined by its method, scientism demanded that the requirements of natural scientific method dominate the practice of social science. In examining the postwar context in which scientism arose in the United States, we will look first at the increasing strength of professionalism; then at the historical anxieties and disillusion with politics that professionalism channeled into science; and finally, at a range of institutional and conceptual supports for scientism in the 1920s.