Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:46:40.251Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Distance and Engagement in a Time of War: Comments on “Social Science and Liberal Values”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Peter Breiner
Peter Breiner
Affiliation:
Peter Breiner is associate professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany (breiner@albany.edu)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In “Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War,” Jeffrey Isaac urges us to discuss “the responsibilities of social scientists during wartime.” He focuses specifically on the ethics of responsibility appropriate to the university-based scholar when political authority attacks the values, both moral and non-moral, that we implicitly presuppose when we function as academics in general, and political scientists in particular. Isaac invokes the authority of Max Weber to elucidate the precise boundaries of these obligations as well as to find a notion of responsibility on which all political scientists, whatever their partisan commitments, can agree.Peter Breiner is the author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics and articles on Weber and other German theorists. He is working on a book on the role of examples in political theory. The author thanks Jeff Isaac for a most useful interchange that helped him focus this response.

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 485 - 488
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Lassman, Peter, Irving Velody, and Hermino Martins, eds. 1989. Max Weber's “Science as a vocation.” London: Unwin Hyman.
Mann, Michael. 1986. The sources of social power. Vol. 1, A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mann, Michael 1993. The sources of social power. Vol. 2, The rise of classes and nation-states, 1760–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mann, Michael 2003. Incoherent empire. London: Verso.
Taylor, Charles. 1985. Neutrality in political science. In Philosophy and the human sciences. Vol. 2, Philosophical Papers, 58–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Max. 1949a. The meaning of “ethical neutrality” in sociology and economics. In The methodology of the social sciences, ed. Edward Shils and Henry Finch, 1–47. New York: Free Press.
Weber, Max 1949b. “Objectivity” in social science and social policy. In The methodology of the social sciences, ed. Edward Shils and Henry Finch, 49–112. New York: Free Press.