The Social Sciences—How to Think
Though a major function of the second-year course in the social sciences was to prepare students going on to further work in the field, it focused on what were claimed to be “major social problems of the day,” though this time the order of the different social sciences was changed.18 The first quarter tackled urbanization; the second, the role of the national government (particularly contentious given Franklin Roosevelt's aggressive use of government powers to try to deal with the Great Depression); and the third quarter, the general problem of economic interdependence—a more theoretical concern, though given topicality by what was happening in the world economy.
a. For an explanation, see chapter 14 this volume.
Most of the items on the “whole volume” reading list, emphasized by being made available as a rental set, focused on critical thinking. First on the list was Straight and Crooked Thinking)-19 The aim of this book was to expose dishonest tricks used to make an argument appear more persuasive than it should be. Words could be chosen because of their emotional appeal (“pigheaded” rather than “firm”); jumps could be made from propositions true of some people to assumptions they were true of all; one could show that someone is wrong on a trivial point and conclude that his or her main argument is wrong; one could present two extreme positions and assume that the mean must be correct. The book sought to expose “tabloid thinking,” the pitfalls in drawing analogies between different situations, and the perils of vagueness. In an appendix, flagged in the syllabus as a crucial part of the book, no fewer than thirty-four illegitimate types of argument were cited. It was a book in logic, though more practical than normal textbooks in logic. Thouless20 likened it to flypaper, writing, “if we have a plague of flies in the house we buy fly-papers and not a treatise on the zoological classification of Musca domestica.
” The point was vividly illustrated with an imaginary but highly plausible conversation in which virtually every statement involved crooked thinking.“Straight thinking” was exemplified by science. “The scientist,” Thouless21 argued, “weighs, measures, and calculates without any use of emotional phraseology, guided only by a simple creed of the universality of cause and effect.” The result was that science, by leading to new experiments, increases knowledge and makes it possible to control our environment: “blind forces” can be replaced by “our own intelligent and conscious control.” The idea that disease should be brought under control was widely accepted, and Thouless argued that similar methods should be used to cure social ills such as trade depressions and international conflicts. “The man who brings a scientific attitude of mind to the analysis of a dispute between his own country and another is labelled a ‘traitor.’... When we suggest that poverty is an evil whose causes must be discovered and, at all costs, removed, we are told that the life of societies follows unchangeable economic laws with which it is dangerous to tamper.”22 The argument was flawed, for although an automobile obeyed mechanical laws, it could nonetheless be driven to a chosen destination. If controlling social phenomena was dangerous, the remedy was not to leave them uncontrolled but to understand the laws behind them. His conclusion amounted to a powerful argument for the social science that Gideonse and his colleagues were offering.
We can solve the problems of war and poverty if we approach them in the same scientific spirit as we have now learned to apply to disease, sure that every effect has a cause, and that impartial scientific investigation will reveal those causes and that sufficiently determined effort will remove them.
A really educated democracy, distrustful of emotional phraseology and all the rest of the stock-in-trade of the exploiters of crooked thinking,...
could take conscious control of our social development and destroy these plagues of our civilization—war, poverty, crime— if it were determined that nothing should stand in the way of their removal—no old traditions and none of the ancient privileges which are called “rights” by their holders. That would be a beneficent revolution which we can have if we are willing to trust our own intelligences sufficiently boldly and if we want it badly enough. But the revolution must start in our own minds.23What began almost as a textbook in practical logic ended with a bold statement of political faith allied with a belief in the power of social science to bring about a political revolution.
The first task the students were set attests to the importance attached to this book. The whole book was listed as “indispensable reading,” and students were asked to keep a “fallacies notebook” in which they recorded examples of crooked thinking, found either in the press or in course readings, together with their own explanation of why the reasoning was false. This had to be shown to their instructor at least once a quarter.
The message that becoming a social scientist involved learning to apply a critical, scientific attitude to social problems was reinforced with other reading. They were directed to read The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931) for its first-hand reports of social movements, especially ones arising in large cities; and Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923)—by Bertrand Russell, “one of the outstanding philosophers of our time,” and Dora Russell—on account of the critical attitude it displayed toward industrial civilization. The Russells' suggestions for a way out of these problems were described as incidental to its critical analysis. Different ways in which people might be trained to be citizens were covered in The Making of Citizens (1931) by Charles Merriam, a professor of political science at Chicago since 1920. In line with Thouless's thinking, Merriam was concerned with both unconscious and conscious ways in which citizens' ideas were shaped.
The theme of revealing unconscious barriers to clear analysis of social problems was covered explicitly in Norman Angell's The Unseen Assassins (1932). Like Steffens, Angell was a journalist, though he had just served two years as a Labour Party Member of the British Parliament. He was famous worldwide for his book The Great Illusion (1910), which had challenged the ability of war to resolve economic issues; and in 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Unseen Assassins challenged notions of nationalism, patriotism, and imperialism, arguing as in his earlier book for a more rational organization of world affairs. A major focus of the book was on educating ordinary voters who, he argued at length, could never master the technical details of economic and social problems: they were far too complex and yet it was impossible simply to rely on experts, for the experts were divided. Angell's contention was that, though “John Smith” could never become an expert, he could nonetheless reach sensible conclusions by drawing on knowledge he already possessed but to which he was blind. For example, arguments about retribution against Germany could be undermined by recognizing the obvious fact that, though Germany might be referred to as “she,” nations were not individuals but, rather, collections of people with different goals and interests. Such recognition was sufficient to undermine notions of punishment. Many disasters, including the First World War, could have been avoided if ordinary people had not been driven, through false conceptions, to hold the “suspicions, hatreds, insane passions, and cupidities” that they did.24 Angell thus took an optimistic view of what could be achieved by opening the eyes of ordinary people.
The rental set also included two books specifically on economics, presumably intended to support the theme of economic interdependence to be covered in the third quarter, the first of which was Recovery: The Second Effort (1932), by the British economist Arthur Salter.
Salter argued that although unemployment was the most obvious contemporary problem, it concealed deeper problems. The purpose of his book was to provide comprehensive coverage of what he called the “immediate distress,” encompassing money, gold, finance, reparations and war debts, trade policy, industrial organization, government regulation and control, and political security, on the grounds that anything less would be “partial and misleading.”25 The root cause of postwar problems was the dislocation of the world economic system brought about by the First World War. There had been a remarkable recovery by 1925, but because the defects of the system had not been addressed, there was now need for another recovery. Theoretical ideas were introduced in the context of working out solutions to urgent policy problems.bIn the nineteenth century, the laissez-faire system had achieved much: an outburst of scientific invention and rising living standards. It was an
b. During the Second World War, a major focus of Samuelson’s research was the aftermath of the First World War, to which he had been introduced here. automatic, self-regulating system governing the flows of goods and money throughout the world. It was so successful that few realized “how miraculous was the self-adjusting quality of this individualistic, competitive, free, unregulated, unplanned and unplanning system; and upon what a fortuitous combination of conditions, precarious and temporary, its success was depen- dent.”26 Government had intervened to respond to defects in the system, with the result that the world now found itself with a system intermediate between laissez-faire and planning, each of which had its own defects. The task facing policymakers was to design a new system that transcended both laissez-faire and planning.
Though the book focused on immediate policy problems, it held out clear methodological lessons. The first of these was that economic problems were much more complicated than they appeared to be, thereby undermining simple solutions that might be found in popular writing.
This message was reinforced in another text in the rental set, The Control of Wages (1928) by Walton Hamilton and Stacy May, the message of which was that even in the context of something so apparently simple as wages, the interdependence of different markets meant that careful analysis was needed. In the course of his analysis of current problems, Salter also covered important theoretical ideas—competition, the business cycle, speculation—introducing the idea that theory was important for understanding concrete problems. This message was reinforced by one of the optional readings listed to support the students' preparation of their “fallacies notebooks”: “It May Be So in Theory,” by James Bonar.27 In this chapter, Bonar attacked the notion that theory and practice were opposed. Theory was, he argued, essential, and if theory did not work in practice, that meant that the theory must be wrong. The maxim espoused by many so-called practical men that “The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it” did not justify popular disbelief in abstraction.28 Bonar went on to argue for the method adopted by the nineteenth-century classics.In Political Economy we are making an endeavour after a Science. Is our endeavour fruitless?
Must we be content with a register of facts? The right answer seems to be that the motives and actions of men in regard to economy in society undoubtedly yield general principles; they present certain broad uniformities that have a greater persistence and regularity than exist in any other group of social facts. This is proved by practice in the sense of being inferred from the known character of the great masses of civilized men. The onlooker sees these uniformities; to be an economist, he takes permission to look at them (in the first place) separately as if they were the only causes at work. This detachment of them is his offence in the eyes of the “practical” men. It is the method described as essential to economic investigation by J. S. Mill, Senior, Cairnes, Bagehot, and [Neville] Keynes, the last summing up the whole case sanely and wisely. It is the method dictated (to use a figure) by the facts of human nature.29
Whatever stance his teachers took toward Bonar's position (it must never be forgotten that their aim was to expose students to contrasting views), Samuelson was exposed at an early stage in his training to strong arguments for abstract theorizing in the social sciences, paralleling the arguments he was encountering in his physical sciences course, but these arguments were all firmly rooted in contemporary problems.