Weber on Objectivity and Value Freedom

Weber presents a sophisticated discussion of values in social science (Weber 1949). He certainly talks about the necessity for ‘value freedom' and sociologists at least have often taken him to mean something equivalent to the more positivist notions of objectivity in the natural sciences.

To begin with science itself is a value choice, an ultimate value in the sense discussed earlier. There is no rational justification for a choice to make a career out of social science or natural science. Once that choice is made, the value can be pursued rationally and a level of value freedom can be achieved. However, this can be achieved only in a social and cultural context. First, there is the context of the scientific community, where value freedom is achieved through scholarship and studies are subjected to mutual criticism and argument (the context of justification in the language of Chapters 2 and 3). Second, there is the wider cultural context with its standards of rationality or reasonableness and its dominant concerns and values. All of these impinge on social science, and value freedom is relative to these contexts. This could be taken as a thoroughgoing relativism - in the social sciences, what is accepted as knowledge depends upon the norms and values of the scientific community and the wider culture, and of course these change over time: what is acceptable in one period will not necessarily be acceptable in another.

The alternative interpretation of Weber's position is more complex and interesting. The processes and events studied by the social sciences have many causes and there can be no final, overarching explanation. Within the process of cultural change, the values of social science change and social scientists concern themselves with different aspects of a complex reality. The Protestant ethic thesis concerns itself with one aspect of the rise of capitalism which is bound up with arguments against and about Marxism which were important in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another historical period, the end of the twentieth century, for example, might not be concerned with these issues at all, or might be concerned with a different aspect of the process. This does not mean that the Protestant ethic thesis is wrong, but simply that it describes part of a reality which we no longer think of as being so important because of a change in cultural values. Reality is complex, and we concern ourselves with different parts of it at different times.