ABSTRACT
NORMATIVE Orientations of Marxian Social Science. Although science in general is subservient to human values, it is only in the social sciences that theoretical controversy is a comparatively direct expression of political differences. Marxian social science, in particular, is self-consciously and expressly conditioned by a dual political goal: (1) the abolition of exploitation; and (2) the overcoming of anarchy, inefficiency, and waste in capitalist production. Positively formulated, the ultimate purpose of knowledge in the social sciences is to bring about a classless society and a level of civilization in which all men are masters of their social and physical environments. On the one hand, Marxian social science is designed to serve the partisan morality and relative justice of a proletarian class; on the other hand, its ultimate goal is the freedom and perfection of mankind.1 Its proximate goal is a proletarian revolution, itself a necessary condition to higher levels of productivity and the optimum in social well-being. To be successful in its first or proximate task, it is compelled to represent the class interest and relative justice of the proletariat as the common interest of all members of society, to give its partisan ideals the form of universality, to represent them as the only rational ones. At the same time, it can do this without hypocrisy because of the conviction that its partisan interest really is closest to representing the common interest of other nonruling classes, and that its fulfillment precludes the proletariat, as the bottom class in society, from constituting itself into a new ruling class oppressive like the old. Thus the Marxian ethics leads to the paradox that only a narrowly proletarian class ethic is capable of serving the “common good,” while all attempts to serve humanity directly’—in being predicated upon existing relations between social classes—turn out in fact to be a travesty upon humanist ideals.
