V

Value freedom is a methodological requirement of a useful social science, and would be treated as one of the primary requisites in judging most political science, though not political theory, writing. It consists of the effort to carry out analyses in the most impartial manner possible, and in not allowing individual preferences to bias the research, data collection or conclusions drawn. The model being invoked is, of course, that of the natural sciences. It is believed by the advocates of value freedom that a physicist, for example, has no private preference for any one theory of nuclear particles rather than another, and therefore produces unbiased work. Similarly, it ought to be possible to study the causes of social stability, or of voting behaviour, or of the efficiency of presidential rather than prime-ministerial governments without any bias resulting from personal conviction. As such it is a goal both long established as ideal (Weber wrote extensively on the problem and Comte thought he had achieved it), and hotly contested by various schools of the philosophy of science. There are two major points that raise doubt about the possibility of such value freedom in social science research. The first is the general argument that all people are subject to the dominant ideology of their society. As a result truth, and especially truth about social reality, is inevitably relative. A Marxist like Georg LukaÂcs (1885±1971), for example, would argue that an economist working inside the framework of a capitalist society simply cannot grasp that capitalism is doomed to collapse through its internal contradictions and because of its exploitative nature, because to accept this would be incompatible with their entire outlook. A second, more subtle argument denies the utility of analogy with the physical sciences because they too are seen as less than impartial. A physicist, because of training, career expectations and individual creative limitations, is stuck inside a `paradigm' in which there is indeed a preference for one theory over another. A theory that fits into the overall received view, rather than one which would force a general rethinking, will be preferred. Thus political sociologists may be forced into working towards, for example, a rational choice theory of voting both because such a theory defends the liberal democracy they have been

socialized to believe in, and because the intellectual apparatus they have been trained in is only efficient given such assumptions. There is no ultimate solution, and perhaps it does not really matter. What is important is not so much that values do not enter into the choice of theory or research method, but that they be explicit and open, so that those who oppose them can criticize the work. Some political theories of liberalism, like utilitarianism, seek for value freedom in a different sense; they seek to create a constitutional framework in which as wide a variety of human values as possible can be achieved. This sense of value freedom could be said to pervade most justifications for democracy.