Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: kumulative Unordnung; Sozialwissenschaft

Kurzinhalt: Gruppenbefangenheit, Grundproblem der Geschichte; Machiavelli; Norm der Sozialwissenschaft

Textausschnitt: () ... there is an even more serious consequence that can emerge when social scientists attempt to interpret and evaluate just what is going forward through a historical sequence of such social orders. If social scientists take the actual data of the social situation as the norm for critically judging the reality of the situation, they are abandoning the normative guide that is intrinsic to their own desire to know. In place of this normative desire to know, social scientists substitute the concrete data of the social order, but such data combine ordered and disordered elements without providing any norm by which scientists can discern the difference between a social order and social disorders. Thus, we have the situations that I illustrated by the quotation from The Prince, where Machiavelli rejects any normative standard for governing a people other than the use of force and fraud.