Paul Streeten - Value in Social Theory

SOCIAL THEORY AND METHODOLOGY In 22 Volumes

First published in 1958

by Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 2002

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX 14 4RN

or

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

First issued in paperback 2010

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1958 Gunnar Myrdal and Paul Patrick Streeten

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in The International Library of Sociology. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

Value in Social Theory

ISBN 978-015-17522-7 (hbk)

ISBN 978-0-15-60510-6 (pbk)

Social Theory and Methodology: 22 Volumes

ISBN 978-0-15-17818-1

The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes

ISBN 978-0-15-17838-9

ISBN 9-78-113-6227-011 (epub)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

I F a man has been successively university professor, government adviser, member of parliament, director of a study of the Negro in American life, cabinet minister, bank director, chairman of a planning commission and international civil servant; if, a citizen of a small country, he has occupied these positions in the last thirty years in different countries, has travelled widely both east and west, and has remained all the time a curious observer, we should not be surprised if he came to ask himself certain fundamental questions: Can one be at the same time objective, practical and idealistic? What is the relation between wanting to understand and wanting to change society? How can we free ourselves from thinking in terms possibly appropriate to an earlier age, but no longer appropriate to ours, though still powerful in our intellectual tradition? What are the new presuppositions of social thought which can do justice to the changes in social organization?

Yet, Gunnar Myrdal asked himself these and similar questions as a young man in Stockholm, before embarking on the voyage described above. His subsequent career looks almost like a series of attempts to extort from concrete problems time and time again the replies to these and similar fundamental questions. His biography might be an exercise in practical methodology.

So at least it may appear from the point of view of this book. The following collection of essays is intended to illustrate his repeated attempts to explore the logical, political and moral foundations of social thought and action, as he pursued diverse academic and political activities.

The volume is a companion to Myrdals youthful and iconoclastic Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory.established authority of laissez-faire, to his current writings on under-developed countries, the clarification of the status of the social scientist has been Myrdals constant and meticulous concern. His views, although a series of variations on the same theme, have undergone a gradual change.

One justification for collecting these scattered reflections is that the reader interested in the relation between values and analysis of facts in social theory might not look for its treatment in the sources on which this volume draws. The whole of Part II consists of excerpts and summaries from An American Dilemma. In Part III I have included an early article on Ends and Means, written in German, which has not hitherto been available in English.

The book is neither a complete collection of Myrdals writings on value, nor is it confined to this topic, nor does it avoid overlapping. To give a complete collection would be impossible, for all Myrdals writings are pervaded by methodological reflections and provide illustrations of their application. Few workers in the statistical and empirical field and even fewer men of action can have been more conscious of and scrupulous about the theoretical foundations of their activities. To include all relevant material would have meant to reprint virtually everything Myrdal has written. The most important omission is his most recent Economic Theory and Under-developed Regions which treats almost entirely of the same questions as this book. Thus the Political Element, on the one hand, and Under-developed Regions on the other, form, as it were, the youthful and the mature companions to this volume that spans the eventful quarter century between the last glimpse of a golden European age and the challenge of rising Asia and Africa, which Myrdal calls the great awakening.

Discussions not directly relevant to the central problem were included in order to illustrate how Myrdals method the continual encountersometimes constructive, sometimes destructivebetween the a priori and the a posteriori, between vision and experience, in which each, in the process of shaping the other, is itself shaped by it.

In the following sections I shall attempt to select some of the issues raised by Myrdal and to contrast his approach with the more conventional type of welfare economics which is still vitiated by many of the Victorian presuppositions criticized by Myrdal.