The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory by Richard J. Bernstein (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 527 The Restructuring of· Social and Political Theory. By RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN . Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1976. Pp. ~86. $17.95. Ambrose Bierce defines philosophy in The Devil's Dictionary as "a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." The definition receives some apparent support from the multitude of problems raised, methods employed, and solutions advocated by contemporary philosophers and from their readiness to excommunicate each other from the enterprise of philosophy. It is no wonder many people confronted with this seeming babble of contradictory voices turn either to a total skepticism about the problems, methods, and solutions or to a rigid dogmatism which is but the other side of skepticism. One way to escape the predicament is to bypass the schools and movements and to face the issues directly, but this response often means simply increasing the noise level. Another is to listen more attentively to the disputes among philosophers in order to find the elements of possible unity within the diversity of approaches and to take both conflict and unity as a key to a richer perception of human questions and their likely answers. Few have equalled the success of Richard J. Bernstein in the second endeavor. His earlier book Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of· Human Activity (Philadelphia, 1971) brought together the work of Marxists, existentialists, pragmatists, and analysts in elucidating the concept of action. In The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, he has achieved a similar linkage for the debate about the status of the social sciences. The starting point for The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory is the dominant conviction of mainstream social scientists that their task is to develop a science of society in essential continuity with the natural sciences. They too must work towards " testable and well-confirmed theories which explain phenomena by showing how they can be derived in non-trivial ways from our theoretical assumptions." If the social sciences evidence a shortage of testable and well-confirmed theories, it is a result of their relatively recent origin and of their complex human object, not of an intrinsic difference of approach required for the study of society. A methodological principle at play here is the importance of maintaining a neutral stance in all that concerns value. The social scientist like the physicist or the chemist may have personal preferences, but his work as a scientist must remain value-free. A fact-value dichotomy enters into the undertaking procedurally if not in terms of a basic ontology. Bernstein discusses the general orientation under the heading "empirical theory," and he identifies its advocates as the "mainstream" because they have dominated the professional societies, the universities,· and the journals which control the currents of the relevant disciplines. 528 BOOK REVIEWS The figures that occupy the center of his presentation of empirical theory are the sociologist Robert Merton and the philosopher Ernest Nagel. In focussing on Merton and Nagel, he quite consciously selects authors who have been sophisticated about the difficulties of social and political theory, but who in the end have given the mainstream its form and its power. To speak of a mainstream is, of itself, to suggest that there are other currents moving at the same time and in tension with it. In the intellectual order, one could almost establish a rule according to which any powerful tendency will inevitably elicit movements resisting it. The resistance to empirical theory in the social sciences became most evident in the 1960's when people within as well as without the academic disciplines grew preoccupied not only with the difficulties of establishing adequate theories of society but also with the conceptual and moral hazards involved in the simple transfer of strategies useful in analyzing chemicals to the effort to understand human society. A major factor in producing this preoccupation was the strife over the war in Southeast Asia and over the socio-economic inequities of even advanced nations. When a person had observed the ways in which value-free investigation of things and people serve manipulative and ideological purposes, he came more easily to ask about the basic assumptions of the investigation and to think about possible alternatives. What Bernstein does...