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5 Liberalism as Social Science The values liberals hold dear are absolute not relative values. . . . Where recognized, the liberal order of justice is eternal, immutable and universal. —D. J. Manning (1976, 79) I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present or nothing but the past. —John Maynard Keynes (1926, 16) [W]e tend to overstrain a new principle of explanation. —Frederick A. von Hayek (1952, 209, n. 9) The century stretching from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War has been called the Age of Steam, the Age of Nationalism— and the Age of the Bourgeoisie. Defensible names all, but it might well be called, too, the Age of Advice. —Peter Gay (1993, 491) The French Revolution, as we have been arguing, had enormous consequences for the realities of the capitalist world-economy. It led to the construction of the three modern ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—and then to the triumph of centrist liberalism as the basis of the world-system’s geoculture. It led to the construction of the liberal state in the core zones of the world-economy. It led to the emergence of the antisystemic movements and then to their containment . And it led to the creation of a whole new knowledge sector: the historical social sciences. Hayek sums up (1941, 14) the impact of the French Revolution on our knowledge systems thus: In the first place, the very collapse of the existing institutions called for immediate application of all knowledge which appeared to us as the concrete manifestation of that Reason which was the Goddess of the Revolution. In this field, too, centrist liberalism would come to be triumphant. It is the story of this other pillar of the nineteenth-century world-system (one that lasted indeed 219 220 Liberalism as Social Science for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century as well) that we wish to tell now in order to complete the picture of this triumph of liberalism in the nineteenth century. The real social world changed remarkably during the nineteenth century. But the ways in which we perceived, analyzed, and categorized the world changed even more. To the extent that we do not take cognizance of the latter, we exaggerate the former. What had changed most in the real social world was the wide acceptance of the twin doctrines that were consecrated by the French Revolution—the normality of change, and the sovereignty of the people. For those who were immersed in the politics of the world-system, it now became urgent to understand what generated normal change in order to be able to limit the impact of popular preferences on the structures of the social system. This is the task for which the historical social sciences and its new conceptual language were invented.1 To be sure, social analysis and social theorizing were ancient activities, and eighteenth-century Europe in particular was the locus of important theoretical debates that we might find useful to read still today, were we to read them. However, this prior tradition of social analysis was not what we call today social science. The social science that was invented in the nineteenth century is the systematized, organized, and, yes, bureaucratized research on how our social systems operate, and in particular on how the modern world-system operates. This “social science” was conceived of as a knowledge activity that was to be distinguished from, and somehow situated between, “humanities” or “letters” on the one hand and “natural science” on the other (Lepenies, 1989). THE INVENTION OF THE “TWO CULTURES” The period between 1789 and 1848 was one of great confusion, in terms of both the content of the emerging ideologies and the content and structure of the emerging knowledge systems. Neither the terms to be used nor the boundary lines to be drawn, nor even the number of basic categories (the key question being whether there were two or three) had yet been clearly decided, and certainly these were not yet in any way institutionalized. At that time, these political and intellectual battles 1. See the discussion by Brunot and Bruneau (1937, 617) of the transformation of the term revolution : “The evening of the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI, uneasy, enquired: ‘Is this then a riot?’—‘No, Sire, it’s a revolution,’ the Duke of Liancourt responded. This word was not new, even in the sense of a profound movement transforming an empire...

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