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5. The Place of Value in a Culture of Facts: Truth and Historicism
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126 5 The Place of Value in a Culture of Facts Truth and Historicism James T. Kloppenberg Carved in stone on the Social Science Research Building at the University of Chicago are the following words: “When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.” That bold proclamation, attributed to Lord Kelvin, reflected the convictions of the sociologist William F. Ogburn, chair of the Committee on Symbolism, which was charged with ensuring that the exterior of the building accurately projected the aspirations of the social scientists it would house. Like natural scientists in their laboratories, some social scientists at the University of Chicago, such as Ogburn, the first sociologist ever named president of the American Statistical Association, envisioned themselves engaged in a quest for truth. From reliable measurements of empirical data they intended to generate significant and satisfactory results that would enable their contemporaries to solve pressing social problems. Not all Ogburn’s colleagues agreed with him, or with Kelvin. Some preferred Aristotle ’s more open-ended dictum “man is a political animal.” At least one denied that any words could capture the rich diversity of the work to be done by scholars who would follow different methodological paths toward diverse, and changing, conceptions of truth.Another of Ogburn’s foes, the political scientist Charles E. Merriam, never accepted the claim emblazoned on his workplace; he wanted the misleading words removed.1 The terms and the stridency of these scholars’ debates have echoed ever since within the humanities as well as the discursive social sciences. The same year that building opened, 1929, a new president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, arrived at the University of Chicago. The thirty-year-old Hutchins presided over the dedication ceremonies of the Social Science Research Building , and he almost immediately locked horns with its faculty. As a breathtakingly young professor and then dean of the Yale Law School, Hutchins had established himself as a champion of Legal Realism, which challenged the timelessness of legal principles and the usefulness of abstract reasoning. But The Place of Value in a Culture of Facts 127 when he arrived in Chicago, Hutchins made it clear immediately that he did not share Kelvin’s faith in measurement or Ogburn’s commitment to empirical investigation. In his first address at the university he told the class of 1929 that “the purpose of higher education is to unsettle the minds of young men.” The goal of education “is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight, if possible, but to think always for themselves.”2 To that end Hutchins endeavored to transform the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Chicago. He wanted students to develop their ability to think not by learning to measure but by confronting the timeless wisdom contained in the great books of the Western tradition. Hutchins sought to appoint scholars who shared his enthusiasm for ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, scholars wary of Kelvin’s confidence in natural science and equally skeptical about American pragmatism. Even though John Dewey had left Hyde Park for Columbia almost twenty years before Hutchins arrived, the sensibility associated with Dewey and with his fellow pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce and William James remained influential at the University of Chicago. Two of Dewey’s allies and champions, James H. Tufts and George Herbert Mead, bristled at Hutchins’s attempt to appoint Mortimer Adler, Richard McKeon, and Scott Buchanan to the faculty. When the Chicago philosophers first met Adler and explained that they introduced first-year students to the discipline by assigning Will Durant’s popular, accessible, and pragmatist-leaning Story of Philosophy, Adler is said to have fumed, “But—but—but that’s a very bad book.” Adler had first burst on the academic scene when, as a student at Columbia, he had enraged Dewey at a meeting of the undergraduate philosophy club by denouncing Dewey’s account of “the religious” in A Common Faith. The usually equable Dewey, protesting that “nobody is going to tell me how to love God,” walked out. Now Adler was turning his ire on the Chicago philosophers, and Hutchins was urging them to make room for scholars who would teach classical and medieval philosophy instead of instrumentalism. They responded much as Dewey had: Tufts resigned, and Mead made plans to move to Columbia. The philosophers...