Corporate social-scientism in Whyte's 'Organization Man'

Seventeenth in a series of seventeen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 16)

In the previous post in this series, I distinguished between, on the one hand, the social-scientism of the early positivists and, on the other hand, the X-club's scientism, which was championed by T. H. Huxley, among others. I hummed and hawed about the latter variety's label (e.g., reductive-scientism, eliminative-scientism). I should simply have called it physical-scientism. For adherents of physical-scientism, the physical sciences, armed as they were with the new evolutionary theory, were poised to solve all the erstwhile mysteries about human beings, thereby putting the humanistic and social sciences out of business.

I've said that critics of social-scientism trace its lineage to 19th-Century France, particularly to the work of Comte and Saint-Simon. Hayek and others trace it back to the founding of the École Polytechnique.

French social-scientism was largely a left-wing creature. The French association of social-scientism with the political left probably inspired the American cold-war use of 'scientism' as a term of abuse in political debate. On that note, it's interesting that one of the more famous deployments of 'scientism' in 1950s America saw the word applied not to big government but, rather, to big, private corporations. I have in mind William Hollingsworth ('Holly') Whyte's use of the term in The Organization Man (1956), the third chapter of which is called 'Scientism'.

[Here's Whyte interviewed on PBS. I think Whyte would have liked The Wire.]

Citing Hayek and Voegelin, Whyte introduces 'scientism' as follows:

The first denominator is scientism. This is the practical part of the Social Ethic, for it is the promise that with the same techniques that have worked in the physical sciences we can eventually create an exact science of man. (Whyte, The Organization Man [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002/1956], p. 23)

That's a nice, in-a-nutshell statement of social-scientism.  Like Hayek and van Duzer, Whyte traces the ideology back to France:

With the founding of the École Polytechnique in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century scientism was given another forward push; Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte energized a formidable school with the promise of positivism (Ibid., p. 25). 

To display the extent to which private corporations have taken up social-scientism, Whyte quotes from advertising, personnel, and public-relations journals. He quotes an editorial in Public Relations Journal, according to which, 'The challenge of social engineering in our time is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago' ^{(Ibid., p. 26)}. Whyte embraces the phrase, 'social engineering' ^{(Ibid., p. 27)}, a locution with which I, myself, was more familiar as an epithet for the batch of concerns that he addresses. Perhaps 'social engineering' has displaced 'scientism' as the preferred term of abuse for social-scientism.

I believe that social-scientism in its corporate incarnation is the brand of scientism on which Sebastian Benthall and Adam Elkus focus in their interesting posts on scientism. Benthall links this kind of scientism to recent enthusiasm about 'big data'. Elkus characterizes scientism as,

a generalized philosophy that argued modern life was too complex, bewildering, and dangerous for the common man to navigate without the aid of enlightened elites, who would use supposedly scientific methods to direct society through managerial control of social life and the flow of information. Hence, Scientism is really about the idea that a small group of people might be uniquely endowed to engineer the fates of others due to superior knowledge and rationality.

'Scientism' 14 - 1891-1968

Fourteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 & 16)

In 1891, the New York positivist T. B. Wakeman chose, as W. M. Brown would later do, to embrace 'scientism' (the doctrine and the label). Wakeman wrote:

We find the religious history of our race to consist, therefore, of a gradual evolution of its leading peoples from a broad base of general animism and fetichism [sic], thence to astrology, thence to polytheism, thence to monotheism, and thence to scientism expressed chiefly to us in the pantheism of Goethe, the positivism of Comte, the synthetism of Spencer, the cosmism of Fiske, and finally by the monism of Haeckel. He proposed this word monism as expressive of the world-unifying law of science, as the summary of all that was true and good in the other philosophic names proposed by the philosophers just named, while it excluded what he regards as the crude and vulgar notions of materialism, spiritualism, and dualism. (Thaddeus B. Wakeman, 'Ernst Haeckel', in Evolution in Science, Philosophy, and Art: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association [NY: D. Appleton & Company, 1891], p. 41; italics in the original)

Uses from the 1930s are interesting, since they precede the papers by Hayek that popularized 'scientism'. In his 1935 doctoral dissertation, Contribution of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought, Charles van Duzer had this to say:

Two major currents ran through French thought during the latter half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand was Rousseauistic sentimentalism which tended toward the close of the century to pass into a religious mysticism as exemplified in the writings of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Saint-Martin; on the other, the Voltairian philosophy of common sense and scientism which informed the rational and utilitarian tendencies of Encyclopedic thought. (van Duzer, Contribution of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought in The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series 53, No. 4 [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935], p .5 of the number [p. 419 of the volume])

Next, there are two uses from the late 1940s. First, we have Max Horkheimer's use in 1947: 'Like any existing creed, science can be used to serve the most diabolical social forces, and scientism is no less narrow-minded than militant religion'  (Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 1947).

In the same year, we find Werner Jaeger using the term as follows: 'The unilateral emphasis on the physical side of pre-Socratic philosophy in their works is a product of 19th-century scientism and its horror of everything metaphysical' (Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 195, n. 25).

In a letter to William L. Kinter (dated July 30, 1954), C. S. Lewis wrote that That Hideous Strength 'is about a triple conflict: Grace against Nature and Nature against Anti-Nature (modern industrialism, scientism, & totalitarian politics)' (C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, v. III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963, ed. Walter Hooper [New York: HarperCollins, 2006], pp. 497-98).

By the 60s, uses of 'scientism' had become common , but it's interesting to see how Leszek Kolakowski used the word (in 1968):

...scientism, that is, the doctrine according to which any question that cannot be settled by the methods of the natural and deductive sciences is an improper question' [p. 160]. ... It [logical empiricism] professes scientism, that is, it asserts the essential unity of the scientific method, accounting for differences between the sciences on this score -- especially between the social and the physical sciences -- by the immaturity of the former [pp. 177-8] (Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason, [1968]).

'Scientism' 3 - Observations (cold war)

Third in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Some quick observations about the mid-20th-Century use of 'scientism':

• It was used in a more overtly political way by both religious and non-religious authors who tended towards the right end of the political spectrum. 
• The term was generally used to brand its target as a Faustian, secular religion, implying that adherents of the targeted view, though they pretended to superior rationality, had in fact made their own leap of faith. 
• The destination of this leap of faith was in the first instance a 'liberal' ideology, in which a Whiggish belief in progress and an overly rosy view of human nature figured prominently. (This aspect of the term's function fades in the libertarian uses.)
• The phrase was rhetorically convenient for right-wing authors, since it assimilated secular liberalism with Marxism (a more obvious secular religion that was optimistic about history and human nature and that made a great show of being a purely rational science).

The overtones of imputed religiosity are especially clear in the quotations of Foerster ('devotion'), Morgenthau ('dogmatic'), and Voegelin ('creed' and 'dogmas').

Some of the quoted passages seem haunted by a fear of Marxist communism, which is more pronounced in the passage by Polanyi ('soul-destroying tyrrany'). The fear also comes through as a concern about loss of freedom (esp. in the passages from Lewis and Polanyi), with the suggestion in Hayek's 1942 statement that there's something 'slavish' about scientism.

It's interesting to see how the French 'scientisme', originally directed against Saint-Simon and Comte (who really did envision secular institutions that mimicked religion), morphed into the English 'scientism', which was used just before and during the Cold War as an epithet for a broader array of secular views.

My sense is that today, 'scientism' has largely shed its overtly political connotations and is more often used simply to imply that someone has illegitimately applied phsyical-scientific method beyond its proper domain.

'Scientism' 1

First in a series of fourteen posts (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The use of the English term 'scientism' echoes that of the French 'scientisme'. Both words have primarily been terms of abuse, implying the application of scientific methods beyond their proper domain. Peter Schöttler has traced the French phrase back to the 1840s. It seems to have arisen from disputes between Comtean positivists and more conservative, religious authors. Some of the Comteans embraced the label. Here, for instance, is Felix le Dantec in 1911:

I believe that science ... alone can solve all the issues that have meaning ... and I think it will penetrate to the mysteries of our emotional life and explain to me even the origin and structure of hereditary anti-scientific mysticism cohabiting with the most absolute scientism. But I am also convinced that men posed many questions that mean nothing."  (le Dantec, Le chaos et l'harmonie universelle [F. Alcan, 1911])

[Please excuse my linguistic feebleness, but the above rendering is my Google-assisted translation of le Dantec's French.]

Aided by Google's Ngram, James Schmidt has charted the early development of the English 'scientism', noting a spike in its use around 1920. Schmidt identifies two sources of this increase. One was a 1919 theological book by Charles Gray Shaw’s (The Ground and Goal of Human Life [reviewed in The Personalist 4 (1923): 67-9]). Shaw takes Comte and Spencer to be paradigms of scientism (Comte's name appears more than twenty times in the index of Shaw's book). Here's Shaw: 'The attempt to socialize science or to make sociality scientific has been the undoing of scientism; so that who can deny that Comte and Spencer have made scientism appear silly?' (p. 177) Shaw regarded scientism as being inimical to 'individualism'. In one of his earliest uses of 'scientism' in the above-linked book, Shaw says,

The scientism which now attempts to interpret the world for man had its beginning with the inception of modern thought; but it was not until the science of the organic world advanced beyond the study of the inorganic that scientism gained the upper hand and drove the self from the world of things. How such scientism arose and how it achieved its victory over the self, must now become the subject of analytical investigation

Shaw's writing abounds in ill-defined abstractions, including not only scientism but, also, its putative contraries (among which are 'aestheticism' and the 'spiritual').

Schmidt says that the other source of 'scientism's' 1920 spike was an article by Charles Cestre on the plight of labourers. Cestre's use seems idiosyncratic, though he, too, sees a tension between scientism and individualism. (Here's Part II of Schmidt's history of 'scientism'.)

Among the most prominent uses of 'scientism' before 1950 was that of Friedrich von Hayek. In his 1942 paper, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I', Hayek introduced the term as follows:

To preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned, not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with that slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of 'scientism' or the 'scientistic' prejudice. Although these terms are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from the French, where in recent years they have come to be generally used in very much the same sense in which they will be used here. It should be noted that, in the sense in which we shall use these terms, they describe, of course, an attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it. (Hayek, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I' Economica 9 [1942]: 269 [italics added])

I've omitted Hayek's three footnotes from the above passage. In one of them, he cites two French sources re. the use of 'scientisme'. One of them is J. Fiolle's Scientisme et Science (Paris, 1936). The other one is André Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (4th ed.).