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.

Social-scientism vs. reductionist-scientism (Part I)

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

I've distinguished two strands in the use of 'scientism'. On the one hand, there's what I've called 'the mid-20th-Century' use (post 9), or the 'cold-war use' (post 11), which channels apprehensions about left-wing political agendas, especially Marxism. In post 11, I conjectured that this deployment of the term echoes some of the concerns behind the earliest uses of the French 'scientisme'. In both cases, 'scientism(e)' gave voice to dark forebodings about radical, 'socialist' agendas whose aim was to jettison much of tradition in a drastic redesign of society. Such radical programs were linked to science by their putative roots in the new social sciences.

Let's coin the label social-scientism for the kind of scientism that was being attacked in these uses. Who was supposed to be guilty of social-scientism? While cold-war fulminations targeted Marxism, the earlier French uses of 'scientisme' were more often motivated by opposition to the visions of Saint-Simon and Comte (and their followers). My understanding of the earlier French concerns is suggested by Richard G. Olson's work. In his Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Olson writes: 

The Saint-Simonians unquestionably understood themselves as scientists, developing a science that comprehended the events of the social as well as of the natural world. Moreover, nearly thirty years before Friedrich Engels appropriated the term 'scientific socialism' for the doctrines that he and Karl Marx had developed, Karl Grün (1817-87) had applied the term to Saint-Simonianism (Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, [Urbana, IL: the University of Illinois Press, 2008], p. 59).

In both the cold-war and earlier French castigations, social-scientism was reviled for its supposed reduction of persons to mere cogs in a machine, social bits and pieces susceptible of the same sort of understanding to be had in the physical sciences. To be sure, proponents of social-scientism might abjure attempts to reduce special sciences to physics, denying that the subject matter of the social sciences (or of any science other than physics) could be reduced to that of any more basic science. Nonetheless, they (e.g., Comtean positivists) held that the same sort of method that had met with such stellar success in the physical sciences now promised an understanding of humanity (if only it were applied to that subject matter). The kind of intellectual operation at work in this method involved the subsumption of the subject matter under universal laws of nature, themselves to be discovered by empirical study.

Note that those who were charged with social-scientism need not be taken by their critics to have embraced reductionist materialism or, indeed, any metaphysics at all. Instead, they were seen as using their science to plot other people's lives, designing a new social order in which people were treated as pawns to be manipulated rather than as free agents to be let alone. (Such worries about social-scientism are echoed by libertarian animadversions about social engineering.)

Note, also, that since social-scientism was associated with socialism, its critics tended to be conservative traditionalists. However, many who have warned of the dangers of scientism have been further to the left on the political spectrum.

This observation brings us to the second strand in the uses of 'scientism'. The main theme in this second strand is a concern about reductionist programs in which a physical science (such as biology) threatens to gobble up the subject matter of the old humanistic disciplines or of the newer social sciences. Let's call scientism of this second variety reductionist-scientism. This is the kind of scientism that members of the X-Club were thought to embrace. Critiques of reductionist-scientism were more likely to include the accusation that its adherents were committed to a materialistic metaphysics. Clearly, concerns about this brand of scientism were fueled by the advent of evolutionary theory. The concerns were exacerbated by the subsequent rise of social Darwinism. Opponents of reductionist-scientism included not only traditionalists but many left-wing authors as well.

The current use of the term 'scientism' incorporates elements from both social-scientism and reductionist-scientism, although the influence of the latter variety has been more pronounced in the past few decades.

'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.