Max Weber and the Objectivity of Social Science

No science is value-free, for all scientific activity (because it is an activity, a human activity) presupposes some framework of meanings or values in terms of which it is judged meaningful, worthwhile, or useful. Scientific interests are guided by values in this sense in an intimate fashion insofar as they enter definitively into the selection of a project for investigation. In this sense, also, the initiation of a scientific project is subjective: it is relative to a valuing subject who selects from a multitude of problems theoretically available to him within his field one which he deems significant. And, again, while it may appear so to the subject, the chosen project can never be intrinsically significant, since its significance is always relative to that subject who chooses it and ultimately to the time and place of which he is more or less wholly a representative. At this preliminary level, in neither the natural nor the human sciences' can the pervasive influence of values be denied, but neither can that influence be said to exert any effect over the objectivity of the ensuing investigation. Max Weber, in his methodological writings, addressed himself primarily to this question, and he concluded that in respect to the so-called historical disciplines, at least, (sociology, economics, history, law, and presumably the anthropology of his time) this necessary orientation to value not merely influences the objectivity of historical study but is the very principle which makes that objectivity possible in the first place. It acts, he thought, as a principle of selection whereby fragments of the succession of cultural events are endowed with a form of objectivity becoming, as a result, phenomena