American Social Science: Moralism and the Scientific Method

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American social science has always suffered from an ambivalence found in its very name. As science it represents the amoral, empirical, antitheo-retical approach of the technical method that Daniel Boorstin among others has championed as the characteristic nature of American thought and action. Scientific method deals with how to do things and do them most efficiently; it is unconcerned with the issue of what to do. Yet social science is also social thought and thus contains, especially in America, a traditional consistent concern for social welfare and the directing of society toward preconceived moral ends. Since the time of the Mayflower Compact and John Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charitie," American thinking on society has possessed this normative concern for the welfare of individuals within society. As heir to both traditions, American social scientists have attempted to integrate the two. Yet from the time social science was founded in the late nineteenth century, the elements of social advocacy and scientific neutrality have conflicted with each other.

Puritans' thinking about society was by definition concern for moral issues. Their goal in establishing a new "commonwealth" was to protect the one true church in its Babylonian exile, and they consciously attempted to create a moral and virtuous society in which the church could flourish. John Winthrop reminded his fellow settlers that "wee ought to account our selves knitt together by this bond of love, and live in the exercise of it.... Wee must beare one anothers burthens, wee must not looke onely on our owne things, but allsoe on the things of our brethren." After all, the goal was to be a model "citie on a hill" which other nations could emulate and copy.

Although Puritan thinking differed from that of the Enlightenment in almost every imaginable way, they did share this emphasis on the absolute need for a moral society. Enlightenment thinkers maintained that mankind, especially uneducated natural man, possessed a moral sense which caused him to choose and do the ethical thing. One of the chief reasons the American revolutionaries wanted to separate themselves from the mother country was their belief that England had become corrupt and that a conspiracy was under way to make colonial society over in that corrupt image. Since it was possible to mold individuals through social control, the only protection for the virtuous American people was a separation from corrupt Europe and the creation of social and political institutions that would protect and even help create virtue.

Nineteenth-century American social thought retained this conscious moralism and engaged in cyclical periods of social and religious revivalism when citizens perceived materialism and industrialism threatening their visions of a moral society. Many of the followers of the Jacksonian movement were attracted by the movement's attempts to regain the moral simplicity and virtues of the Founding Fathers. Moral and social reformers of the 1830s and 1840s advanced the theory of perfectionism, which would produce sinless individuals through the creation of a perfect society. Its most prominent spokesman, Charles Finney, exhorted his listeners to "be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." Utopian thinkers were less optimistic about the possibility of reforming current American society, but they believed that perfect individuals could be created through the establishment of new communities totally separated from ongoing society. The British industrialist and philosopher Robert Owen found great support in the United States for his attempt to create a "new moral world" in his community of New Harmony.

Owen's communitarian plans are useful for understanding the interaction between this moral strain and the technological perspective. Owen believed his new moral order would succeed because of its rational and scientific basis. He maintained that he had developed his plans through twelve years of scientific testing in his mill community of New Lanarck, Scotland, and he believed he could simply apply these proven methods of social control to the American environment. Owen, like other Enlightenment figures, believed strongly in the power of the environment. Indeed, he matched the later behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner in the extremity of his views: "Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the world of men." A truly moral society could be achieved only through the discovery of the scientific laws governing society and their subsequent use by political leaders. Although many of Owen's contemporaries may have opposed the extremity of his environmentalism or the validity of his "laws," few would have disagreed with his search for these laws and the need for a moral society. Enlightenment figures pointed to science and the scientific method as the major liberating forces for the times, and few doubted that society was any less amenable to understanding and control than the physical universe. Even earlier critics of rationalism such as the Puritan ministers Increase and Cotton Mather honored science as positive support in their goal of the good society. Morality and science were inextricably linked.

The immediate precursors to professionalized social science in the antebellum United States were threefold: university courses in moral philosophy, pre-Civil War southern followers of Auguste Comte, and inventors and users of statistics for social research purposes. Each retained the connection between moralism and science found in earlier American social thought.

Foremost among these precursors were the first purely social thinkers in American institutions, the teachers of moral philosophy in the colleges during the early nineteenth century. Every college, whether or not it was church supported, had a senior course in moral philosophy, often taught by the president, which interpreted social life in the context of the reigning moral philosophy of Scottish commonsense realism. This final course demonstrated the alleged interconnections of metaphysics, ethics, logic, natural law, rhetoric, politics, and political economy through man's innate moral sense. Moreover, since commonsense realism relied completely on the senses, all of these fields were necessarily composed of facts. This alliance of theology and Baconian science led to the creation of natural laws that were, in the words of historian of philosophy Daniel Wilson, "both descriptive and prescriptive." Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, declared in 1837 that "the principles of political economy are so completely analogous to those of Moral...