Social Science Among the Humanities
Or, why my colleagues should read more fiction
As a reminder, this is the first substantive post in a series adapting my course on Politics and Literature for Substack purposes. If missed my previous post and you want to read the brief introduction and plan for the series, see here.
I want to kick this series off with a reflection on a lecture by Robert Redfield entitled “Social Science Among the Humanities.” This lecture was delivered in Frankfurt, Germany, and was originally published in the journal Measure, a publication of the Chicago Committee on Social Thought. The journal was published only briefly through Regnery, and hosted papers by all sorts of amazing thinkers (T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and even an essay by George Orwell if my memory serves). I’ve written elsewhere about Redfield, so I won’t retread too much ground on biography, but feel free to revisit that post if you’d like some background.
It might help to frame Redfield’s lecture around the question: what is “social science” anyway? What is the point of social science? What are “social scientists” doing, or aiming to do?
Let me answer with a quote from a popular textbook called Social Science Methodology by John Gerring. He opens the book with the following:
“The subject of this book is the set of disciplines known as the social sciences (which in earlier times would have been referred to as the moral or human sciences). By this is meant a scientific study of human action focusing on elements of thought and behavior that are in some degree social (non-biological). ‘The object of the social sciences,’ writes Hans Morgenthau, ‘is man, not as a product of nature but as both the creature and the creator of history in and through which his individuality and freedom of choice manifest themselves.’ Wherever nurture matters more than nature, or where some significant decisional element is involved, we are on the turf of social science.”
This operative definition is quite useful and quite broad. Any study of human beings as social animals, that is, in non-biological senses, falls under this domain. If we want to know why and how people organize their communities, how and why they worship, how they go about doing commerce and making decisions, we are working in the domain of the social sciences. And, importantly, this study is in some way “scientific,” by which Gerring seems to mean empirical, rigorous, using the best tools available for measuring and analysis to get high-quality explanations of human action.
Now, at this point, students in my class usually see the problem or the tension with what we plan to do in our course. The writing of literature, the reading of literature, the interpretation of literature, the application of our interpretation of literature, none of these seem particularly “systematic” or “scientific.” What, then, can we do with literature or art or culture generally in the social sciences? What is the point? How does it fit into the picture? In other words, why does the class I teach, Politics and Literature, exist at all?
Redfield’s lecture provides one answer that I think is helpful. He begins by noting that in certain parts of the world, namely Germany, social sciences and the humanities are often still lumped or grouped together, under the heading of the “Geisteswissenschaften,” or the spiritual sciences. This overlaps with the Gerring quote I referenced above. He tells us that what we call “social science” would have, in earlier times, been referred to as “moral” or “human” sciences. It’s only relatively recently that the study of politics has been separated from the study of philosophy, ethics, theology, literature, and history. Those things were not previously regarded as fundamentally separate.
What brought about the separation? Redfield says that it is the tendency of the social scientist to want to ally with the natural sciences. By adopting the methods and techniques and language of the natural sciences (“hypotheses” and “experiments” and “variables” and so on), the social scientist strives to emphasize the science of his work, as opposed to the humanness of his work.
Let me be clear: Redfield doesn’t think social science or precision in the social sciences is bad. He says it’s quite a good thing that we strive to make knowledge “systematic and comprehensive.” It is a good thing that, if you go into the field of political science, you will learn proper experimental methods, how to construct good surveys, how to conduct rigorous statistical analysis. But what is lost, Redfield thinks, in our rush to be as close to the natural sciences as we can be, are the deep differences between studying human beings in their social lives and studying aspects of “nature” as you would in chemistry or physics. He tells us that “There sometimes appears in the use of statistical methods in psychology or anthropology or sociology an exercise of the intellect in which nothing very much is found out about human beings or societies. The knowledge is measured; yet is somehow meager and unsatisfactory.”
In other words, humanity is ultimately not quantifiable in the way chemistry might be. As Redfield puts it, “Neither a family nor a religion can be learned about by counting people or by measuring a house or a temple.” Certain things about the human condition and society cannot be reduced to numbers or quantifiable data, but rather deal with what people desire and value. We aren’t going to learn a lot about religion or religious people in the United States simply by measuring how many people go in and out of church every day, or every Saturday or every Sunday.
So what is the shared topic, the common ground that the social sciences and the humanities have to come together on? Redfield says quite obviously it is human beings themselves. Look back at the Gerring quote again: we’re interested in the social aspects of human action, thought, behavior. We aren’t studying human beings for their biology, or their chemistry, or studying them for how they emerged evolutionarily. Both the historian and the political scientist are concerned with WHAT happened and WHY. Both the novelist and the psychologist are attempting to understand, describe, and explain human motivations for action, why people think and do the things they do. Both the artist and the economist are, in a sense, trying to paint a picture for us about what human beings are like deep down. The filmmaker and the sociologist both want to portray the richness and diversity of our cultures and traditions.
Redfield is asking us to consider our “groupings” of disciplines not by methods (experiment vs interview vs reading texts, for example) but by subject matter. The subject matter of the social scientist is human beings as human beings, and so too for the humanities. It is the language of social science that often obscures the human reality of what we’re studying, Redfield says. “ ‘An economic policy’ means only that somebody intends something, and a ‘political machine’ is only figuratively a machine—it is people, with hopes, ambitions, intentions, understandings.”
These things we are looking for, states of mind, relationships between individuals, can’t simply or easily be counted and calculated. If I want to understand why a certain culture buries their dead as opposed to cremating them, if I want to understand why some people think it’s deeply wrong to do a certain act, if I want to know why people gather in churches, protest injustice, or form collaborative organizations, I need to know things about their state of mind, things that can’t been seen with the naked eye or counted up and analyzed with a computer. When Redfield did his field anthropological work, for example, he was attempting to understand “the choices that men make, the preferences they have, and the standards that they define explicitly or implicitly… and these standards are moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.” But, Redfield says, aren’t moral, aesthetic, and intellectual standards the expressed concern of “Every great novel… painter… [and] great philosophers”? Aren’t we all looking for the same thing?
So how do you study “states of mind”? How would I know what you think, feel, or believe? Well, you could ask me questions. What if I’m not there to answer questions? Well, Redfield says, we need what he calls “expressive documents,” things that communicate those states of mind that we’re actually concerned with. We either study those documents that have been created by others, or we create them ourselves in the process of doing our research.
What is the essential difference, Redfield asks, between the scholar who studies what the Stoics believe and the scholar who studies the traditional religions of present-day native Americans? One can go and interview those still living and passing on their traditions and writes down what he learns, and one goes to the library and pulls dusty tomes off the shelf, but is there anything fundamentally different between those two acts of gaining knowledge? Redfield says no. We are allied in this, we theorists, philosophers, and “social scientists,” despite our methodological differences. And in fact, our materials are often the same: Texts, stories, legends, cultural practices, plays, rituals, all of these give us important information about what it means to be a human being.
There is, of course, a background assumption in Redfield’s lecture, one that he is happy to concede: the idea that the humanist and the social scientist are engaged in a common study because they share a common object of study suggests that there is some constancy between human beings across time and place. In other words, there is such a thing as “human nature.”
Redfield is careful here, and he wants to clearly distinguish whatever “human nature” is from what he calls “culture and personality.” Of course not everyone has the same culture, and not everyone has the same personality. But perhaps there is something constant beneath that, something a bit more unchanging than the whims of culture and personality that can change so drastically place to place and time to time. So, Redfield says, while the things that amuse you or seem shameful to you are different from place to place, time to time, culture to culture, we can reliably expect that human beings will have certain things that amuse them, and certain things that are shameful to them. We can reliably expect that human beings will have goals and desires and intentions, desire praise, and often defer present goods for future ones that we value more. We can’t, he says, expect these things of other animals, but we can expect them in some form whether we encounter human beings in Clemson, South Carolina or the jungles of South America.
We assume the existence of this kind of “human nature,” Redfield says, when we even attempt to describe or understand other people who are quite different from us. The anthropologist can’t tell you what is shameful in a native culture without understanding the concept of shame, for example, shared between himself and his subjects.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we agree on what this human nature is like. Some people would tell you human beings are naturally selfish, others that they are naturally evil and corrupt, others that human beings are naturally good and are corrupted only by society, others that they are by nature self interested but that self interest is neither good nor evil… But the point Redfield wants to pin his listeners down on is that in social science, we frequently assume or imply the existence of some kind of common human nature, while cutting off one avenue of understanding it: the avenue of the humanities, literature, philosophy, theology, history, and art.
Redfield concludes this essay with what I think is a really lovely analogy. He says that the social scientist and the scholar of the humanities are both concerned with the same “tree”: humanity. The work of the anthropologist, he says, “begins at the bottom, where ordinary people work out their ways of life without benefit of books or Socrates. The student of art or literature is concerned with the flowers on a tree whose roots are investigated by anthropologists. But it is the same tree.”