Scholars belonging to this school of thought are also known as positivists, behaviouralists, or factualists. They want to eliminate all values that are personal ‘preferences from the study of Political Science. The value-neutral political scientists want to study political events, activities, groups, and organisations in the way scientists study natural facts.
They want to give social phenomena a specific, continuous and discrete shape. While doing so, they keep their personal value consideration away from the investigation. If human or social facts are treated in this objective manner, they hope, in due course of time, to develop a value-free human science.
August Comte, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and other sociologists made efforts to develop a universal social science. Besides them, the idea received further fillip from logical positivists belonging to the Vienna Circle. This academic circle was started in 1922 by the scholars of Vienna University – Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and others. They severely criticised traditional disciplines like Metaphysics, Ethics etc. They accepted only mathematical and empirical statements as ‘meaningful’, and regarded all values as personal preferences.
Nothing could be told about their superiority or inferiority. T.D. Weldon in his ‘Vocabulary of Politics’ has enunciated this doctrine of preference: Determination of good or bad political institutions, like any other value judgements are made by individuals. They differ because of their biases, parochialism, selfishness, ignorance, etc.
According to logical positivists, there can be no last or ultimate values, as science can prove no values as the highest or ultimate. Scientific method requires that values should be kept apart, failing which no social science, including Political Science, can attain the status of a ‘science’. A social scientist has to remain value-free and value-neutral. Objectivity is the basis of scientificity.
Consequences of Value-Neutralism:
It is possible for the western scholars only to develop social sciences by adopting scientific method in the study of social phenomena. Underlying this venture, they had certain common tacit values. Most of their values were almost identical, and a form of consensus had emerged. As such, they did not have to face conflict over values.
While adopting value-neutral stance, very few were aware that they themselves had been standing on the ground of certain values. In this sense, value-neutrality became a part of their scientific method. But this closed approach has proved to be a great tragedy of twentieth century.
Some of the adverse consequences are enumerated below:
(1) Social scientists, on account of their scientific method based on value-neutralism, became unable to judge a goal or purpose superior to some goal or purpose in absolute terms.
(2) They could not speak on relative superiority of some values or purposes, used as means, in view of other ultimate values or purposes.
(3) All social scientists started deflecting from making any evaluations or criticising preferences in definite terms. In their view now, whatever was considered so far as good was non-scientific, amounting to some philosophical imagination or individual bias.
(4) For all these spokesmen of science, all values were equal, as they, like any other assumptions, were beyond the purview of scientific method. No value was final. All values were treated as impermanent, provisional, pre-scientific and relative.
(5) As all social scientists kept away from value-laden politics, they started living in ivory towers. Their output, being value-neutral, had no use for practical politics. They could now live and survive in any kind of regime, democracy or dictatorship.
(6) Between the First and the Second World Wars, humanity and human values reached the lowest ebb in the rise of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism. But the social scientists tied to value-neutralism of their scientific method could not speak anything against them. They could not use their science in support and defence of democratic values.
Their ‘science’ did not have any relation with values. Western culture stood helpless to defend its own values. Even John Dewey and Hans Kelsen were standing on crossroads. Albert Einstein, in 1940, had stated that even if one advocated the idea of eliminating all human beings from earth, it could perhaps not be repudiated on scientific grounds.
Thus, all values were considered as dogma, ideology or myth, and put beyond the scope of science. The main problem was not the presence of several ideologies, but to maintain that no choice can be made with the help of scientific method among various ultimate values. Every value-free social scientist considered all values as relative and dispensable.