Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989406
E. A. Johnson
I N SPITE of its wonder-working power, the radio has one serious shortcoming. However distressed he may be, the listener cannot challenge or heckle the speaker. He can only turn off an offending argument, even though he feels a strong moral duty to rebuke the pundit whose electrically magnified words spread abroad ambiguous doctrines based on careless reasoning. Particularly during the period preceding the national election-but actually for the last three or four yearsI have listened with enforced, although perhaps foolish patience, to a persuasive doctrine which has formed a very real part of the Rooseveltian political creed. That doctrine is one of just price, although it is designated more often as a "fair" price or "fair" wages. I propose to examine this doctrine in a general way and to raise questions about the possible meanings which this alluring doctrine can have in a political democracy using machine technology in the business of production and characterized by pluralistic interests which defy classification. Although I have been and still am extremely sympathetic toward the Roosevelt administration, I have not yet reached that state of hero worship which saps the critical faculties so completely that adoration replaces appraisal. Jove may be Jove, but even so he needs watching. The doctrine of a just price, which Mr. Roosevelt has chosen to enunciate, cherish, and promote, has a venerable past. In patristic literature it was given classic statement by Augustine "I know a man who, when a manuscript was offered him for purchase, and he saw that the seller was ignorant of its value, gave the man the just price though he did not expect it."'
{"title":"Just Price in An Unjust World","authors":"E. A. Johnson","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989406","url":null,"abstract":"I N SPITE of its wonder-working power, the radio has one serious shortcoming. However distressed he may be, the listener cannot challenge or heckle the speaker. He can only turn off an offending argument, even though he feels a strong moral duty to rebuke the pundit whose electrically magnified words spread abroad ambiguous doctrines based on careless reasoning. Particularly during the period preceding the national election-but actually for the last three or four yearsI have listened with enforced, although perhaps foolish patience, to a persuasive doctrine which has formed a very real part of the Rooseveltian political creed. That doctrine is one of just price, although it is designated more often as a \"fair\" price or \"fair\" wages. I propose to examine this doctrine in a general way and to raise questions about the possible meanings which this alluring doctrine can have in a political democracy using machine technology in the business of production and characterized by pluralistic interests which defy classification. Although I have been and still am extremely sympathetic toward the Roosevelt administration, I have not yet reached that state of hero worship which saps the critical faculties so completely that adoration replaces appraisal. Jove may be Jove, but even so he needs watching. The doctrine of a just price, which Mr. Roosevelt has chosen to enunciate, cherish, and promote, has a venerable past. In patristic literature it was given classic statement by Augustine \"I know a man who, when a manuscript was offered him for purchase, and he saw that the seller was ignorant of its value, gave the man the just price though he did not expect it.\"'","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122811415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989411
Max Rheinstein
HE publication of an English translation of Eugen Ehrlich's Sociology of Law is an event of importance. For years, Ehrlich has exerted a considerable influence upon American jurisprudence. With and through Roscoe Pound, he is among the founders of modern American sociological jurisprudence and among the precursors of its offspring, the realist school. As a matter of fact, his influence has been greater in America than in the countries of his German mother-tongue. This man, who was born and who spent all his life in the old Austrian Empire, was an American at heart, an individualist and pragmatist, a believer in freedom and the free forces of society. He saw the task of his life in combating government by bureaucracy, which was so characteristic of the old Hapsburg monarchy. This political aim permeates his writings and colors his principal book, the Sociology of Law. Ehrlich did not have the gift of his greater contemporary, Max Weber-the gift of detaching himself from ethical and political bias in scientific research. He who undertakes to deal scientifically with "law" must be aware that this word has a multiplicity of meanings. For a judge, at least in our present civilization, law means that body, or, perhaps better, that system of norms, according to which he has to decide the litigations which are brought before him. Norms are contents of the human mind. They exist, but their existence is not, like that of physical objects, in the physical world but, like that of other contents of the mind, in the world of meanings. The norms of law exist in the same sense in which a poem, a symphony, or a simple proposition exists. Norms can be and have been made the subject matter of a "science." Norms for judicial decisions have been made the subject matter of what is usually called the "science of law," which is primarily a classificatory science. Its first aim is to help the mind grasp its objects, the norms for decision, by grouping and classifying them in the same way in which descriptive botany creates order in the mass of its objects of observation, the plants. Such a classificatory science takes the legal norms as it finds them; it does not ask whence they come and what ends they serve, nor does it judge them good or bad.
{"title":"Sociology of Law. Apropos Moll's Translation of Eugen Ehrlich's Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts","authors":"Max Rheinstein","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989411","url":null,"abstract":"HE publication of an English translation of Eugen Ehrlich's Sociology of Law is an event of importance. For years, Ehrlich has exerted a considerable influence upon American jurisprudence. With and through Roscoe Pound, he is among the founders of modern American sociological jurisprudence and among the precursors of its offspring, the realist school. As a matter of fact, his influence has been greater in America than in the countries of his German mother-tongue. This man, who was born and who spent all his life in the old Austrian Empire, was an American at heart, an individualist and pragmatist, a believer in freedom and the free forces of society. He saw the task of his life in combating government by bureaucracy, which was so characteristic of the old Hapsburg monarchy. This political aim permeates his writings and colors his principal book, the Sociology of Law. Ehrlich did not have the gift of his greater contemporary, Max Weber-the gift of detaching himself from ethical and political bias in scientific research. He who undertakes to deal scientifically with \"law\" must be aware that this word has a multiplicity of meanings. For a judge, at least in our present civilization, law means that body, or, perhaps better, that system of norms, according to which he has to decide the litigations which are brought before him. Norms are contents of the human mind. They exist, but their existence is not, like that of physical objects, in the physical world but, like that of other contents of the mind, in the world of meanings. The norms of law exist in the same sense in which a poem, a symphony, or a simple proposition exists. Norms can be and have been made the subject matter of a \"science.\" Norms for judicial decisions have been made the subject matter of what is usually called the \"science of law,\" which is primarily a classificatory science. Its first aim is to help the mind grasp its objects, the norms for decision, by grouping and classifying them in the same way in which descriptive botany creates order in the mass of its objects of observation, the plants. Such a classificatory science takes the legal norms as it finds them; it does not ask whence they come and what ends they serve, nor does it judge them good or bad.","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132479740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989407
P. Rice
P HILOSOPHERS, on the one hand, and so-called imaginative writers, on the other, are, to a large extent, trying to do two different kinds of things. What their respective functions are is a question that I shall not attempt to answer here; I shall take it for granted that the two types of activity do not wholly coincide, and that each must be judged by its appropriate standards. But there is also a sphere within which philosopher and novelist may be dominated by similar impulses and pursue common ends. Both are trying, through the medium of language, to give order and value to their experience; both are trying to adjust themselves to a world, human and nonhuman, and, sometimes, to adjust that world to them. In the case of the philosopher this activity may lead to the formulation of an ethics; with the novelist or poet it usually results in a scheme that is imaginatively rather than analytically ordered, and expressed in symbols that are capable of becoming abstract concepts but are presented at the concrete and affective level. There may be, furthermore, an exchange between the two: the poetic ethos of today may become the ethics of tomorrow; or, conversely, the poet may nourish a philosophical idea, as a seed, until it grows into a symbol. One of the functions of the philosophical poet or novelist is to test the abstract ideas of the philosopher by applying them to concrete human situations and showing them at work in the human soul. These situations are, of course, largely imaginary; but they must be in some way equivalent to a reality if they are to be accepted. The asset of the novelist is that he usually brings to the test of these ideas a wider, if not always a deeper,
{"title":"Malraux and the Individual Will","authors":"P. Rice","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989407","url":null,"abstract":"P HILOSOPHERS, on the one hand, and so-called imaginative writers, on the other, are, to a large extent, trying to do two different kinds of things. What their respective functions are is a question that I shall not attempt to answer here; I shall take it for granted that the two types of activity do not wholly coincide, and that each must be judged by its appropriate standards. But there is also a sphere within which philosopher and novelist may be dominated by similar impulses and pursue common ends. Both are trying, through the medium of language, to give order and value to their experience; both are trying to adjust themselves to a world, human and nonhuman, and, sometimes, to adjust that world to them. In the case of the philosopher this activity may lead to the formulation of an ethics; with the novelist or poet it usually results in a scheme that is imaginatively rather than analytically ordered, and expressed in symbols that are capable of becoming abstract concepts but are presented at the concrete and affective level. There may be, furthermore, an exchange between the two: the poetic ethos of today may become the ethics of tomorrow; or, conversely, the poet may nourish a philosophical idea, as a seed, until it grows into a symbol. One of the functions of the philosophical poet or novelist is to test the abstract ideas of the philosopher by applying them to concrete human situations and showing them at work in the human soul. These situations are, of course, largely imaginary; but they must be in some way equivalent to a reality if they are to be accepted. The asset of the novelist is that he usually brings to the test of these ideas a wider, if not always a deeper,","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130492445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989420
{"title":"Shorter Notices","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989420","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123457146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989405
E. Ayres
ROFESSOR Lancelot Hogben in the introductory chapter of his book Mathematics for the Million writes: History shows that superstitions are not manufactured by the plain man. Our studies of mathematics are going to show us that whenever the culture of a people loses contact with the common life of mankind and becomes exclusively the plaything of a leisure class, it is becoming a priestcraft. It is destined to end, as does all priestcraft, in superstition.' This belief has been voiced before, and it is sometimes intended as a piece of advice to ordinary people to inform themselves more fully of what is going on in the world of intellectual specialists. Actually the advice should be good in both directions-to specialists as well as to the uninformed-but in the modern world of endowed schools and official support professors have little incentive to keep in touch with the common life of mankind unless their work is understood and criticized by ordinary people, and, when necessary, challenged. Two interesting attitudes can be observed today among educated people outside the academic or professional traditions. They show, on the one hand, a growing interest in simple and easy popularizations of theories in the natural sciences, and, on the other, a growing disgust with theories of economics and sociology. Perhaps there are dangers in popularizations, but
{"title":"What Shall We Do with Economic Science?","authors":"E. Ayres","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989405","url":null,"abstract":"ROFESSOR Lancelot Hogben in the introductory chapter of his book Mathematics for the Million writes: History shows that superstitions are not manufactured by the plain man. Our studies of mathematics are going to show us that whenever the culture of a people loses contact with the common life of mankind and becomes exclusively the plaything of a leisure class, it is becoming a priestcraft. It is destined to end, as does all priestcraft, in superstition.' This belief has been voiced before, and it is sometimes intended as a piece of advice to ordinary people to inform themselves more fully of what is going on in the world of intellectual specialists. Actually the advice should be good in both directions-to specialists as well as to the uninformed-but in the modern world of endowed schools and official support professors have little incentive to keep in touch with the common life of mankind unless their work is understood and criticized by ordinary people, and, when necessary, challenged. Two interesting attitudes can be observed today among educated people outside the academic or professional traditions. They show, on the one hand, a growing interest in simple and easy popularizations of theories in the natural sciences, and, on the other, a growing disgust with theories of economics and sociology. Perhaps there are dangers in popularizations, but","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116244631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989409
H. Schneider
O N THE first page of his great treatise Hugo Grotius remarks, as though it were an obvious fact, that "war is waged for the sake of peace." And we, with equal complacency, call the end of war a treaty of peace. Such habits of speech and thought are a tribute to the reasonableness of human aims but they raise the larger question of fact. Do wars lead to peace? Are our treaties the bases of peace, or are they but symbols of armistices? There are those who argue a priori that strife cannot breed peace. There are others who argue on the basis of what they call human nature that man does not fight for peace. There are still others who argue from current experience that whether war can lead to peace, it is not doing so now. All these arguments are more convincing to their preachers than to the bewildered hearers of many voices. The chief ground for this bewilderment of the common man is that, in a world where so many different theories may be right, it is useless to choose any. An appeal to facts is indecisive, for in this case it involves an appeal to the future, which is notoriously full of hopes and fears and which never comes. We are never sure that today ought to be the day of judgment, for tomorrow, we think, may possibly prove beyond doubt what today is hopelessly debatable. Thus we stumble from day to day, from generation to generation, from empire to empire, still hoping to learn from experience what we cannot prove from knowledge. For this blindness in human affairs I can propose no remedy. I do not know whether we are making peace or enduring an armistice. And I doubt even if time will tell, for history throws less light on such general questions than we think it does. History can teach anything and is continually being re-written for that very purpose. I conclude, therefore, that as a general proposition the question whether or not war is waged for the sake of peace is unanswerable. What particular persons gain or lose from particular wars, whether or not these persons anticipated the results, and whether they are satisfied or discontented with the outcome
{"title":"The High Road and the Low Road to Peace","authors":"H. Schneider","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989409","url":null,"abstract":"O N THE first page of his great treatise Hugo Grotius remarks, as though it were an obvious fact, that \"war is waged for the sake of peace.\" And we, with equal complacency, call the end of war a treaty of peace. Such habits of speech and thought are a tribute to the reasonableness of human aims but they raise the larger question of fact. Do wars lead to peace? Are our treaties the bases of peace, or are they but symbols of armistices? There are those who argue a priori that strife cannot breed peace. There are others who argue on the basis of what they call human nature that man does not fight for peace. There are still others who argue from current experience that whether war can lead to peace, it is not doing so now. All these arguments are more convincing to their preachers than to the bewildered hearers of many voices. The chief ground for this bewilderment of the common man is that, in a world where so many different theories may be right, it is useless to choose any. An appeal to facts is indecisive, for in this case it involves an appeal to the future, which is notoriously full of hopes and fears and which never comes. We are never sure that today ought to be the day of judgment, for tomorrow, we think, may possibly prove beyond doubt what today is hopelessly debatable. Thus we stumble from day to day, from generation to generation, from empire to empire, still hoping to learn from experience what we cannot prove from knowledge. For this blindness in human affairs I can propose no remedy. I do not know whether we are making peace or enduring an armistice. And I doubt even if time will tell, for history throws less light on such general questions than we think it does. History can teach anything and is continually being re-written for that very purpose. I conclude, therefore, that as a general proposition the question whether or not war is waged for the sake of peace is unanswerable. What particular persons gain or lose from particular wars, whether or not these persons anticipated the results, and whether they are satisfied or discontented with the outcome","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116438568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989408
H. Myers
INTEREST in theory of value as a separate study in philosophy has been a distinguished intellectual movement of recent years. Much has been done toward establishing an independent point of view, a method, and a survey of the data of values. Much more remains untouched. Too many of the pioneers in the new work have dissipated their energies in clearing the ground, in defending the value of their work, in wandering in "thickets abounding in monstrous doubts and difficulties." Few of the explorers have arrived at the heart of the problem, and the reason may be that no one apparently has fully called upon the services of the two competent guides in the realm of values, namely, art and history. The purpose of this paper is to set forth briefly a few of the workings of history relevant to theory of values. To anticipate, history presents two propositions and one probability concerning values: (i) At all times in Western culture men have believed in or sought a principle of control, a law of values. (2) The story of these principles of control reflects an intelligible process, each epoch or crisis in theory of value following historical causes. (3) The conditions and terms of three of these revolutions in thought are sufficiently clear to make possible an understanding of the conditions and terms of the next crisis. In order to reveal the evidence for these propositions I have chosen, as a point of attack, the idea of progress, the theory of control in the realm of values which has most affected our own times and which, through an analysis of its component elements, leads us back to every crisis in the history of values.
{"title":"Progress and Justice: Four Crises in the History of Values","authors":"H. Myers","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989408","url":null,"abstract":"INTEREST in theory of value as a separate study in philosophy has been a distinguished intellectual movement of recent years. Much has been done toward establishing an independent point of view, a method, and a survey of the data of values. Much more remains untouched. Too many of the pioneers in the new work have dissipated their energies in clearing the ground, in defending the value of their work, in wandering in \"thickets abounding in monstrous doubts and difficulties.\" Few of the explorers have arrived at the heart of the problem, and the reason may be that no one apparently has fully called upon the services of the two competent guides in the realm of values, namely, art and history. The purpose of this paper is to set forth briefly a few of the workings of history relevant to theory of values. To anticipate, history presents two propositions and one probability concerning values: (i) At all times in Western culture men have believed in or sought a principle of control, a law of values. (2) The story of these principles of control reflects an intelligible process, each epoch or crisis in theory of value following historical causes. (3) The conditions and terms of three of these revolutions in thought are sufficiently clear to make possible an understanding of the conditions and terms of the next crisis. In order to reveal the evidence for these propositions I have chosen, as a point of attack, the idea of progress, the theory of control in the realm of values which has most affected our own times and which, through an analysis of its component elements, leads us back to every crisis in the history of values.","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124425303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1938-01-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989410
Heinrich P. Jordan
SINCE Max Weber died seventeen years ago, the fundamental problematics of the social sciences have moved more and more into the LO focus of philosophical discussion. This, no doubt, is partly due to the ever widening interest in sociology and related fields. But seldom, if ever, has the discussion regained the depth of Max Weber's profound insights into the foundations of our historical and social knowledge. Although all of his work on this subject was cast in the same mold of thought, much of it is scattered in various polemics against contemporary authors-mostly writers productive in the fields whose principles were under discussion. These polemic essays, and some of original systematic purpose, were collected in the Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre' and published in this form posthumously. Only slowly and hesitatingly has the guild of professional philosophers entered into the treasure of Weber's methodological views contained in this volume and his other writings. Often enough it seems that what is still being said on such issues as the evaluating procedure and causal imputation in the social sciences would hardly be said if Max Weber's penetrating analyses were more generally known and understood. From this viewpoint a work such as Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre by Alexander von Schelting2 must be highly welcomed. For this author undertakes to interpret Max Weber's epistemological and methodological views in a more systematic and concentrated form than they are presented in Weber's own work. Thus the essential problems subsisting in Weber's position are set in relief as explicitly as may be desired, and the discussion is opened up for the further analysis of their philosophical bearings. This venture appears to be justified in the light of Weber's own view of the nature of all scientific enterprise, which, according to him, is just this: to be forever revisable and at the same time responsible for its own realignment with new discoveries in method and fact. Von Schelting's work, however, reaches beyond a mere interpretation of Weber's methodology. Indeed, the problem of causal imputation in history, as seen by Weber, and an exposition of the categories of "understanding," or knowledge of the subjective modes of human behavior and experience (including the
{"title":"Some Philosophical Implications of Max Weber's Methodology","authors":"Heinrich P. Jordan","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.2.2989410","url":null,"abstract":"SINCE Max Weber died seventeen years ago, the fundamental problematics of the social sciences have moved more and more into the LO focus of philosophical discussion. This, no doubt, is partly due to the ever widening interest in sociology and related fields. But seldom, if ever, has the discussion regained the depth of Max Weber's profound insights into the foundations of our historical and social knowledge. Although all of his work on this subject was cast in the same mold of thought, much of it is scattered in various polemics against contemporary authors-mostly writers productive in the fields whose principles were under discussion. These polemic essays, and some of original systematic purpose, were collected in the Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre' and published in this form posthumously. Only slowly and hesitatingly has the guild of professional philosophers entered into the treasure of Weber's methodological views contained in this volume and his other writings. Often enough it seems that what is still being said on such issues as the evaluating procedure and causal imputation in the social sciences would hardly be said if Max Weber's penetrating analyses were more generally known and understood. From this viewpoint a work such as Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre by Alexander von Schelting2 must be highly welcomed. For this author undertakes to interpret Max Weber's epistemological and methodological views in a more systematic and concentrated form than they are presented in Weber's own work. Thus the essential problems subsisting in Weber's position are set in relief as explicitly as may be desired, and the discussion is opened up for the further analysis of their philosophical bearings. This venture appears to be justified in the light of Weber's own view of the nature of all scientific enterprise, which, according to him, is just this: to be forever revisable and at the same time responsible for its own realignment with new discoveries in method and fact. Von Schelting's work, however, reaches beyond a mere interpretation of Weber's methodology. Indeed, the problem of causal imputation in history, as seen by Weber, and an exposition of the categories of \"understanding,\" or knowledge of the subjective modes of human behavior and experience (including the","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1938-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116584726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1937-10-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.1.2989303
F. Knight
UDGED by reasonable standards, Getting and Earning, by Professors J Bye and Blodgett of the Department of Economics in the University of Pennsylvania, is an excellent book, and one to be strongly commended to students of economics as well as to that larger public to whom, in form and style, it is primarily addressed. It is well writtenbut not too well-and logically arranged. And it contains much penetrating and sound economic analysis, and in particular avoids many of the fallacies which an economist expects to find in a book dealing with this subject, if written from the standpoint of a more or less "advanced" position, in program as well as sympathies. Especially good, in the reviewer's judgment, is the chapter on wages (ethical significance of differences in money wages [chap. iii]). The repeated emphasis on the necessity of a price system as the only feasible mechanism for comparing and adjusting the innumerable conflicts of individual interest involved in any largescale economic co-operation is also a notably superior feature (cf., e.g., p. 48). The present note, however, is not intended as a book review in the conventional sense' but as an examination of issues. Hence, admittedly at the cost of seeming somewhat ungracious, it is proposed to judge the book by unreasonable standards-even to make of it a sort of bad example. The main impression which reading it has left on the present writer's mind is one of acute realization of the difficulties of the problem of criticizing the economic system in ethical terms or proposing ideals to guide efforts to improve it, and the long, long way we have to go before even the foundations are laid for anything like a satisfactory treatment of the issues. Such a treatment would, of course, presuppose and build upon "sound" economic analysis, and even in this preliminary task it is clear that very much remains to be done before there is general agreement on essentials among the presumptive competent. Economic principles and social policy.-Following two chapters on the statistical facts of inequality and their implications and on the meaning of earned and unearned income-more broadly the problem of economic justice and desert-the authors devote the main body of their book (chaps. iii-vi, pp. 59-2I7) to a critical examination of the four distributive shares traditional in economic discussion-interest, rent, wages, and profit. The main effort in each case is to discover the degree in which the respective
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Pub Date : 1937-10-01DOI: 10.1086/intejethi.48.1.2989302
B. Wright
T THE simultaneous appearance of a constitutional anniversary and of a new book on recent American political thought' furnishes an excuse for discussing once more the dependence of Americans upon the political thinking of their sesquicentennial ancestors. During one short generation, from about I76i to I788, there was a flowering of political theory in this country which has not often been equaled and very rarely surpassed in any comparable period. The controversial literature of the time occupies a position of hardly less importance than the literature of the English civil wars, upon which it so heavily drew. The institutional products, and especially the written constitutions, have not only continued to serve as patterns here but they have also been widely imitated-in France, in the British Empire, in Latin America, and even in post-war Europe. Nor did the age fail to produce its great political treatise, for the Federalist is a far more significant work on politics than many a book more generally studied from that point of view. It has suffered from 'an excess of oratorical praise and an almost total absence of analysis. To most students of American history it is simply the longest argument in favor of the ratification of the Constitution, and the depth and originality of its theoretical analysis is rarely considered. Even the famous No. IO is well known only for a paragraph or so which, wrested out of its context, gives aid and comfort to the exponents of the economic interpretation of history. Because to an extent unparalleled among modern peoples we have been living upon the ideas of our forebears we have at least had a relatively stable political tradition. Changes there have been-in constitutional institutions and in ideas about them-but the changes have been in terms of the ideas of the founding-fathers. There is no safety in prophecy, but at present it appears that for a long time to come further changes will be in those same terms. I shall have more to say on the subject later in this essay, but it may be remarked in passing that this traditionalism is certainly one of the main reasons why the Marxian philosophy has had so little success in this country. This political tradition is not to be defined by the use of a single word. Not democratic, nor revolutionary, nor conservative, nor constitutional,
{"title":"Traditionalism in American Political Thought","authors":"B. Wright","doi":"10.1086/intejethi.48.1.2989302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.48.1.2989302","url":null,"abstract":"T THE simultaneous appearance of a constitutional anniversary and of a new book on recent American political thought' furnishes an excuse for discussing once more the dependence of Americans upon the political thinking of their sesquicentennial ancestors. During one short generation, from about I76i to I788, there was a flowering of political theory in this country which has not often been equaled and very rarely surpassed in any comparable period. The controversial literature of the time occupies a position of hardly less importance than the literature of the English civil wars, upon which it so heavily drew. The institutional products, and especially the written constitutions, have not only continued to serve as patterns here but they have also been widely imitated-in France, in the British Empire, in Latin America, and even in post-war Europe. Nor did the age fail to produce its great political treatise, for the Federalist is a far more significant work on politics than many a book more generally studied from that point of view. It has suffered from 'an excess of oratorical praise and an almost total absence of analysis. To most students of American history it is simply the longest argument in favor of the ratification of the Constitution, and the depth and originality of its theoretical analysis is rarely considered. Even the famous No. IO is well known only for a paragraph or so which, wrested out of its context, gives aid and comfort to the exponents of the economic interpretation of history. Because to an extent unparalleled among modern peoples we have been living upon the ideas of our forebears we have at least had a relatively stable political tradition. Changes there have been-in constitutional institutions and in ideas about them-but the changes have been in terms of the ideas of the founding-fathers. There is no safety in prophecy, but at present it appears that for a long time to come further changes will be in those same terms. I shall have more to say on the subject later in this essay, but it may be remarked in passing that this traditionalism is certainly one of the main reasons why the Marxian philosophy has had so little success in this country. This political tradition is not to be defined by the use of a single word. Not democratic, nor revolutionary, nor conservative, nor constitutional,","PeriodicalId":346392,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Ethics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1937-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133721185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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