Reports and Documents THE NATURAL SCIENCES, THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND POLITICS DON

K. PRICE 1

THE SOCIALSCIENCES, in comparison with the natural sciences, are handicapped in an unexpected way. The social sciences have a greater obligation to examine the relationships between science and politics or between knowledge and power. This obligation is a competitive handicap rather than a help. The leaders in the social sciences profession are obliged by the subject-matter of their research to go on public record with respect to their position on m a j o r political issues. W h e n for reasons beyond the control of scholarship the political decisions miscarry, the press and the general public hold the social scientists accountable for the unhappy result. Political issues that rarely emerge in public in the natural sciences m a y t o u c h on social scientists in ways that cost them heavily. O n e m a y cite, a m o n g other instances, the quarrel over the rejection of an eminent political scientist for m e m b e r s h i p of the National A c a d e m y of Sciences, 2 or the congressional review of the report by a leading sociologist for the United States Office of Education in 1966 on Equality o f Educational Opportunities .3 It is significant that individual natural scientists are not held responsible for the political uses to which their research is put. Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and G e o r g e Kistiakowsky are not blamed for the policy decision to develop the atomic or hydrogen b o m b ; D r Edward Teller was an exception because he publicly took a partisan position. D D T , the greatest contribution of scientists to the elimination of typhus, became a threat to rural wildlife, but even Rachel Carson's b o o k , Silent Spring, 4 did not m a k e villains of the individual scientists who developed it. It m a y be significant that, as control of the executive branch passes f r o m one to another political party, a majority of its natural scientists retain their m e m b e r s h i p in the President's Science Advisory C o m m i t t e e or its successors. This is also the case with the boards of the National Science A revised and expanded version of the first Dael L. Wolfle Lecture given on 6 October, 1987, at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle. Don K. Price was dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and is the author of Government and Science (1954), The Scientific Estate (1965) and America's Unwritten Constitution (1983). He has held senior posts in the United States Bureau of the Budget, the Defense Research and Development Board, and the Ford Foundation, and was an adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. z Marshall, E., "Academy Membership Fight Goes Public", Science, CCXXXIV (5 December, 1986), pp. 1192-1194, and "Academy Rejects Huntington Nomination", ibid., CCXXXVI (8 May, 1987), pp. 661-662. 3 Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), known as "the Coleman report" after its senior author, sociologistJames S. Coleman, was mandated by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The history of its controversial discussion is told in Mosteller, F. and Moynihan, D. P. (eds), On Equality of Educational Opportunity (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). 4 Boston: Houghton Mufflin, 1962.

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Foundation or of the National Institutes of Health, while the membership of the Council of Economic Advisers in contrast changes completely with a change in the presidency. An analysis of the ways in which the scientific institutions most closely connected with politics are protected from political interference should consider the ways in which they have become something like an autonomous sphere, an establishment with relative freedom from control by the government, and from accountability to it. Science the Endless Frontier

It is useful in reflecting on the problem of protecting scientific research analysis from improper political interference, while assuring its financial support, to take as a starting point the report by Vannevar Bush to President Truman at the end of the Second World War on the ways he thought government might support science without destroying its independence. In Science the Endless Frontier, 5 Vannevar Bush looked at his wartime experience and attempted to deal with the issue, which had troubled many of his colleagues, i.e., whether private science could safely accept federal funds. Before that time, the most influential leaders in the fundamental academic sciences thought that to maintain the independence of scientific research from political influence they should not accept governmental financial support at all. In view of the greater need for money, in the stage reached by science after the war, Bush proposed a new approach, resting on three crucial principles. The first was that basic science has to have governmental financial support in order to progress. The second was that to avoid the kind of interference which had been traditional in fields like agriculture, it should receive this support from a unified government source, organised in a way which would leave it under the control of scientists; this meant that they should serve on a parttime basis, while continuing to pursue their careers in universities and independent research institutions. The third principle was that in order to make such a system acceptable to political authority, it should support only those fundamental sciences which would not express political attitudes, i.e., the physical and biological sciences; this entailed the exclusion of the social sciences. The report proposed to set up a genuine establishment, set apart from political power, under the control of scientists whose primary interests lay in scientific research. President Truman rejected the programme, mainly because he thought that such large expenditures by government should be kept under the control of elected political authority, with the President appointing the director of the research foundation. Politicians debated this issue for several years, but in the meantime created or used other agencies of the federal government through which they could support research. They found that many scientists as well as politicians did not want to depend on popular political support for research on pure or basic science, such as a unified governmental agency might 5 Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945.

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provide. They turned to such institutions as the Office of Naval Research and the National Institutes of Health, whose officers could deal with members of congressional appropriations committees in a spirit of independence and testify that their brand of basic science could have practical consequences. By the time the National Science Foundation was finally established, it could provide only a minor fraction of the federal dollars that went into research grants to private institutions. This was a blow to Bush's strategy, which had put great emphasis on having his proposed foundation control funds supplied by the federal government for basic research, through a board made up of part-time scientists, while excluding those disciplines--namely, the social sciences-that might involve them in political controversy. It is possible that Bush's own record may have justified the political reaction against granting the proposed foundation anything like a monopoly. Bush's Science the Endless Frontier justified his appeal for federal funds on the basis of the practical accomplishments of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development which he had headed; its leadership in weapons development and medical technology was apparent to the congressional committees that moved in to set up the highly decentralised postwar system. Although Bush did not have his way, his view about the social sciences was not forgotten. The National Science Foundation yielded to the demand that it permit them to come into the programme, but nearly two decades later was still issuing its warning that it would not support studies "designed to endorse particular social policies or to promulgate solutions of specific social problems". 6 In the United States, an earnest effort was made in 1969 to promulgate the basic research programme of the social sciences along the lines on which this had been done in the natural sciences. The Behavioral and Social Sciences Survey Committee, created jointly by the National Academy of Sciences and the Social Science Research Council, proposed a range of reforms in both the basic and applied aspects of the social sciences. It recommended among other things an improved national system of the collection of data---of "social indicators"--the strengthening of special institutes for research in the social sciences, and the protection by law of the anonymity of respondents to questionaires. They even speculated on the possible creation of a national social science foundation, separate from the National Science Foundation, to support research in the social sciences. But, more recently, the Social Science Research Council, in a series of annual reports by its successive presidents, has renounced any strained efforts to imitate the natural sciences, and has emphasised how its programmes of policy evaluation---especially in such fields as foreign area studies--have proved the most effective approaches of the social sciences to political i s s u e s . 7 Many persons hoped to integrate the social sciences with the natural sciences in the unifying pyramid of knowledge. This hope failed to recognise 6 National Science Foundation, 14th Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 35-36. 7 See the annual Report of the Social Science Research Council, esp. for 1979-80, pp. xxiiixxvi; 1980-81, pp. 6-15; 1981-82, pp. xxii-xxiv, and 1985-86, pp. 15-17.

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that the metaphor of the pyramid of knowledge did not take into account another important possibility. Professor Gerald Holton says that science is not just one pyramid of power, but two. 8An alternative to the Newtonian pyramid of basic knowledge, which integrates the theoretical disciplines and sub-disciplines into one system of thought, is the approach of Francis Bacon, who looked to a council of wise men to develop and control all the applications of practical knowledge. This second metaphor points out that while basic research tends to synthesise all disciplines into a unity as they rise vertically to a peak, the Baconian interest in practical applications is concerned with the branches of the tree of knowledge, growing horizontally in response to political demands. If we wish to compare the natural sciences with the social sciences in their applied research, it is this second pattern that concerns us. We must then face this question: do the two types of sciences, in their practical applications, differ more significantly in their subject-matter and methods, or in their institutional structures? Institutionally, there are very marked differences in the political strength of the natural and social sciences. The National Academy of Sciences devolves its interest in the applied branches of science, made up of the leading figures of the natural sciences, to its subordinate agencies--e.g., the National Research Council, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering--and they draw on a limited number of social scientists in their conduct of studies for the federal government in which the application of knowledge is involved. In such work, the Social Science Research Council can hardly compete with the institutions of the natural sciences, and the more quantitative reductionist wings of the social sciences are often absorbed into the institution of the National Academy of Sciences. In the universities, the basic natural science disciplines do not need to push their own practitioners into research on the application of scientific knowledge. They have the support of the great professional schools of engineering and medicine. These arrangements are reinforced by professional careers in the practical application of knowledge and in research bearing on it, e.g., in medicine and engineering. The numerous schools of business administration are often allies of the natural sciences in fields that lead to industrial development, and draw for these fields of applied research on the support of major business corporations. Consequently, even though they make an earnest effort to be non-partisan in politics, some of the practitioners of the natural sciences---especially those in the more applied fields of research--and their associated professions, tend to lean to a conservative outlook, while in recent decades much of the motivation for the support of the social sciences has come from the supporters of the progressivistic policies such as the New Deal, governmental regulation, and economic aid to the poor countries. Natural scientists who go into professions with a tradition of support for progressivist policies--such as public heath--tend to support the liberal wing of politics. The dominant tone of the American Association for the Advancement of 8 Holton, Gerald, "The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens", Daedalus, 115 (Summer 1986), pp. 82, 90.

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Science, which is the less exclusive association of scientists regardless of discipline, is noticeably different from that of the National Academy of Sciences and its affiliated academies of medicine and engineering. These differences seems trivial, however, by comparison with the concern shared by the natural and social sciences for the potentially dangerous effect of the advancement of science and technology on the future of humanity. Nuclear weapons are only the most obvious of these. In dealing with such issues, the natural scientist finds it difficult to apply the intellectual abilities that help him raise the height of the Newtonian pyramid of knowledge. The natural sciences themselves as they apply their knowledge are by no means uniform in their ability to predict effects from causes; physics may have a high rank in such efforts but meteorology does not give the Weather Bureau much confidence in predicting next month's rainstorm. More significant for our purposes, the pyramid of the organisation of governmental decision-making power seems upside-down when placed alongside the Newtonian pyramid of knowledge. The most important issues that rise to the top for decision are the ones most difficult to solve by the methods of science. It is the less important problems--those which can be solved definitely by scientific methods--that are left for the lower ranks of the decision-making hierarchy. As issues are transformed from the executive hierarchy to the even less predictable judiciary, the courts learn that any technological innovation which is designed to solve a social problem is likely to have unwanted consequences. As result, issues then move over into the legislative process, which is the least effective forum for the settlement of scientific issues. In this interaction among the branches of government, the United States relies less than its European counterparts on traditional authority and much more on a pragmatic or instrumental approach. Both the Congress and the courts in the United States, by contrast with the British practice, defer less, for example, to the secret processes of the development of policy than does Her Majesty's Government; they turn more readily to open performance of policy research by private, academic and governmental agencies. As the results of such research are presented, the basic natural sciences may have greater prestige and apparent influence, but within the scope they define for themselves they tend to refuse to try to answer the issues that require the attention of the highest levels of the governmental pyramid. The social sciences, by contrast, being obliged in most of their research to become entangled in the relationships between science and politics, can hardly avoid involvement. The social scientists' involvement as individuals is all the more conspicuous, by comparison with that of the natural scientists, because they have a less formidable set of professional organisations to represent them. The physicist or biologist can leave such political issues to the engineer or the physician; the economist or sociologist does not have the same institutional alternative. So while Congress and the courts may be greatly influenced in their major decisions by considerations which fall within the intellectual jurisdiction of the social sciences, they are by that very fact not inclined to attribute to social scientists as individuals the degree of detachment from politics which they accord to natural scientists.

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In these respects, the social sciences must recognise the impossibility of laying out clear lines for decisions on major policies, or for the reorganisation of society. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked after taking part in the "war on poverty" of the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, the appropriate institutional role of the social sciences in public affairs lies not in the formulation of social policy, but in the measurement of its results. The institutional role of any kind of science, of course, is one thing, and the personal role of the scientist is another. The scientist is not released from the general political obligations of citizenship. Indeed, these obligations are all the greater because intellectual work might be expected to produce more ability to understand what science and technology have been doing to the scale of governmental activity in modern society. Greater knowledge might also strengthen the capacity to discover how government might organise its civil service and the institutions it supports to deal with the resulting problems.

The Control of Technology Abroad The problems of the support, use and control of science and technology in the United States, and especially the means by which they are held politically accountable, may be illuminated by contrast with the systems prevailing in other societies. At one extreme, Communist doctrine professes to base political power on a science perfected by Marx and Lenin. This theory commits the Soviet Academy, which is sophisticated enough in some of the natural sciences, to total exclusion of support for the diverse approaches of social scientists, and to accepting their complete political subordination to the Communist hierarchy, which tolerates no rival party. In the Western European countries, with their multi-party systems and strong career bureaucracies, one or another scientific academy or technological institution may be virtually free of all final political control, and free to produce specialised administrators engaged in promoting their special interests. The American system seems in some ways to be closer to the French or Scandinavian systems than to its cultural ancestor, the British system. The British, as they undertook in the middle of the nineteenth century to rescue their civil service from recruitment by patronage, founded it on two traditions: the political tradition of "lifetime careers", and the educational tradition of Oxford and Cambridge that elevated persons trained in classics over the scientist or technologist. Later, as scientific research came into a state in which it needed large sums of money, the British were intent on protecting universities, including their scientific research, from partisan political influence. For this, they detached the support of basic scientific research with higher education generally from the special interests of the ministries of the central government; they delegated the distribution of block-grants to the University Grants Committee, dominated by academic leaders serving on a part-time basis--a model that may have influenced Bush's proposal for the board of the national

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research foundation as he proposed it. But things have changed in Great Britain and the University Grants Committee itself has been altered. Its appropriations have been brought within the scope of ministerial responsibility to parliamentary criticism. The grants from research councils in the several specialised fields to particular universities for the support of specific disciplines now amount to as much as the general support under the older system of unrestricted grants to the universities. The specialised committees of the House of Commons threatened to meddle in the use of research grants. The Prime Minister, with an eye less on basic science and more on the profitability of industry, is trying to shift the burden of research support from government to private business. Mrs Thatcher has recently set up a new advisory committee on science and technology and charged it with planning a number of university-based centres of research, which are expected to plan programmes in co-operation with private business to strengthen the economy by a more fruitful application of the results of scientific research in technology. At the same time, she is undertaking to have the national government take over from local government the control of the polytechnic institutions which have been much under the influence of the Labour Party socialists in the cities. Her own view, as a rare Tory leader with a university degree in a natural science, is threatening to shake up drastically the approach of British conservatism to the universities. The Union of Science and Policy The United States, like Great Britain, avoided many of the most difficult issues of the relation of science to policy and politics before the Second World War by leaving much, if not all, of the support of scientific research to the universities, to private business and to private philanthropic foundations. But that was in the era when the scope of governmental activities was relatively narrowly restricted. When it became clear that the advancement of science and technology had broken down the boundaries which had separated each type of private business--agriculture, finance, transportation and manufacturing--from the others, and then made them all depend on government policy, new arrangements had to be devised. The new arrangements did not impose centralised control by officials of the federal government over either business or scientific institutions, because the federal government itself is not a centralised institution. The diversity of organisations and the multiplicity of centres of control dispersed over political parties, legislative committees and administrative agencies-and above all among many professional civil servants--at the highest levels of the executive branch made for an extremely pluralistic pattern. This was reinforced by the abrogation of secrecy by journalists who believed that the breaking of secrecy was their constitutional right. In such an unsystematic system, policies were not deduced from theoretical doctrines. Instead each policy was treated as a thing in itself, worked out in the course of collaboration among scientists, technologists, administrators and politicians--and then combined clumsily with other

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policies. Here is where independent, non-profit research institutions and voluntary, quasi-political associations--sometimes with governmental support but without co-ordinated political direction--come into their own. One of the best examples was in early September 1986 when the United States and the Soviet Union were in dispute over whether the secret giant radar in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, was a violation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. A joint investigation of the problems of the surveillance of nuclear test sites was undertaken by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which was entirely under the control of the government of the Soviet Union, in collaboration on the American side with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private voluntary association without any legitimate standing as a representative of the federal government, and a congressional delegation.

Science and the Scope of Government Let us turn back now to the first of the two issues identified earlier-namely, what science and technology have been doing within the framework of government. In the United States, the various fields of interest of governmental departments were a few decades ago thought of as distinct areas of policy and administration. In each of them--agriculture, commerce, banking and transportation--private interests opposed governmental controls and socialists wanted public ownership. Now, somewhat paradoxically, recent advances in technology and in management, based on the social as well as the natural sciences, have been brought into the service of the expansion of governmental control. This has at the same time destroyed the appeal of socialistic doctrine. Modern advances in technology have completely changed the basis of agricultural programmes and reduced greatly the proportion of farmers in the population. New forms of transportation and manufacturing have changed the federal system, shifting population among various regions, and making it impossible to leave to the state governments entire responsibility for many programmes like welfare and housing. In all such fields, the executive departments dealing with these matters compete with each other under the very general direction of the President, and the congressional committees which claim jurisdiction over them also compete with each other as well as with the executive agencies. In these complex and difficult interactions, all major economic interests in the country, as much as they may demand independence, actually favour measures of governmental control that would have been unthinkable a half-century ago. These measures have been taken not by transferring ownership to government, but by providing a mixture of regulatory measures, grants and subsidies, and contractual arrangements through which governmental functions are delegated to private corporations and institutions. The effect of these arrangements---especially the unsystematic system of "federalism by contract"--is that a very small proportion of the federal government's budget for its domestic activities, certainly less than one tenth, goes to pay for those activities that it performs itself. The rest

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goes, by one device or another, to pay for the supervision of those activities in a wide variety of other institutions, private, semi-public and public. 9 The great expansion of governmental functions, while making desirable a great deal of delegation to private institutions, gives these institutions a degree of autonomy that is in conflict with the need for co-operation on issues of common concern. The advances in science and technology made these programmes dependent on one another, and justified the expansion of federal controls over them. Such mutual interdependence then called for a higher degree of synthesis of their policies. If "privatisation" turned out to make that impossible, which it might well do if the executives of the newly established institutions came to be concerned only with their own programmes, a great deal would be lost. We must try to think of ways in which to provide more incentives for leaders to consider the general public interest, especially to balance the current emphasis on "privatisation". One way is to consider the sources of financial support for the organisation. In scientific or technological organisations, it would be helpful to look at the balance among industrial and philanthropic institutions and various types of governmental agencies. The influence of industrial supporters, with conservative interests, may be counterbalanced somewhat by the liberal interests of philanthropists and membership associations-although such contrasts are by no means clear-cut. A second way is to consider how institutions that seek to further economic growth or welfare measures may balance their emphasis on one or another kind of science. The natural sciences seem by their traditions to encourage support for unrestrained technological development and to be more optimistic in evaluating its social effects. The recent traditions of the social sciences incline their practitioners to be critical of and to seek to control the social consequences of the technological application of science. The National Academy of Sciences by defining its standards of membership mainly in terms of eminence in the natural sciences, pays less attention to their social effects than does the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is open to social scientists.

The System of Careers One of the problems which must be dealt with in an effort to find the right place for scientific and technological research in a large liberal democracy, committed to an economy and a standard of living requiring the incessant application of the results of scientific research, is to encourage the development of a professional career for scientists and technologists working effectively with government and business. Much depends too on the ways in which leaders are chosen for governmental positions, both in political appointments and in the system of careers. Perhaps the most important difference of all turns on the formal structure of governmental careers. Should it be so rigid that at various 9 Mosher, Frederick C., "The Changing Responsibilities and Tactics of the Federal Government", in Lane, Frederick S. (ed.), Current Issues in Public Administration (New York: St Martin's, 1982), p. 174.

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age-levels an official cannot move from one special field to another? Can a scientist shift in middle age from a university or research institute to government at a responsible level of administration or political authority and be free to move back again? Or from state to federal government and vice-versa? A list of science or organisational advisers in the President's Executive Office will illustrate how much more flexibility is allowed at the upper levels of scientific careers in universities and in private research institutions than is allowed in the civil service. Vannevar Bush wished to bring in from private institutions to the highest levels of the Defense Department or of the President's Executive Office executives who could help develop new and critical approaches to matters of science and technology. In this, his approach in practice was similar to that of leaders in social sciences and public administration in the New Deal--men such as Charles Merriam in the Social Science Research Council, or Louis Brownlow in the Public Administration Clearing House-of whose partisan leanings he disapproved. In a few such positions of high leadership, there have been both natural and social scientists who are brought into high governmental positions and exercise great influence over policy. It is tempting to dream of a great expansion of the numbers of such leaders who move back and forth between private institutions--academic and business--and the federal service. But two things work against the realisation of this potentiality on a larger scale. The first is that education in any branch of science is now such a demanding and extended process that it commits most of those who survive in it and who succeed to a long-term career in a particular field. A further obstacle is that those who by temperament are most likely to be successful in research and scholarship are not likely to possess the qualities needed to be political leaders or administrators at a high level. Another obstacle is that most research institutions or universities guarantee permanent tenure for their senior members, but to retain their appointments they are allowed only a few years of leave of absence and must then go back in order to retain their right to permanent tenure. If we are to consider how the patterns of professional careers of scientists might be modified in ways which would be advantageous to themselves as individuals and to the public, we must go back to the fundamental question raised earlier: do the natural and social sciences differ more significantly from each other in their practical applicability because of differences in their subject-matter and methods or because of differences in their institutional structure? It seems clear to me that the institutional structure is the more important and that it is susceptible to deliberate change. The social sciences are far less well protected against public criticism and interference than the natural sciences by a network of institutions which can take the results of their basic research and apply it to practical tasks. The leaders of social science research are drawn into work on public issues that has little to do with basic social science, but is close to what would be done with practical applications. If the professional societies that work on such problems could be strengthened, they might be more effective in their relations with governmental programmes.

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The Professional Approach to the Application of the Social Sciences The development of professional standards for the application of the social sciences to public issues should not, of course, be expected at the level of political careers. Most of the intellectual preparation for political careers cannot be defined by formal standards--at the top of a democratic system that must be left to free democratic competition. But at the levels just below a better system of professional organisation and education is urgently needed. At these levels at present are the policy analysts and public administrators. Their education, at the graduate schools of universities, must include work based on the social science disciplines, but with a considerable admixture--in the teaching staff--of practical experience, some of which can be taught most effectively at mid-career levels. In any such system of quasi-professional education, the intellectual content of the curriculum, however high, is not enough. The analyst of policy and the administrator alike need to learn to think systematically about the ethical aspect of their studies and activities. In the more traditional professional schools of law and medicine, much attention is now being paid to ethical studies. The Harvard Business School has received a large grant to help develop a new programme in ethics, and many medical schools are trying to balance their emphasis on advanced medical technology by an emphasis on the ethical aspects of health care. In their efforts to gain an education for the practice of a profession or a quasi-profession, students need not only the wisdom of experienced practitioners, but also a serious philosophical study of the ethical problems they will be unable to avoid in the future. The need is especially pressing for those who must undertake to translate the social sciences into practical action. Laws, orders of superior executive authority, and the judgement of courts are not enough. Ethical judgements are inevitable, not only on the part of the highest authority but also in the areas in which discretion is inescapable. While they should not try to establish a single professional society to develop conclusive answers to ethical problems, the policy analyst and the public administrator, who provide and draw upon knowledge gained through the social sciences, must not only adhere as rigorously as they can to the most scientific canons of the social sciences, but must also know how to perceive ethical problems and how to take them into account in their work. Accountability is not just accountability to patrons, and to administrative and political superiors. It is also accountability to ethical norms and ideals.

The Pyramid of Knowledge and the Tree of Knowledge The Bush strategy was clearly successful, with respect to basic research in the natural sciences. Benefiting from the success of the leading universities and the philanthropic foundations before the Second World War, it vastly expanded the programme of basic research, drawing funds not only from the National Science Foundation but from the armed services and

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other federal agencies. Even in the universities originally created to promote technology, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, the primacy of basic research was widely acknowledged. Scientific disciplines interacted closely with one another as they rose to their most advanced levels, as did molecular biology in supporting the Darwinian theory of evolution. The tradition of Isaac Newton, who foresaw the fusion of the scientific disciplines into a unified system of thought, was exemplified in the increasing unification of the basic sciences into a single pyramid of knowledge. It was much harder to fit the social sciences into this ideal of basic research. In the universities, it was hard to distinguish them from the humanities and from the older approach to the study of social phenomena. The new efforts to apply quantitative methods and reductionist theories to such studies did not succeed in disentangling economics from economic history, or political science from political theory, or sociology from philosophy. By contrast, in the natural sciences, it was recognised that it is impossible to permit students to choose their subjects of study at random: they need to submit to a vertical or pyramidal structure of knowledge in which biological subjects, for example, can be studied only after mathematics or physics. The requirement of particular prerequisites for further study in the natural sciences, if one looks at the catalogues or syllabuses of universities, postulates this pyramid. It is not the same in the social sciences or the humanities.

Conclusion The social sciences stand at a strange crossroads. There is a greater need for disciplined inquiry into the issues of policy facing the United States. Yet the incentives in the political system, and in the professional guilds of those performing social research, discourage a close involvement of many prominent social scientists with policy. The political system, fearing an elite imposing its values on society, welcomes the natural scientist who seems to conform to the model of the politically neutral expert who solves problems and addresses "facts". This model also fits the higher ranks of the civil service, made up of specialists rather than generalist administrators, and the outside advisers serving officials concerned with high policy. Likewise, to protect themselves from changes of partisanship, leading academic social scientists forsake policy concerns for topics within the analytic traditions of Weberian Wertfreiheit. Just as Weber sought to avoid censorship by value neutral scholarship, the modern social scientist disdains the normative concerns of policy in favour of more tractable, morally neutral issues defined as the core of the discipline. The country needs to draw some of the best analytical talent in the social science community into the policy process and advisory roles. Disciplined inquiry cannot be left only to technicians whose professional interests are far removed from political, economic, social and other human sciences. To promote better policy and better social science, we should encourage serious, professionally grounded inquiry into social values, the directions

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of policy, and the role and proper limits of state power. In the clamour of American politics, there is little danger that policy will be monopolised by an elite group, but considerable danger that debate on policy will be impoverished by the absence of those most knowledgeable about social and economic reality.