Jason Blakely is professor of political science at Pepperdine University and has written a book, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power, that is likely to perturb some, gratify others, but interest almost everyone. He writes on the many ways in which social scientific methodologies, while purporting to describe in a neutral manner individuals and societies, in fact generate new conceptions of their subjects that then feed into a “double-hermeneutical” (double-H) loop: Social scientists imagine the world through various presuppositions and then analyze and contextualize data in ways that can only reinforce their original theories.
At his best, Blakely gives readers the tools to interrogate the methods of social scientists who, intentionally or not, have smuggled serious philosophical claims into their work under the guises of “objectivity,” “neutrality,” and, yes, even “science.” However, readers of a more conservative bent will inevitably notice Blakely’s bias in favor of his own left-communitarianism. Still, We Built Reality is worth considering for its illumination of the ways in which so much ground-breaking social science ultimately leads not to a broader understanding but a narrower reimagining of humanity.
In “The Market Polis,” the book’s first and most provocative section, Blakely describes the escape of economic analytic tools like the Rational Choice Model and utility maximization, as well as such macro-metrics as GDP and stock indices, from the carefully proscribed confines of academic discourse and high finance into a “vulgarized” rhetoric that captured the popular imagination. “Individual well-being and social prosperity were carefully decrypted via this symbology,” writes Blakely, perhaps best epitomized by James Carville’s simple yet evocative phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” during the 1992 presidential election.
Continue reading at the Acton Institute here.
Comment by Search4Truth on April 8, 2023 at 12:30 pm
What is revealed here is simply a continuation of the previous articles in this month’s presentation. As education has become more technically and self-focused, forgetting that it should be about deepening our understanding and praise for God, the direction of cultural thought and belief has been bent in a geometrical progression of the aggrandizement of self over society.
Until we wake up to the fact that we are all members of a community that needs to worship God, our society will continue to atrophy until it completely destroys itself. I am praying we wake up first.