The Genesis and Telos of the Social Sciences: A Summary

•Social science methodologies are teleological – not value neutral. Their essential purpose is to legitimate and provide the technologies of governance for creating and sustaining capitalist order.

•Social sciences presume the validity of the central proposition of Kantian mechanism and empiricism / utilitarianism.

•Social sciences are committed to a secular conception of being and the world. Man is a (n actual or potential) creator of the world and the purpose of practical reason is to establish man’s mastery over the world.

•Social sciences presume the universe to be a self contained self regulating dynamic mechanism the laws of motion of which are to be discovered /determined by self reflection. Knowledge is a product of the self understanding of the self which imposes its order on the world. The self itself cannot be known for it is the condition of knowledge. Reason is a means for practicing the universalisable commands of the (unknowable) self.

•The social sciences are committed to freedom – the unlimited right of the self is to will its ends. Belief in the self legislating self eliminates the need for seeking any moral authority for granting the self this unlimited right.

•The social sciences are an unreserved and total endorsement of the beliefs underlying mechanism and utilitarianism. The social sciences are means for the realization of Enlightenment ends – self fulfillment and progress. There is therefore no room in the social sciences for the recognition of God as sustainer (Rabb) as there is in Newtonian physics.

•The social sciences recognize reason as a slave of the passions. All individual acts and institutions are to be judged on the basis of the felicific calculus. Wealth not virtue is an end in itself. Man is recognized as sovereign in the basic sense that he is the sole legitimate possessor of his body. The social sciences are committed to the elimination not of vice but of poverty and to the promotion of the passion for money making.

•Capitalism is the universalization of this passion – the universalization of avarice and covetousness. The social sciences legitimate and provide technologies of governance for operationalizing the rule of capital in the market and in the state.