Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Knowledge: Unused and Misused 121
which we use in the social sciences. (For that reason, I am suspicious
of polar typologies, e.g., Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomies.
They lure us into fallacious, and yet perhaps sometimes
self-fulfilling, prophecies of decline and decay.) 3
For instance, is it not a testimony to the blindness of social
scientists and critics that they ignore such a significant social lacuna
in America as the paid blood donor? In 1956, of all blood
donated in the United States, only two percent came from people
who received payment for it. Even in Germany, during the height
of "social solidarity" under Hitler's war propaganda, the paid
donor was the rule. In 1959 in West Germany one of the smaller
political parties could urge its members to donate blood for pay
to earn money for the party treasury. The bloodmobile, collecting
blood on a voluntary and unpaid basis, left a group of Soviet medical
officials, visiting New York in September, 1956, speechless. In
the Soviet Union one would not dream of collecting blood on a
noncommercial basis. Has anyone ever bothered to use this "social
fact" for correcting the caricature of Am,erican society that the
world has received, and still gets, from official social science? 4
II
There are quite a number of foci of research and general
scholarly concern that, in my judgment, omit crucial aspects. For
instance, I am not encouraged or comforted by all attacks that are
currently carried on in the name of a crusade against scientism.
In current trends of criticism, a number of my friends in the
world of scholarship engage in a particular vein which troubles
me. It is their organized hostility toward various forms of advertising.
This hostility is in reality an old prejudice among some intellectuals.
They would be amazed to know how much of their criticism
stems from men such as Fourier, who merely dreamed of
things to come in the field of "hidden persuasion."
In America, I could name Joseph Wood Krutch and W. H.
Whyte, Jr., among the more congenial authors, and John Gal-