ARNOLD BRECHT'S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED Political ...

ARNOLD BRECHT ' S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED 157
synonymous; and that a far more demanding standard is being applied
to "value judgments" than that which obtains in the restricted
sphere of "scientific" investigations. We must therefore turn to a
more detailed examination of Brecht's account of proper "science" in
order to determine whether this impression of a double standard is
correct and, if so, whether Brecht can justify its employment.
III
Brecht's account of the characteristics of a proper "science" of
politics, which should be contrasted with the first pages of the
Fourth Book of Aristotle's Politics, stresses the prime importance of
"method" in typical contemporary fashion. But some of the specifics
of his account are rather untypical in that Brecht makes more of a
self-conscious effort to avoid the implication of a simply mechanical
inquiry into the efficient causes of a world presumed to be merely a
complex machine. His account of the "growing methodological
awareness" of the twentieth century explains it as a reflection of a
growing awareness of "limitations in the nature of science." This
"methodological awareness" entailed the acceptance of the necessity
for certain restrictions on how one could proceed in the effort to investigate
and understand the world.
The principal tools of science qua science, they found, were observation of
facts, measurement, and logical reasoning. Anything that could not be done
with such tools should not be presented under the pretense of being scientific
but be frankly put forward as the personal opinion of the writer, or as a piece
taken out of a religious creed, or as a tentative assumption, or the like. (4)
' The specification of the detailed particulars of the proper rules of
scientific method or procedure, he acknowledges, has been a matter
of considerable debate. But those who have been responsible for
making this century "the methodological century in the social
sciences" have been in agreement on the superiority of this general
approach to that which had previously prevailed. As Brecht explains
it:
Instead of indulging in the establishment of first principles a priori, the validity
of which was not proven but from which detailed postulates had nevertheless
been derived, twentieth-century political science gradually came to focus
research on actualities, that is, on the disclosure of facts and of their interrelations,
basing its findings on painstaking observation and measurement, especial-