ARNOLD BRECHT'S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED Political ...

ARNOLD BRECHT ' S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED 185
to Kant. Why, then, should we blame Aristotle, for example, or his
doctrines simply because he or they are not persuasive to large
numbers of social scientists much less talented than Brecht whose
knowledge of Aristotle may be limited to brief encounters with
Sabine's history?
V
It is evident, then, that Brecht does not convincingly show that
the uncertainties necessarily attaching to value inquiry are
significantly greater than those which are admitted to be a part of
the warp and woof of an ostensibly non-evaluative science of
politics. He is unable to resist being swept along by the radical skepticism
of modern philosophy because he is unable to counter its skeptical
arguments; but he is simply unwilling to allow his enthusiasm
for and confidence in Scientific Method to be dampened by those
concessions. He is similarly unable to resist the current tide of "scientific
thinking" about values; and while he finds some reasons to
want to resist that tide and its destructive effects, he is, in the final
analysis, unable to do so in an effective way. His subsequent effort to
modify the current "scientific" understanding of the relationship
between science and ("ultimate") values turns out to be as unjustifiable,
by reference to his philosophic position, as is the selective
association of the Scientific Method with "common-sense." But
while Brecht offers no principled grounds for the scientist's "following"
of common sense in the employment of (but not the belief in)
the conceptions of reality, causality, etc., he can apparently count
upon the stubborn persistence of these common sense beliefs to
obscure the theoretical problem and thus preserve the status of
Scientific Method. He is apparently willing to allow the "values and
principles" of Western civilization to be saved by a similar easy and
unprincipled reliance upon common sense beliefs, so long as the latter
are "universal"; but that is not a likely prospect, since the
designation "Western civilization" itself testifies to the uniqueness of
that combination of "values and principles" in space and time. The
uncertain "facts" are therefore preserved, while the uncertain
"values" go down the drain. Would the result have been different if
it had occurred to Brecht that the common sense opinion that some
things are intrinsically good or right (i.e., by nature) and others bad
or wrong, appears to possess a universality comparable to that of the
belief in causality?