The Backwardness of Social Science
There is a general feeling that the development of knowledge has proceeded unevenly in different fields: quickest in relation to "dead" nature, much slower in relation to living nature, and very slow indeed in relation to man and society. This is the basic contrast of science (in the following always used for "natural science") and the social sciences. The development of techniques has been correspondingly uneven: We have gone a long way in the "conquest" or "mastery" of nature, but we have not bothered about mastery over the forces which grow in society, in man and between men. This is probably a hangover from the original situation of man: His helplessness in face of a threatening nature. The struggle against nature corresponds to old drives – to ensure survival and protection against enemies, and to procreate and spread the species over the globe. In the service of these drives, comparable to primeval deities, we have created the machine and with it industrial capitalism; on the machine is built, by necessity, a hierarchical organisation of growing complexity, uncontrollable dynamics, non-transparence, irrationality, which has created its own aims and subjected the human lives to them.
