THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
97
of the National Bureau, and our foremost authority on the panic
cycle, declines to advise anxious statesmen who seek enlightenment
in this quarter, on the ground that he does not yet know enough.
The advantages of this position, from the point of view of
aggrandizing the prestige and emoluments of the social sciences
as a profession, need scarcely be pointed out. The more the social
scientist abstains from considering problems of social
evaluation
and
management
and confines himself austerely to the
quantifica–
tion
and
measurement
of social phenomena, totally removed from
any context of attitude, tendency, or program, the safer he is. By
imitating, sometimes to the point of burlesque, the methods of
the physical scientists, he comes within the aura of sanctity that
surrounds the practitioners of these older scientific disciplines.
Objective as the angels in heaven, he abstains from taking sides as
a matter of principle. His not to reason why. He tells you that four
hundred and sixty-five and a half citizens of Gopher Prairie
answered "yes" to the question: "Don't you think the New Deal is
not so hot?" You can take it or leave it.
Obviously, the statistical sociologists will never run out of
phenomena to measure, particularly in this declining
per~od
of
monopoly capitalism. The more you avoid doing anything about
social problems except to measure them--or rather, such parts of
them as may he safely examined-the more social problems you
have and the richer the symptomatic manifestations that must he
measured exactly before anything can he done about the problems.
By applying a static technique to a dynamic process you not only
mark time, but march triumphantly backwards, like the Sabine
men, with the stainless banner of Objectivity going on before-that
is to say, behind. Only recently have American sociologists–
notably Robert Lynd-hegun to recognize the implications of the
fact that the social scientist is himself a part of the process which
he is measuring; that "objective" out-of-context measurements are
not merely futile but frequently come under the head of propa–
ganda by omission and suppression. Only recently have they seen
any connection between the fact that Thorstein Veblen, with his
genius for synthesis, was one of the most tendential social scientists
of his generation-and remains today perhaps the most durable
and usable of them all.
Meanwhile, however, nothing succeeds like success, and the
