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and, as Aristotle observed long ago, might just as well have been
otherwise." In futurology, moreover, positivist principles have been
attenuated in three ways. First, the empirical social fact is utilized in
the way facts are supposedly used in the natural sciences: the only
datum
is the
res extensa-that
which can be empirically observed-and
as a result potentiality and consciousness are excluded from considera–
tion. Second, quantitative methods of the social sciences take prece–
dence over other methods of analysis and evaluation. As Robert Merton
and Daniel Lerner declared in 1951: "We do not take into account
'personal' motivations, such as love of truth or an appetite for knowl–
edge, since there do not exist valid data on this matter and since it is
practically impossible to assign to them today even an approximate
place on a calibrated scale of national distribution." Third, it is
assumed that the instrumental needs of different classes and individu–
als are to be fulfilled by a spirit which exists beyond the ordinary cares
and obvious manipulations of the most powerful forces of the society.
At the beginning of this century, John Dewey and James Tufts as–
serted that:
From the ethical point of view ... , it is not too much to say that the
democratic ideal
poses
rather than solves the great problem: how to
harmonize the development of each individual with the maintenance
of a social state in which the activities of one will contribute
to
the
good of all the others.
It
expresses a postulate in the sense of a
demand
to
be realized: that each individual shall have the opportu–
nity for release, expression, fulfillment, of his distinctive capacities,
and that the outcome shall further the establishment of a fund of
shared values.
These ideas were put into practice at the end of the second world
war by the American pragmatists who invented the "policy sciences."
It
was the intention of the policy sciences, the methods of which were
technocratic and apparently neutral,
to
avoid the question of whether
social science had its own interests, class bias or hidden agenda of
political practice. According
to
Harold Lasswell, the policy sciences
could speak for everyone. Their technocratic mode would start as the
"dominant current among many scholars and scientists notably in the
social sciences" and then move "more specifically toward the policy
sciences of democracy. " Hence, it would appear that what Marxism
was supposed
to
be to the socialist state, the policy sciences would be
to
democracy.
Planning was the staple of policy making. According to Charles
Rothwell, planning was a "systematic attempt
to
shape the future.
