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something is good or bad, e.g., a good apple or a bad heart-are deemed
to be a matter of personal preference or aversion. Here is how Hobbes put
the point originally: "But whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite
or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his
hate and aversion, evil. ... For these words of good and evil ... are ever
used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing sim–
ply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil. . .."
Accordingly, right and wrong conduct, too, had been thought a matter
of how a person takes it, no more, at least, so far as the economist is con–
cerned with human behavior. Within pure economic analysis this stance
could be quite appropriate. Since, however, economists have always been
called upon to offer general commentary on poli tical-economic matters,
not just strict economic analyses, they have often taken this value-free
framework with them into their studies and recommendations to govern–
ment-environmental, racial, and other public policy topics. In these areas
their value-free approach had always resonated badly with most people
because, well, human life is necessarily normative, value-laden. But what
was widely resisted by the public did not begin to become respectable until
the late twentieth century. Logically, of course, such doubts should have
been evident from the outset of scientism's popularity since the debate
between positive and normative analysts rests on the underlying view that
there is a right and many wrong ways to thinking about human ciffairs.
Holding
one's adversaries guilty of bad thinking is an inescapably normative point.
In the early twentieth century, even the few free-market economists
who overtly attacked some versions of scientism reintroduced it by the back
door, by modeling the market along lines of more complex physical systems.
This is indeed a competing approach in our own time, what with so many
efforts to model human social life on quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc.
Despi te what FA. Hayek argued-that in fact the modeling went the
other way, so that Charles Darwin adopted the framework of social scien–
tists such as Adam Ferguson by which to understand natural
phenomena-the basic grounding remained scientism. The social theory
of Bernard Mandeville and David Hume had by that time been placed
under the influence of a more complex version of scientism, one that
retained the foremost ingredient of the earlier, mechanistic type--deter–
minism, the denying of the possibility of free choice, self-governance or
bona fide
initiative in human life. For example, Ferguson held that we are
motivated by "subrational drives." In turn, Hayek claimed that Ferguson,
"with his phrase about the 'the results of human action but not of human
design' has provided ... the best definition of the task of all social theory."
The news is, however, that science, in contrast to scientism, and norms
could well be perfectly compatible because the former must accept whatever
