Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg · 1903
This file is a single-author inaugural lecture: a compact methodological essay on whether “social science” has a unified object and a defensible path of inquiry. Inama-Sternegg begins from the disorder of contemporary Gesellschaftswissenschaft, torn between philosophical, natural-scientific, and historical-ethical claims.
Die Frage, welche an der Schwelle aller wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen über Staat und Gesellschaft uns entgegentritt, ist die, ob die sozialen Phänomene eine solche innere Einheit und Eigenart haben, daß ihre Erforschung Objekt einer in sich geschlossenen selbständigen Wissenschaft sein kann.
English translation: The question that confronts us at the threshold of all scientific investigations of state and society is whether social phenomena possess such an inner unity and distinctiveness that their investigation can be the object of a self-contained and independent science.
The lecture first stages an apparent division. Some social phenomena seem to arise without conscious agreement: population change, market competition, price formation, custom, and unwritten law. Others seem deliberately organized: associations, firms, positive law, and the coordination of labour and capital. Between them stand institutions such as family, municipality, and state, natural in origin yet shaped by conscious organization. If this division were final, social science would split into a natural science of mass regularities and an ethical history of institutional forms.
Inama-Sternegg’s central move is to deny that split. Even the supposedly “natural” phenomena are socially formed: child mortality, French population stagnation, illegitimacy rates, and market order depend on law, habit, collective ideas of welfare, and practical knowledge. Conversely, deliberate organizations are not pure inventions of contract; they express the same social forces that make similarly situated people act alike. Hence his warning against one-sided theories of the state:
Jede einseitige Betonung des einen oder anderen Moments erzeugt Irrtum, und es ist darum auch ebenso verseht, den Staat ein Naturprodukt zu nennen, wie ihn auf einen Vertrag zu begründen.
English translation: Every one-sided emphasis on the one or the other moment produces error, and it is therefore just as mistaken to call the state a product of nature as to base it on a contract.
The result is a definition of social science neither as deduction from generic human nature nor as mere description of historical singularities. Social phenomena are unified because they are socially conditioned; society is the complex causal system in which individuals are formed and through which they act.
Und darin liegt denn auch die Einheit der Wissenschaft; alle Erscheinungen des Lebens, welche gesellschaftlich bedingt sind, bilden ihr Objekt; die Erforschung des komplizierten Ursachensystems, auf dem jedes einzelne soziale Phänomen beruht, ist ihre Aufgabe; die konstanten Grundformen für die Massenwirkung sozialer Kräfte aufzufinden, ist ihr letztes Ziel.
English translation: And therein lies the unity of the science; all phenomena of life which are socially conditioned form its object; the investigation of the complicated causal system on which every single social phenomenon rests is its task; to discover the constant fundamental forms of the mass action of social forces is its ultimate goal.
The second half turns from object to method. Because the object is unified, the method must also be unified, though not mechanically uniform. Inquiry begins with observation and analysis, decomposing complex social states into elements, magnitudes, relations, and causal connections.
Das scheint zunächst festzustehen, daß wir nur eine Methode der sozialen Forschung anerkennen können, sobald die Einheit der Wissenschaft selbst anerkannt ist.
English translation: This at least seems to stand firm: we can acknowledge only one method of social research, once the unity of the science itself has been acknowledged.
Statistics is therefore indispensable wherever social facts can be counted, classified, compared, or placed into series. It replaces conjecture with determinate observation and tests apparent causal relations among prices, population, crime, poverty, money, and institutions.
Was daher in Zahlen erfaßbar ist, muß statistisch beobachtet und analysiert werden.
English translation: Whatever can be captured in numbers must be observed and analyzed statistically.
Yet statistics alone cannot yield social laws, because a present condition does not reveal its genesis and may confuse accidental with essential features. Statistical “Zustandskunde” must therefore pass into history. History is not an opposite method but statistics’ necessary twin, disclosing social forms through development.
Das Wesen der Dinge enthüllt sich nur in ihrem Werden; denn nichts ist vollendet, als was erstorben ist; so lange es aber nicht vollendet ist, ist seine Erscheinung immer nur eine unvollkommene Manifestation seines Wesens.
English translation: The essence of things reveals itself only in their becoming; for nothing is complete except what has died; but so long as it is not complete, its appearance is always only an imperfect manifestation of its essence.
The lecture closes by limiting exact method without abandoning it. Historical-statistical research prepares knowledge of social processes, but beneath facts lie ideas that move human action and cannot themselves be measured, counted, or read directly from documents. Social science is finally oriented toward welfare:
Die Sozialwissenschaft ist die Wissenschaft von den Handlungen der Menschheit, durch welche sie die Idee der Wohlfahrt zu verwirklichen strebt.
English translation: Social science is the science of the actions of mankind by which it strives to realize the idea of welfare.
Its relevance lies in this mediation: against natural-law economics, Inama-Sternegg denies that social regularities can be deduced from human nature; against pure historicism, he seeks constant forms of social force. The work proposes a historically deep, statistically exact, yet philosophically aware social science grounded in the social conditioning of collective life.
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