Emil Lederer, Freedom and Science (1934)

Emil Lederer’s journal article examines whether science can remain neutral toward every value while defending the conditions of its own existence. Moving from the debate over value judgments in social science to the political suppression of intellectual freedom, it argues that scientific objectivity cannot mean indifference to truth, criticism, or independent inquiry. Freedom is not merely an external privilege enjoyed by researchers: it belongs to the activity through which observations and hypotheses continually correct one another. The article’s defense of science consequently becomes a defense of democratic freedom and human dignity.

Lederer begins with the 1909 meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, where Max Weber and Werner Sombart denied that scientific proof could establish the superiority of particular social goals. Progressive reform, however compelling to its advocates, was not scientifically demonstrable as morally superior to oppression. Lederer recognizes the intellectual gains of this position: it encouraged theoretical analysis, challenged the historical school’s indiscriminate accumulation of material, and sharpened awareness of the assumptions shaping scholarship. Marx’s critique of socially situated knowledge and the sociology of knowledge further unsettled claims to an unconditioned standpoint. Yet historical interpretation still required selection, emphasis, and concepts; acknowledging the influences on knowledge could not eliminate them.

The decisive distinction is between accepting limits on scientific proof and surrendering judgment altogether:

But from that it does not follow that we ought to forfeit our right of judgment about all values, or that there are not certain values which we are not only justified in denying but are even obliged to deny.

Lederer asks two connected questions: whether some values must be rejected as destructive, and whether science’s historical development implies commitments that scientists cannot discard. The first concerns moral responsibility rather than the discovery of a universally provable hierarchy. His deliberately provocative example of cannibalism distinguishes understanding a practice within another cultural setting from accepting it among people whose history and commitments make it incompatible with their way of life. Values are not interchangeable propositions; they constitute personality and inherited forms of existence. Weber’s appeal to personal conviction and the daimon likewise expresses a demanding responsibility for choice, not permission for arbitrary changes of allegiance.

The second question exposes an internal contradiction in unrestricted scientific relativism. A doctrine claiming that science cannot contest any evaluation would also have to tolerate the repudiation of truth and conscientious investigation. But this would undermine the authority of the doctrine itself:

In short, if I declare as a scientific statement that science has no inherent worth, then my declaration itself has no validity.

Lederer’s point is not that science can prove every desirable end. Scientific argument already presupposes commitments that make argument meaningful. He develops the same reasoning through democracy: toleration of different political beliefs does not require tolerating the destruction of free public opinion. Democracy may defend itself against violence, intolerance, and imposed obedience without abandoning its defining value. Formal freedom becomes self-defeating when passivity allows the institutions sustaining freedom to disappear. Neither democratic tolerance nor scientific objectivity entails acquiescence in its own destruction.

The methodological argument supplies a positive account of these commitments. Science requires independence from binding creeds, freedom to choose and revise hypotheses, and openness to evidence that might overturn an interpretation. Investigation begins with a tentative conception of what matters, rather than with an entirely directionless collection of facts:

Thus a scientific work, even in the field of pure theory, must represent a synthesis of observation and constructive scientific imagination.

Constructive imagination is disciplined by potentially disconfirming observations; observations acquire significance through ideas. For Lederer, this reciprocal process is especially important in social science, where facts cannot readily be isolated and experiments cannot settle disputes as they can in natural science. Interpretation therefore demands examination from different perspectives. Error is an unavoidable risk of inquiry; the fatal danger is a creed that prevents researchers from recognizing error. His examples include mandatory racial explanations, an exclusive class-struggle interpretation, and a prescribed aesthetic standard. The objection concerns their unquestionable status: once conclusions are guaranteed in advance, research loses its purpose.

The final movement connects this methodological freedom to modern political organization. Older regimes could sometimes tolerate intellectual independence among a small, insulated minority. Modern administration, industry, commerce, and journalism require scientific training across much wider populations:

Either everyone or no one can have intellectual freedom.

This dependence on educated judgment produces a contradiction for dictatorship: it needs people capable of independent thought while trying to prohibit their independence. Lederer discusses National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy as different configurations of this conflict, not as identical systems. Censorship, propaganda, and exhausting regimentation substitute enforced conformity for freely sustained political support.

Nor can social science escape into technically sophisticated but politically insulated specialisms. Mathematical economics, Lederer argues, addresses selected problems with settled premises; it cannot alone explain economic structures and structural change. The article concludes by returning to the exchange between facts and principles. A changing society requires flexible inquiry, not prescribed answers. Its enduring conceptual contribution is to show why defending scientific freedom is integral to scientific responsibility: suppressing criticism destroys both the search for truth and the distinction between free persons and obedient subjects.