GUNNAR MYRDAL AS A WEBERIAN PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL.

Sven Eliaeson

This paper deals with Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) as a pragmatic extension of the Weber-Rickert solution to the value-incommensurability problem in post-Enlightenment. A brief condensed presentation of Weber’s position is required in order to specify what Myrdal adds and how? The notion of Gunnar Myrdal as a more radical Weberian than Weber himself calls for further investigation of “Science, Values, and Politics in Gunnar Myrdal’s methodology”. In this paper we restrict ourselves to an analysis of Myrdal’s self-understanding in this regard. Myrdal recurrently confirms his deep allegiance to Axel Hägerström’s (1868-1939) radical anti-metaphysics, but actually denies Weberian influences on his way to apply explicit value premises, as a vehicle to avoid uncontrolled value intrusion in policy analyses, despite obvious affinities.

The predicament which defines Weber’s concern has been expressed by Weber’s neighbor Ernst Troeltsch, as one of value-polytheism in the post-Enlightenment era. The necessity and anxiety of choice in late Modernity is another way to formulate this crucial problem. Weber as a public intellectual thought professors had a calling to find ultimate value in culture. The use of significant social movements as norm-senders provides a pragmatic way out of the problem, even if it remains unresolved philosophically. This is the solution Myrdal advocates.

Myrdal has exercized little influence on Weber’s reception in Sweden. Reasons are that Weber was read in the original, in a period when Sweden was an intellectual “annex” to Germany. No mediating and translating were necessary. This changed after WW2. Later Arnold Brecht’s magisterial work on Political Theory was widely used in undergraduate teaching, which had a synergy-effect, due to its creed in common to the Nordic anti-metaphysics, Weber understood as a trade-mark for scholarly ethic and scientific objectivity.

Weber’s and Myrdal’s common project is the rationalization of value hierarchies for instrumental policy analyses. Myrdal goes one step further, “operationalizing” a solution to the norm-sender problem, for intersubjective means-end-analyses.