Distance and Engagement in a Time of War: Comments on “Social Science and Liberal Values”

Abstract

n Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War, Jeffrey Isaac urges us to discuss responsibilities of social scientists during wartime. He focuses specifically on the ethics of responsibility appropriate to the university-based scholar when political authority attacks the values, both moral and non-moral, that we implicitly presuppose when we function as academics in general, and political scientists in particular. Isaac invokes the authority of Max Weber to elucidate the precise boundaries of these obligations as well as to find a notion of responsibility on which all political scientists, whatever their partisan commitments, can agree. Of course, Isaac rightly notes that the context in which he writes is quite different from Weber's. Weber was also trying to find a kind of impartiality that all academics could agree on, regardless of partisan stances. But he pursued this aim in an academic environment in which using the lectern to impose one's partisan position on an audience was the norm.' He further assumed that his audience was deeply committed to a wide range of political parties, programs, and goals, and was expecting judgment about right and wrong political commitments, which, at least on surface, he claimed a social scientist as such was not in a position to provide. Isaac, on the other hand, wants academics, especially political scientists, to consider their public responsibilities, given their tendency to ignore the dangers to the values of academic freedom-such as free inquiry, free speech, free dissemination of one's work, and free exchange-that and the political invocations of war, might have. Unlike Weber, he is not worried about an overpoliticized relation of the political scientist to his or her audience; rather his concern is with the under-politicized relation of political scientists to the values presupposed by all who