Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 105
Bruno Leoni
“Some Reflections on the ‘Relativistic’ Meaning of the
WWeerrttffrreeiihheeiitt in the Study of Man” 54
Paradoxically, this is a good paper even though I believe
it fails in its ultimate purpose. For it is a good defense of
Max Weber and his doctrine of Wertfreiheit. And in the
course of this defense, Leoni shows that Weber did not
attack scholars for having values or for advocating them,
and that he was largely concerned, in his famous championing
of a clear separation between fact and value, to be
“confusion free,” so that both the writer and the reader
know what is going on. It was to Weber’s eternal credit to
point out that there is a place for value-free “social science”
and for value-free analyses of the consequences of
different policies, of different values even, without confusing
matters by injecting the scholar’s own false judgments
into that discussion. And Leoni does well in stressing this
contribution, and in joining Weber in attacking those
social scientists who, pretending to Wertfreiheit, smuggle
unanalyzed ethical preconceptions into their wertfrei
analyses, and thus give the former the strictly scientific
tone of the latter (e.g., those economists who naturally
assume that “equality” or “stability” or “full employment”
are good things and require certain policies, without bothering
even to point out that they are slipping in a personal,
unanalyzed value judgment.)
When all this is said and conceded, however, I must add
that, in the famous battle at this symposium between Leoni
and Mises on the one side and Strauss on the other, Leoni
and Mises are wrong and Strauss is right. (And this is true
even though Leoni corrects some Straussian errors about
Weber: e.g., that Weber couldn’t by his own doctrine make
54 Bruno Leoni, “Some Reflections on the ‘Relativistic’ Meaning
of the Wertfreiheit in the Study of Man,” in Schoeck and Wiggins,
eds., Relativism, pp. 158–74.