Gunnar Myrdal som en Weberiansk offentlig intellektuell - Arvet efter Max Weber

Abstract

Gunnar Myrdal as a Weberian Public Intellectual. The Legacy from Max Weber. Gunnar Myrdal offers a pragmatic extension of the Weber-Rickert solution to the value-incommensurability problem in post-Enlightenment. The notion of Myrdal as a more radical Weberian than Weber himself calls for further investigation of “Science, Values, and Politics in Gunnar Myrdal’s methodology”. Myrdal recurrently confirms his deep allegiance to Axel Hägerström’s 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. A public intellectual can hardly avoid to “beat the drum” for some values, which cannot satisfy any criteria of truth. The use of significant social movements as normsenders provides a pragmatic way out of the problem of value-polytheism in the post-Enlightenment era and the necessity and anxiety of choice in late Modernity, even if it remains unresolved philosophically. This is the solution Myrdal applies. 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. An American Dilemma is an exemplary work, with its list of explicit postulated premises.