Albert Hirschman’s challenge to social scientists in A Bias for Hope (1971) to embrace a “passion for the possible” has largely been ignored in the mainstream disciplines. That is a pity for, in this age of high anxiety and disaffection, don’t we desperately need perspectives that transcend the limiting confines of liberal democracy and the commodification of everything?

What many of us crave is not Utopia, which by many definitions is unrealizable. Instead, we simply seek promising ways to allow people to lead long and meaningful lives in harmony with nature and others of their kind. And social scientists, who devote their lives to listening, reading and learning, should be well-placed to offer such perspectives. But the canons of social science, reinforced by incentive systems, push practitioners to limit their purview to the #explanation of what is, with scope perhaps for minor policy recommendations. According to the prevailing viewpoint, value-laden ‘speculation’ about what might be is not scientific.

Explanation is, of course, the primary task of social scientists. In Hirschman’s terms, we search for probabilities in the sense of uncovering regularities and uniform sequences. But even this important task is not independent of our values, for we need some way to select not only questions for investigation but also lines of analysis or causal chains to follow up. How do we select the ‘frame’ for an analysis if not ultimately by implicit reference to our values or the values of other scholars whose theories we adopt? There are, after all, a myriad of variables that might impact our dependent variable: historical, psychological, social, political, cultural and economic. How do we choose where to begin? Hugh Stretton brilliantly explored this important methodological issue in a book entitled The Political Sciences in the 1970s. He concluded that ‘value-free’ #socialscience is necessarily value-less, and the most engaging work flowed from analysts who had clear selection principles because of their ‘conservative’ or ‘radical’ orientation. ‘Liberals’ (in the US sense) fell into one category or the other, depending on whether personal liberties were threatened or secure in the society in question. But explanation is not just a matter of values – you like chocolate ice cream and I prefer vanilla – because accepted principles of logic and evidence weed out poor or inadequate explanations. Epistemological questions are very complex, of course, and require a lot of reflection. But I simply want to suggest that standard social science is not as rigorously objective as the textbooks suggest, and the divide between value-neutral explanation and value-laden prescription is not as clear-cut as is often supposed.

Barrington Moore also contended that social scientists adopt a passion for the possible, though he never called it that. In Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery, he formulated an approach to social-scientific research that marries a passion for the possible with hard-headed analysis that does not play ideological favourites. His premise is that social science should not address human happiness because the causes of happiness are multiple, diverse and personal. But we do know what makes people miserable – for example, poverty, inequality, oppression, intolerance, war – and politics can indeed reduce or eliminate the causes of this misery. Thus, the various forms of human suffering should form the subject matter of social science. This premise leads him to propose an approach that combines values with analysis. Values enter at the start of the research/study process in the selection of a research question. Within a particular society or global issue area, one identifies a major cause of human suffering as the problematic. Then, in the second stage of the process, one undertakes a rigorous analysis of the institutional basis of this form of misery. Why does the latter persist? Values enter again in the final stage of the research/study process: one asks what can be done to eliminate or mitigate the institutional foundations of war, intolerance, mass poverty, in this particular case? Moore was even willing to contemplate the advocacy of revolution in cases of extreme, authoritarian oppression. But such advocacy depended on a rough calculus of the suffering that would be introduced by violent attempts at overcoming oppression, as opposed to the likelihood that such action would alleviate the existing misery entailed in the status quo. One weakness of his approach may be that, if Hugh Stretton is right, Moore underestimated the importance of values even in his second, analytical stage of research/study. Be that as it may, Moore provides us with a bold and imaginative understanding of the role of the social scientist.

Should we adopt a passion for the possible? A personal benefit is that one’s work is rarely boring, either for oneself or for others who learn with or from us. And certainly contemporary social science could use a little passion. Also, a single-minded focus on explanation along conventional lines risks fortifying a paralysis of the will. It does this by implicitly casting situations of backwardness, injustice or oppression as the outcomes of universal laws. Hopeful cases of social progress may then be dismissed as exceptions to the general rule. For this reason alone, I think we should, as Hirschman suggested, nurture a particular passion: searching for the hidden possibilities for minimizing human misery that may lurk in a particular place and time.

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