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THE MEANING OF 'WERTFREIHEIT'aMax Weber's most extensive and definitive exposition of the postulate of 'Wertfreiheit' can be found in the Logos of 1917 under the title Der Sinn der 'Wertfreiheit' der okonomischen und soziologischen Wissenschaften ('The meaning of 'Wertfreiheit' in the economic and social sciences'). He begins with the following sentence: "By value judgementsb is to be understood, when not stated otherwise or when it is obvious, as the 'practical' bestowing of value to a phenomenon which can be influenced through our actions as something capable of being censured or of being approved."' To be sure, Weber, "offers" shortly afterwards, in his lecture "Wissenschaft als Beruf' (Science as a Vocation), to also "provide the proof through the works of our historians, that wherever the man of science applies his own value judgements, the full understanding of facts ceases."2 Yet, in principle, Weber's claim orients itself to the refraining of science from making value judgements of phenomena that are still in flux, and which can be influenced by our actions.Weber already knew that countless misunderstandings would be associated with his claim. If it is so, however, that hardly any other principle has become so determining for the spirit and self-understanding of science in this century, and has gained such an air of being self-evident as this claim, which has always been tied to Weber's name, then it is important to investigate as accurately as possible what Weber had actually meant by the a The difficulty in translating the word Wertfreiheit into English has been the source of much misunderstanding in Weber's use of the term. The most direct English translation is value freedom, a phrase which can be interpreted in various ways. A more accurate, but awkward, translation is to be free of value. Other, frequently seen, translations of Wertfreiheit attempt to avoid these problems by using the word 'neutrality'-ethical neutrality or value neutrality. Doing this, however, may lead to misinterpretation, since it was not the term that Weber used. To avoid these problems, the translators have decided to keep the original German term in the text, and as such can be construed in the technical sense that Weber used it. b The word Weber uses here for the translation 'value judgements' is Wertungen, a noun construction based on the root wert. From this root the German can construct a whole family of noun, verb, and adjectival forms. The basic noun form, der Wert, is a cognate of the English worth, and corresponds closely enough to the English word value. The p...
