Value-rationality and instrumental rationality

Just as social science has not been able to contribute with Kuhnian normal science and predictive theory to scientific development, so natural science has had little to offer to the reflexive analysis of goals, values, and interests that is a precondition for an enlightened development in any society. However, where natural science is weak, social science is strong, and vice versa. For Aristotle, the most important task of social and political studies was to develop society's value-rationality vis-à-vis its scientific and technical rationality. Aristotle did not doubt that the first type of rationality was the most important and ought to influence the second. Since Aristotle's time, however, this view has receded into the background, especially after the Enlightenment and modernity installed instrumental rationality in a dominant position in both science and society. Social thinkers as diverse as Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas have pointed out that for more than two centuries value-rationality (Wertrationalitä) has increasingly given way to instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalitä). In the words of Richard Living-stone: “if you want a description of our age, here is one: the civilization of means without ends.” Today the Aristotelian question of balancing instrumental rationality with value-rationality is forcing its way back to the foreground.