Max Weber
Value-freedom

Weber believed that social scientists needed to avoid making value-judgements. Instead, he wanted social scientific research to be value-free. This would give them objectivity but needed to be combined with an acknowledgement that their research connected with values in different ways. As part of his support for value-freedom, Weber opposed both instructors and students promoting their political views in the classroom. He first articulated it in his writings on scientific philosophy, including "The 'Objectivity' of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy" and "Science as a Vocation". Weber was influenced by Heinrich Rickert 's concept of value-relevance. Rickert used it to relate historical objects to values while maintaining objectivity through explicitly defined conceptual distinctions. Weber disagreed with him that a scholar could maintain objectivity while ascribing to a hierarchy of values the way that Rickert did, however. His argument regarding value-freedom was connected to his involvement in the Werturteilsstreit. As part of it, he argued in favour of the idea that the social sciences needed to be value-free. During it, he unsuccessfully tried to turn the German Sociological Association into a value-free organisation. Ultimately, that prompted his resignation from it.
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