Can Sociology Be Value Free

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plus sociology? This concept of value free sociology has its roots in the rise of positivism and the scientific method in the mid nineteenth century. Positivists believed that discovering laws of social development would create a better society. A key figure in the establishing of sociology as a respectable science was Comte (1798-1857). Comte looked at human progress and decided that there are three stages to the evolutionary growth of knowledge. "Each of our leading conceptions, each branch of our knowledge. passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological. or fictitious: the Metaphysical or abstract: and the Scientific or positive...In the final. the positive state the mind...applies itself to the study of their laws - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance." (Comte 1830 The Philosophy' of Sociology' in Thompson 1995 p. 39-40) Comte argued that the human mind develops through these three distinct phases that were ...

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(Alienation and Freedoms 1964 in McNeill 1990) It was hypothesized that different levels of alienation are causally linked with different types of industrial processes. After operationalising the concept of alienation. its presence was measured in different industrial contexts. The main priority was that there be no suspicion that the collected data had been affected by the researchers' own values. It should be possible for other researchers to use the same methods and arrive at similar conclusions. (McNeil1 1990 p.117-8) Developments in positivist in the twentieth century led to the belief that facts could and should be separated from values. The job of the scientist was only to identify ...

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