Abstract
Many Japanese scholars, in light of their own positions or concerns, have interpreted Max Weber's concept of “Wertfreiheit” or “value-freedom” as carrying dual meanings: “freedom from value” and “freedom for any value.” This article systematically searches for, and analyzes, the use of the word Wertfreiheit (that is, for the words that include the character string “wertfrei” or “wertungsfrei”) in selected texts written by Weber, in order to reveal the meaning that Weber had himself assigned to Wertfreiheit. It is shown that the words including “wertfrei” or “wertungsfrei” were used thirty times in the texts Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, and Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Moreover, it is shown that Weber did not assign the meaning “freedom for any value” to the word Wertfreiheit, in either the epistemological or practical instantiations of the concept. Instead, in Weber's usage, Wertfreiheit is deployed as a concept concerning scientific cognition relating to social facts. Consequently, the concept of Wertfreiheit demands the rigorous separation of theoretical perception from practical value-judgment in the social sciences. Moreover, this separation permits the social sciences to treat value as an object of perception, but excludes subjective value-judgments. As a result, the concept of Wertfreiheit, understood as the division between theoretical perception and practical value-judgment, is a condition required for the collective knowledge of a society to be congruent with that of science. Moreover, the concept of Wertfreiheit is an important (but not complete) basis for Weber's Kantian oriented philosophy, which claims that there is a separation between theoretical and practical reason, and does not support the Hegelianism assumption that there is a unity between the two.
