Can social science ever truly be "value-free"—or does every critique of society secretly rely on an unspoken vision of what a good society ought to be? In this episode, we explore a masterclass in normative social theory: the landmark paper "The Axiological Turn in Social Theory: A Critical Reconstruction and the Case for Commonist Value Theory" (also presented as a reflexive review of the field), authored by sociologist and political theorist S. A. Hamed Hosseini.
Hosseini takes us on a sweeping intellectual journey through the "axiological turn" in the social sciences—the broad movement that abandoned Max Weber’s classical ideal of value freedom (Wertfreiheit) in favor of an explicit, deliberate grounding of social critique in moral stances, transformative visions, and more-than-human liberation.
In this episode, we unpack:
- The Three Core Questions: How social theory grapples with the warrant question (where norms come from and how they are justified), the subject question (whose goods count, extending to nonhuman animals and ecosystems), and the transformation question (how normative visions can inform practice without being captured by technocratic metrics).
- Eleven Grounding Strategies Reconstructed: A comparative tour across major theoretical lineages—from Frankfurt School immanent critique and Habermasian discourse ethics to Ruth Levitas’s "utopia as method," Erik Olin Wright’s "real utopias," feminist care ethics, decolonial liberation philosophy, and critical realism.
- Judgmental Axiology: Why critical inquiry must go beyond mere description or exposure of assumptions. Hosseini introduces judgmental axiology as the essential method that bridges empirical analysis and moral commitment.
- True Value vs. Fetish Value: How Hosseini (alongside Barry K. Gills) redefines value, distinguishing "true value"—which emanates from and nourishes planetary life through consensual, de-fetishizing commoning—from "fetish value," which results from capital's systemic process of decommonisation.
- The Four Commoning Causes: An Aristotelian fourfold framework of existential causes—creativity (efficient cause), liveability (material cause), conviviality (formal cause), and alterity (final/reorienting cause)—that together form the fundamental commons of life.
- The Well-Living Paradigm & Reflexive Candor: An integrative post-capitalist framework for human and planetary flourishing, accompanied by Hosseini's candid, self-critical audit of the unresolved tensions, metric-capture risks, and philosophical frontiers still facing the field.
Whether you are a scholar of critical theory, a student of sociology, or an activist seeking firmer philosophical and ethical foundations for social transformation, this episode offers an essential roadmap for a social science that explicitly knows what it stands for.
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