2.2 Computational Social Science and Scientific Socialism
To speak of “scientific socialism” does not automatically and not necessarily apply a mechanistic and deterministic theory of society that assumes that capitalism automatically breaks down and society is determined by natural economic laws. The scientific understanding of socialism is not a natural science applied society but rather a social science of society (Gesellschaftswissenschaft) that stresses the key role of the conscious human being, social practices, social production, and social relations in society. Natural science theories are not necessarily deterministic and mechanistic. The point is that in the social sciences, the positivist tradition treated society based on natural science methods and mathematics, which focuses on pure quantification and assumes that everything can be calculated. The logic of positivism neglects society’s qualities and the fact that not everything social and societal is calculable. We cannot properly calculate love, morals, sadness, happiness, (dis)respect, (in)justice, solidarity, etc. Society’s social qualities can only be properly analysed by qualitative social research methods. Marx and Engels are not as such opposed to calculation and quantification, but they are critical of computing as means of domination and exploitation that drives capital accumulation and makes the qualities of society disappear behind things and numbers. This critique of quantification as an aspect of capitalist accumulation has been reflected in Georg Lukács’ (1971) notion of reification and Max Horkheimer’s (1947) notion of instrumental reason.
In the contemporary social sciences, computational social sciences have emerged as a dominant paradigm that attracts lots of attention, support, funding and has increasingly been institutionalised.
David Lazer et al. (2009, 722) define computational social science as a social science that “leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale” and operates with “terabytes of data”. In the textbook Introduction to Computational Social Science, Cioffi-Revilla (2014, 2) defines computational social science:
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Theorists