"The value-free doctrine is useful both to those who want to escape from the world and those who want to escape into it. It is useful to those young, or not so young, men who live off sociology rather than for it, and who think of sociology as a way of getting ahead in the world by providing them with neutral techniques that may be sold on the open market to any buyer. From such a standpoint, there is no reason why one cannot sell his knowledge to spread a disease just as freely as he can to fight it. Indeed, some sociologists have no hesitation about doing market research designed to sell more cigarettes, although well aware of the implications of recent cancer research. In brief, the value-free doctrine of social science was sometimes used to justify the sale of one's talents to the highest bidder and is, far from new, a contemporary version of the most ancient sophistry."
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"Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology," Social Problems, vol. 9 (August 1961), pp. 199-213.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alvin_Ward_Gouldner
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Alvin Ward Gouldner
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