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Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences; MAX WEBER On The Methodology of the Social Sciences Translated and Edited by EDWARD A. SHILS and HENRY A. FINCH With a Foreword by EDWARD A. SHILS THE FREE PRESS of G L E N C O E , ILLINOIS 19 4 9 Copyright 1949 by The Free Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writirig from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or neivspaper. Printed in the United States of America FIRST EDITION W^^ FOREWORD I The essays in this book were written, as all methodological essays should be written, in the closest intimacy with actual research and against a background of constant and intensive meditation on the substantive problems of the theory and strategy of the social sciences. They were written in the years between 1903 and 1917, the most pro- ductive years of Max Weber's life, when he was working on his studies in the sociology of religion and on the second and third parts of Wirt- schaft—und Gesellschaft. Even before the earliest of the three published here " 'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy"^— was writ- ten, Weber had achieved eminence in Germany in a variety of fields. He had already done important work in economic and legal history and had taught economic theory as the incumbent of one of the most famous chairs in Germany; on the basis of original investigations, he had acquired a specialist's knowledge of the details of German eco- nomic and social structure. His always vital concern for the political prosperity of Germany among the nations had thrust him deeply into the discussion of political ideals and programmes. Thus he did not come to the methodology of the social sciences as an outsider who seeks to impose standards on practices and problems of which he is ignorant. The interest which his methodology holds for us to-day is to a great extent a result of this feature of Weber's career just as some of its shortcomings from our present point of view may perhaps be attributed to the fact that some of the methodological problems which he treated could not be satisfactorily resolved prior to certain actual developments in research technique. The essay on "Objectivity" had its immediate origins in his desire to clarify the implications of a very concrete problem. Weber, together 1 First published in the Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904. iv FOREWORD with Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaflfe, was assuming the editorship of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschajt und Sozialpolitik which was, from his assumption of editorial rcsponsibiHty in 1904 until its suspension in 1933, probably the greatest periodical publication in the field of the social sciences in any language. He wished to make explicit the standards which the editors would apply and to which they would expect their contributors to conform. In doing so, his powerful mind, which strove restlessly for clarity at levels where his contemporaries were satisfied with ambiguities and cliches, drove through to the funda- mental problems of the relationship between general sociological con- cepts and propositions on the one hand, and concrete historical reality on the other. Another problem which was to engage him imtil his death — the problem of the relationship between evaluative stand- points or normative judgments and empirical knowledge — received its first full statement in this essay. "Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences" was pub- lished in the Archiv in 1905. It must have been in the process of production while he was also busy with a large scale investigation of certain aspects of German rural society and with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The intricate task of explaining causally the emergence of an "historical individual" (in this instance, modern capitalism) finds its methodological reflection in this essay which treats of the nature of explanation of particular historical events in its rela- tionship to general or universal propositions. At the same time, he continued, on this occasion much more specifically and with many illustrations, to examine, as he had in the essay on "Objectivity", the role of evaluative points of view in the selection of subject matters and problems and in the constructive application of categories. His efforts in this essay were partly a continuation of his long-standing, self-clarifying polemic against "objec tivism" and "historicism" but its analysis drew its vividness and its realistic tone from the fact that he was continuously attempting to explain to himself the procedures which he (and other important historians and social scientists) were actually using in the choice of problems and in the search for solu- tions to them. "The Meaning of 'Ethical Neutrality' in Sociology and Economics" was published in Logos in 1917, in the midst of the first World War. FOREWORD V It was a time when patriotic professors were invoking the authority of their academic disciplines for the legitimation of their political arguments, when Weber himself was engaged in a series of titanic polemics against the prevailing political system and while he was still working on the sociology of religion. (Perhaps he had already begun by this time to work on the more rigorously systematic First Part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschajt.'^) The essay itself was a revision of a memorandum, written about four years earlier to serve as the basis of a private discussion in the Verein fur Sozialpolitik and never made publicly accessible. A mass of particular, concrete interests underlie this essay — his recurrent effort to penerate to the postulates of economic theory,^ his ethical passion for academic freedom, his fervent nationalist political convictions and his own perpetual demand for intellectual integrity. Max Weber's pressing need to know the grounds for his own actions and his strong belief that man's dignity consists in his capacity for rational self-determination are evident throughout this essay—as well as his contempt for those whose confidence in the rightness of their moral judgment is so weak that they feel the urge to support it by some authority such as the "trend of history" or its conformity with scientific doctrine in a sphere in which the powers of science are definitely limited. On this occasion too, Weber worked his way through to the most fundamental and most widely ramified methodological problems in the attempt to reach clarity about the bases of his own practical judgment. Here, of course, he was not dealing primarily with the methodology of research, but his procedure and his success illustrate the fruitfulness of methodological analysis when it has actual judgments and observations to analyze rather than merely a body of rules from which it makes deductions. The three essays published here do not comprise all of Weber's methodological writings^in the Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissen- schaftslehre they constitute only one third of a volume of nearly six 2 Recently published by Talcott Parsons under the title The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (London 1947). 3 Cf. his contribution to the discussion on "Die Produktivitat der Volks- wirtschaft" at the meeting of the Verein fiir Sozialpolitik in 1909 {reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik) and "Die Grenzutz- lehre und das psychophysische Grundgesetz" (1908) (reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre) vi FOREWORD hundred pages. One of the most important of his methodological essays — "Roscher und Knies und die logischen Problems der his- torischen National okonomie" has not been included in the present collection, while another important section of the German edition — "Methodische Grundlagcn der Soziologie" — has already been pub- lished in English.* Yet except for the analysis of the procedure in- volved in the verstehende explanation of behaviour which is con- tained in the latter essay and in an earlier and less elaborate version, in the essay "Uber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie," ** the main propositions of Weber's methodology are fully contained here. 11. In many respects, social science to-day is unrecognizably different from what it was in the years when these essays were written. Particu- larly in the United States and Great Britain, the social sciences have developed a whole series of techniques of observation and analysis and have on the basis of these, proceeded to describe the contemporary world with a degree of concreteness and accuracy which only a few optimists could have expected in Weber's time. The number of social scientists engaged in research has increased by a large multiple and the resources available for financing research have likewise multiplied many times over. The success of the social sciences in devising pro- cedures of convincing reliability have led to their marriage with policy to an extent which could have been conceived only in principle in Weber's time. The turn of events and the passage of years have not however reduced the relevance of these essays. The concrete incidents have changed — we are no longer concerned to refute the errors of "objec- tivism" and "professorial prophets" are not a very important problem for us — but the relationship between concrete research, whether it be descriptive concrete research or explanatory concrete research, and general theory has become a problem more pressing than ever, even * The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Chapter I. 5 First published in Logos (1913). Reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschajtslehre. FOREWORD vii though awareness of it is much less than universal. Many of our current advances in research are made in ways which seem to avoid raising the problem—so many of our successes are successes in accurate description in investigations in which the problem of explanation is left to those who requested the investigation or who are to "use" the results.
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