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The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Political Economy. http://www.jstor.org "CAPITALISM" IN RECENT GERMAN LITERATURE: SOMBART AND WEBER-Concluded i M [AX WEBER has none of Sombart'sconcentration of attention upon a single line of development. His re- searches extend over the whole of human history. He investigates the classic world, China, India, ancient Judea, and others. But it always remains his purpose to throw light upon the problems of modem society, and especially upon modern capitalism.2"Thus in spite of methodologicaldifferences between the two scholars, the one working genetically, the other by the comparativemethod, with the aid of "ideal types," the final ob- ject in View is the same, to understand the peculiarities of our modern economic and social situation. None the less the differ- ence of method is, as I shall hope to show, responsible for some of the most important differencesbetween the two authors. The "ideal type" (Idealtypus) is Weber's special instrument of sociological analysis. He asserts that the historical social sci- ences are faced with an infinite variety of facts from which a selection for purposes of analysis must be made. The objective of these sciences is the knowledge and understandingof specific individual cultural phenomena in their uniqueness, as different from all others even of similar character. These "historical in- dividuals2la he seeks to "understand"in terms of the humanmo- tives which have given rise to the social action summed up in them. The standard under which a group of actions is to be brought together as a historical individual is the "significance" (Bedeutung) of those actions for human ends and values. Hence the discovery of uniform relations and their formulationin terms of "laws" cannot be the objective of such a science. That "understanding"Weber attempts to attain by means of the ideal type. It is a special construction in the mind of the ' See Karl Jaspers, Max Weber: Gedichtnisrede (Tiibingen, I92 I). 'r The Germanterm is HistorischesIndividuum. It refersto a culturalphe- nomenonin which many men may be involved. 3I 32 TALCOTTPARSONS investigator of what social action would be if it were directed with perfect rationality" toward a given end. It is not a reflec- tion of actual behavior, since it is purposely a "fictitious" con- struction, which can never occur in reality. Nor is it an abstrac- tion in the ordinary sense which operates under the assumption "other things being equal," for even with respect to the elements with which it specifically deals it makes assumptions contrary to fact. Nor can it be a hypothesis to be "verified,"nor a general concept of a class (Gattungsbegriff) under which many "cases" may be included. It is a picture of what things would be under "ideal," not actual, conditions. Given this instrument of analysis the investigator may com- pare with it the actual record of events in many different in- stances and thus attempt to "understand"them, each in its indi- vidual uniqueness, by seeing how far they conform to action rationally directed toward the given ends, and to distinguish such elements as are not "understandable"in these terms. Fur- thermore,the single ideal type is directed toward understanding, not the whole of the "historical individual," but only one side or aspect of it. A whole would thus be analyzed in terms of several ideal types. Finally, this ideal type is never the end of the sci- entific investigation, but always a means to understanding. It has no "reality" in itself; it does not "reproduce"reality, but is a The "perfect rationality" meant by Weber may not always be a perfect, but rather a relative, rationality, the degree of which depends on the purpose for which the ideal type is constructed. It is always used to separate the rela- tively rational from the relatively irrational elements of the situation to be analyzed. However, the ideal type based upon the perfectly rational adaptation of means to given ends (what he calls zweckrational) is the most important class for Weber. As he says (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2 and 3): "For scientific analysis working with ideal types, all irrational, emotionally determined com- plexes of behavior, which influence action, are most easily investigated and pre- sented as 'deviations' from a construction of the purely rational (with regard to means) order of occurrence in them." And again: "The construction of a strictly rational course of action serves the sociologist in these cases, on account of its evident understandability and lack of ambiguity .... as an ideal type for the purpose of understanding real action which is influenced by irrationali- ties of all kinds, in terms of their 'departure' from what the action would be if it were purely rational." Only in this sense is Weber's sociology to be considered rational. It makes no assumption as to the actual relative importance of the rational elements in social life. "CAPITALISM"IN RECENT GERMAN LITERATURE 33 a fiction, always involving assumptions purposely contrary to fact. Its function is to form a standard for the systematic selec- tion, arrangement,and analysis of the historical facts. In this process Weber does not exclude "values" from his consideration,but the whole point of his method is to analyze so- cial action in terms of them, and to include in his analysis only what can be understood in such terms. But none the less he claims objectivity for his method, since it takes the values as given and attempts no ultimate judgment or criticism of them. He does, however, deal with them in attempting to refine the values he finds in history into ideal types of themselves.28 Investigation of Weber's work,29however, has shown that while all this is true of one class of ideal type, there is another group of concepts which Weber calls ideal types, but which are of a quite differentnature. They are directed toward one partic- ular historical individual and are applicable only to it, are thus historical and not general concepts like the others. Secondly, they attempt to work out the whole "essence" of the thing, not just one side of it. Such a concept cannot be purely a means, but its construction must be in some measure the end of the investi- gation in question. That Weber calls both ideal types without distinguishingthem leads to serious confusion, a confusion which is especially marked in his analysis of capitalism, as I shall show at the end of the discussion. The propositions of abstract economic theory were thought by Weber to be ideal types in the first sense, a view perhaps not very different from its conception as an "engine of analysis" which has become common in English theory in recent times. In the latter of the two senses the "theory" of Sombart may be said a This question of the objectivity of his type of social scienceis one of the most difficultaspects of Weber'sposition. It unfortunatelycannot be discussed here. For his viewpoint see "Die ObjectivitaetSozialwissenschaftlicher Erkennt- nis, Ges. Aufsaetzezur Wissenschaftslehre,pp. T46ff. 2 For the best analysis of Weber'smethodology see A. von Schelting, "Die logische Theorie der historischenKulturwissenschaften von Max Weber usw.," Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaftund Sozialpolitik,Bd. 49. Parts of Weber's own writings which deal with the problem of the ideal type are: several of the essays in the volume GesammelteAufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehreand the first part of "Wirtschaftund Gesellschaft,"Grundriss der Sozialoekonomik,Vol. III. 34 TALCOTTPARSONS to consist of ideal types, of which that of capitalism was the most interesting for this paper. It is a picture of the rationalized and distilled "essence" of the epoch, free from all the irrationalities of the actual historical material. But it is definitely historical, not general. Unlike Sombart, Weber never developed a unified theory of capitalism. In spite of the fact that a very large proportion of his sociological work was devoted to this problem, he left only a number of fragments which from our point of view are to be re- garded as special investigations.30It is thus unavoidable that in piecing these together a certain element of construction should enter in. At the outset there is the difficulty that Weber seems to have used the term "capitalism"in two different senses without clear- ly distinguishing them. It is necessary to analyze them both and to keep them distinct from one another. They may be called ''capitalism in general" and "modern capitalism." The first is, one may say, an ideal type in the former of the foregoing senses. It is a general concept in terms of which many different sorts of capitalism, such as, for example, colonial, finance, and political, may be analyzed. It is thus not a his- torical concept in the same sense as Sombart's capitalism, but stands above and beyond all historical periods, serving in the analysis and comparison of one aspect of many of them.
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