Weber's Project: Sociology as the Science of Meaningful Action

Max Weber (1864-1920) entered the discipline-forming conversation of sociology from a distinctive position. He was trained in law and economic history, held chairs at Heidelberg and later at Munich, and thought of himself as much a political economist and historian as a sociologist. His contribution to the foundations of sociology was therefore shaped by an adjacent set of debates — the Methodenstreit between historicist and analytical economics, the neo-Kantian philosophy of the social sciences coming out of Heidelberg, and the rapidly industrializing Germany whose institutions he watched with both fascination and unease (Bendix 1960, pp. 1-15). The result is a body of work that sits uncomfortably between Marx's materialism on one side and the positivist program of Comte and Durkheim on the other.

Weber's contrast with both traditions is programmatic. Against Marx, Weber argued that material conditions alone do not determine consciousness or action; the meanings actors attach to their situations are themselves causal, and those meanings cannot be reduced to a reflection of economic interest (Weber 1904-5/1930, pp. 55-56). The famous argument of The Protestant Ethic — treated in detail in the next topic — is precisely that a religious-ethical orientation helped generate the conditions for modern capitalism, rather than merely following from them. Against positivism, Weber argued that the methodological ambition of making sociology resemble physics rests on a category mistake. Physics studies objects that do not interpret themselves; sociology studies beings who do. To describe their behavior without reference to the meaning they give it is not more scientific but less accurate (Weber 1922/1978, pp. 4-6).

The opening sentences of Economy and Society fix the definitional move. 'Sociology,' Weber writes, 'is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences' (Weber 1922/1978, p. 4). Each clause of this definition is load-bearing. 'Social' means oriented to others — the meaning the actor attaches takes account of the behavior of others and is oriented in its course (p. 4). 'Action' means behavior to which the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning (p. 4). The combination specifies a domain that is narrower than 'everything human beings do' — a solitary reflex, a purely physiological event, a purely instrumental reaction to a natural phenomenon fall outside the domain — but wider than any single substantive subject matter.

The phrase that deserves special weight is 'causal explanation.' Weber did not renounce causal analysis in favor of pure interpretation. The interpretive moment is a necessary condition for causal analysis, not a substitute for it (Weber 1922/1978, pp. 7-8; Bruun and Whimster 2012, pp. xxii-xxiv). One grasps what an action means to the actor; one then asks what produced the meaning and what consequences followed from the action. Sociology as Weber conceives it is thus simultaneously interpretive and explanatory — a double commitment that later generations of methodologists have found easier to split than to sustain.

The stakes are consequential. If Weber is right, then the study of society has an irreducible hermeneutic dimension: the data of social life are always already interpreted by the actors who produce them, and any analysis that ignores this fact is producing a distorted picture of its object. If he is wrong — if behavior can be adequately captured by external observation and statistical aggregation alone — then the interpretive program is methodological deadweight. Much of twentieth-century sociology has turned on versions of this dispute (Parsons 1937, pp. 473-487; Habermas 1971, pp. 140-160). Weber's position is the classical statement of the interpretive side, and it is the foundation on which the traditions surveyed in the sixth page of this topic are built.

A brief biographical note helps to locate the work. Weber's productive life was repeatedly interrupted by a severe depressive breakdown beginning in 1897, which removed him from active teaching for the better part of a decade. Much of his mature methodological writing — the 1904 essay on objectivity, the essays on ideal-types, the long drafts of what became Economy and Society — was produced in the shadow of this illness and of his ambivalent relationship to the German academic world (Radkau 2009, pp. 150-165). The combination of ferocious analytical rigor and a kind of tragic sensibility about the limits of rational inquiry pervades his work and makes him, among the classical theorists, the one who most conspicuously does not offer consolation.