Commentary on Guy Oakes's paper on ?Max Weber and the South German neo-Kantians?

Abstract

I have been ambivalent about doing this commentary for a number of reasons. First of all, though I may disagree with Guy Oakes, I have enjoyed everything I have read that he has written. In addition, by accepting the invitation to comment on this paper, I was given the opportunity to reread some of Weber's early epistemological and methodological essays which I had taken for granted because I have more closely followed Weber's later and more substantive work. At the same time, my ambivalence expresses itself in the fact that I am not a professional philosopher and because my training and hab? its of mind have led me to concentrate on substantive problems in Weber's work rather than an epistemology and metatheory. Guy Oakes, in one of his introductions to his translations of Weber, points out that it is surprising that Weber wrote so many epistemological essays, given his principled preference for substantive work.1 Yet given the existence of these essays, we must attempt to do with them whatever we can. I accept as given Oakes's summary of the relevant ideas of Windle band, Rickert, and Lask, and confine myself to a discussion of Weber's early epistemological and methodological writings with regard to the Southwest German neo-Kantians. Oakes argues that Weber "failed to grasp some of Rickert's most important arguments even though these were directly relevant to central qu?tions of his own thought," and that "Rickert's wert/wer tung dichotomy collapses and with it Weber's solution to the problem of knowledge of the historical individual." I will not argue that Weber failed to understand Rickert's failure, and that therefore a double negative produces a positive, nor will I argue that Max Weber solved, at a logical and epistemological level, the problems that Oakes raises to that part of Weber's work that is based on his reading of Windleband, Rickert, and Lask. It is true, of course, that Weber cites Windleband and Rickert, espe? cially Rickert, frequently and with approval throughout his early works. To me, however, it is not at all clear that Weber failed to