Commentary on Oakes's paper

Abstract

In his opening remarks in Economy and Society, Max Weber states that the sociologist converts concepts into types and searches for formal rules of social action. He distinguishes sociology from history as a science by noting that the latter strives for causal analysis and the description of unique historical activities, structures, personalities and cultural phenomena. The concept of "meaning," in the sense of a comprehensive, interpretive sociology, must, however, embrace more than the contemporaneous. Sociology requires the organization of the knowledge of both past and present: This is accomplished in Weber's terms by ideal-types and, as the Baden School thought of it, by a theory of historical individuals. The epistemology of the Baden School did not abandon the original Kantian assumption that the function of our consciousness, of the "intellect" to be exact, is to categorize an otherwise unorganized stream of sensations. The emphasis on "conceptualization" in neo Kantian thought follows from this assumption. The question we raise in this paper is, must we still accept this assumption as our starting point? How would posing the problem of value-relationality and value judgment presented in Oakes's paper change if the individual as the subject of the ongoing process of the creation and diffusion of knowl? edge and of repeated and even unique events (or for that matter even the facts of nature) were thought of as existing intertwined through time in a network of relationality? This would allow us to construct and establish a system of "historical" processes on the basis of the qualities of the objects of our investigation themselves, rather than by any construction of this network drawn from the framework within our consciousness. Even in this formulation, the difference between knowing (kennen) and perception (erkennen) would remain, just as would that of the difference between causality in history and our judgment of the meaning of "historical facts." However, these prob? lems do not necessarily have an ontological impact if we shift our perspective to that of a theory of knowledge. Under a theory of knowledge as assumed for example by realists like Schuppe or Rehmke, individual existence need not necessarily be