Max Weber's Methodology in Its Place*

Abstract

When Henry Thomas Buckle, in the opening pages of his History of Civilization in England, declared "that for all the higher purposes of human thought history is still miserably deficient, and presents that confused and anarchical appearance natural to a subject of which the laws are unknown, and even the foundation unsettled" (vol. I, p. 4), he did no less than call into question the scientific legitimacy of historiography as predominantly practiced. Connecting the discipline's insufficiency to its failure "to rise from particular facts in order to discover the laws by which those facts are governed," his diagnosis concerning the source of the shortcoming was straightforward: The root of the problem appeared to him to be "a strange idea" prevailing among historians, "that their business is merely to relate events" (op. cit., p. 3), occasionally enlivening their presentations with moral and political reflections as they saw fit. It was German historians who felt particularly stung by this dismissal, and the development of the theory of historiography in Germany in the generation of Max Weber's im mediate predecessors received its main impetus from the desire to articu late a cogent defense against claims such as Buckle's. To obtain a proper idea of this theory's overriding concern, therefore, it is crucial to make no mistake about the central thrust of the argument it attempted to rebut. Fortunately Buckle is quite unambiguous. Espousing the programmatic po sition that the totality of actions which constitute the history of mankind "form one vast scheme of universal order" (op. cit., p. 24) articulable in terms of the "fixed and universal laws" (op. cit., p. 5) determining the pro gress of civilization, he maintains that the aim of any science must be to grasp its subject matter "in the whole of its natural relations" (op. cit., p. 3).