On the Unity of Max Weber's Methodology

Abstract

Two years after Max Weber's death, his wife Marianne published a collection of his essays on the philosophy of the social sciences under the title Gesammelte Aufs?tze zur Wissenschaftslehre. In these studies, Weber developed his views on what, in the parlance of the time, were termed the "logical" and "methodological" issues of the social sciences: the demarca tion between the natural sciences and the social sciences; the status of the concepts of culture and history; the theory of action and agency; the rela tionship between explanation and interpretation; and the complex of ques tions posed by the fact that the subject matter, problems, and theoretical interests of the social sciences are in some sense defined by values. The dominant tradition in the secondary literature on these writings is based on the assumption that the concept of Max Weber's Wissenschaftslehre is not merely a term of editorial artifice. On the contrary, the essays in this book articulate an internally consistent and unified set of positions: "Max Weber's methodology." Debate within this tradition is not primarily con cerned with the soundness of Weber's theses or the validity of his arguments, but centers on the sources of his ideas and the basis of their unity. In the early years of the tradition, Alexander von Schelting situated the unity of Weber's methodological thought in Heinrich Rickert's theory of the logic of concept formation in the cultural sciences (von Schelting, 1934). Later Dieter Henrich argued that the Wissenschaftslehre contains not only a com plete philosophy of science, but an integrated analysis of theoretical and practical reason (Henrich, 1952). Master key metaphors seem to have at tracted more recent proponents of the tradition. The late Friedrich Tenbruck