Remarks on Weber and Rickert

Abstract

My essay on Max Weber and the Southwest German school attempts to establish the basis of the neo-Kantian influence of Weber's early methodology, the controversy that seems to have begun the debate over the import, validity, and originality of his methodological position. The original parties to this controversy seem to have been Heinrich Rickert himself and Karl Jaspers. As Jaspers tells it, only five days after Weber's death, he and Rickert had a conversation in which Rickert spoke of Weber as his pupil and referred, perhaps somewhat condescendingly, to the limited significance and influence of Weber's work. Jaspers's reply: "Do you mean that anyone at all will read you in the future? If that happens, it will be due only to the fact that you are mentioned in the notes of Weber's works as someone to whom he owes certain logical insights." After this conversation, Jaspers adds laconically, "relations between Rickert and myself became strained."1 If my analysis is sound, Jaspers's biographical explanation of the relationship between Weber's methodology and Rickert's philosophy of history is mistaken. Weber's commitment to Rickert's solution to the problem of historical knowledge was a conse? quence of the immanent requirements of Weber's own thought. This essay was circulated among the members of the Staff Seminar held by the Department of Sociology in The Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. In order to encourage discussion, I made several provocative claims in the "Concluding Remarks" that were not defended in the paper itself. This strategy succeeded all too well. Discussion of the paper did not focus on its main argument, which was left intact, but rather on the somewhat fugitive observa? tions informally sketched in the closing pages. These observations concern the problematic implications of the neo-Kantian theory of concept formation and its theory of value for certain aspects of Weber's methodology. Here I shall confine myself to two of the main problems raised by criticism of the paper: the more narrow issue posed by my remarks on the consequences of Rickert's theory of concept formation for Weber's theory of ideal types; and the more general issue posed by my critique of Rickert's distinction between values and value judg? ments.2