This action is then “objectively” evaluated as “economically correct.”
But the flaw in this assertion is that it—and every similar statement—
treats a number of presuppositions as self-evident when they really are
not self-evident. (Weber 1949, 36)
Weber spells out that the assumptions and presumed conditions, include:
that there are given wants, that all these wants and their rank order are
accepted, and that finally a given type of economic order exists—and
with the reservation that preferences regarding the duration, certainty
and exhaustiveness, respectively, of the satisfaction of these wants may
often conflict with each other. (Weber 1949, 35-36)
The lesson about Weber’s notion of an ideal-type and any association it has
with the model of economic rationality is that his ideal-type does not designate
the standard sort of economic rationality, or any other sort, as the true or correct
kind in a contextless and uncritical way. Rather, it depicts that standard sort,
of “rational economic man” or marginal utility theory, as a particular interpretive
conception and in ways a questionable conception of (instrumental) rationality.
Weber’s ideal-type here is meant to capture and does capture, when fully
articulated, how rationality is being selectively, one-sidedly, construed by agents
and what that does and not explain about their thought and conduct. Weber’s
ideal-type can thus permit and even necessitate seeing that what is presumed
to be instrumentally rational, means-ends maximization par excellence, actually
amounts to being so in one way while also being in another way its opposite.