A central passage in which Weber states his case concerns what is involved
in theorizing about “the ‘Christianity’ of the Middle Ages” regarding which:
[W]e are applying a purely analytical construct created by ourselves.
It is a combination of articles of faith, norms from church law and
custom, maxims of conduct, and countless concrete interrelationships
which we have fused into an “idea.” It is a synthesis which we could
not succeed in attaining with consistency without the application of
ideal-type concepts. (Weber 1949, 96)
And there is this about embryonic ideal-types already present in economic
theory, for example when postulating “rigorously rational conduct” in market
transactions:
This procedure can be indispensable for heuristic as well as expository
purposes. The ideal typical concept . . . is no “hypothesis” but it offers
guidance to the construction of hypotheses. It is not a description of
reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a
description. (Weber 1949, 90)
Weber goes on to say that ideal-types are constructed “not as an average of”
their instances, but by selecting and accenting elements such that it is then a
matter “of determining in each individual case, the extent to which this idealconstruct
approximates to or diverges from reality . . .” (Weber 1949, 90)
Among the questions thus for us to address are: if ideal-types are offered as
one-sided constructs for explanation, how exactly do they connect with reality
and especially with the subjective understanding of agents that is a keystone
of Weberian theory? And if Weberian ideal-types are versions of existing
models in economics, not to mention natural science, what in Weber on the
topic is original?
We may begin our answers by looking for illustration to Weber’s theory
about the Protestant ethic, which presumably applies an ideal-type to explain
specifically how he resolves the query about why Calvinist Puritans, while
believing in predestination and otherworldly concerns, launched capitalism.
Weber’s answer (whether historically correct or not) involves setting aside
what plain logic suggests should have been their orientation: fatalism and a
total withdrawal from the world, or, oppositely, giving oneself over to hedonism
since what would that matter anyway? The actual implication for the
believers that Weber brings out is different. People avoided the anxiety over
their ultimate fate by being always busy and productive in the world, and by
living in a simple and presumably virtuous way, without self-indulgence. Notice,thus, that Weber’s ideal-type of the historical agents in question draws on
their subjective understanding but then reaches beneath and beyond it for the
purposes of explanation.
To elaborate on this we need to properly connect ideal-types with other basic
notions in Weber’s methodology because they or their implications are often misunderstood.
In a much-cited passage Weber tells us: “Sociology . . . is a science
concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby
with a causal explanation of its course and consequences” (Weber 1978 1:4).
Before taking up the reference to causality, I remark that interpretive understanding
here refers initially to such by social agents, subjective meaning, and not (yet)
an interpretation by theorists. The familiar and fundamental postulate for Weber
is that human consciousness and agency must focus an otherwise unfocused
world of experience, by selecting and structuring sensory input in accord with
specific kinds, categories, and linkages of elements. The linkages are forged
sometimes by means of strict logic but often by more general forms of conceptual
connection such as association of ideas, analogy, and symbolic reference. What
sociology addresses, then, is normally already in some sense cognized by agents:
focused, synthesized, and oriented by them.
In a further foundational plank of his methodology, Weber distinguishes systematically
different ways in which conceiving or acting can be meaningful,
and at times shade off into not being meaningful while remaining interesting
as contrast cases. I allude here to Weber’s fourfold classification of rationality
whereby action can be: rational as a means to some end; rational in being an
expression of a value that is taken to need no further justification, as with
doing something solely for the sake of honor; rational in being an expression
of or based on an emotion, but in a focused and coherent way, as with anger
at a particular (alleged) offense, an emotion unlike rage of a pathological or
unfocussed sort; rational in deliberately following a custom, which is different
from being unknowingly influenced or automaton-like. The attention to agents’
meaning and orientation in any of these ways, though, is only a first step to
understanding and explanation by the Weberian sociologist.
The next step in working out the agent-observer dialectic that is the key
to Weber’s sociology and notion of ideal-types comes with his demand, cited
above, for linking the interpretive understanding of agents’ thoughts and actions
with a causal explanation of them. In these matters Weber carved out vital middle
ground in the debate that was ongoing in his time and continues in ours
between an interpretivist approach to the social sciences that rejects these being
assimilated to the model of the natural sciences and a positivist approach that
calls for the unity of all the sciences. So, in what sense and why does Weber
claim that causal explanations are essential to complete the project of the
interpretive understanding of social agents? And why have other theorists insisted that grasping the subjective meaning of things for agents is very different
from giving a causal explanation? One argument presented by these
latter theorists is that reasons are in no way causes because reasons are conceptually,
logically, linked to beliefs and to actions, whereas causes are separate
events from their effects and contingently linked to them. Moreover, causes
are commonly deemed physical factors whereas, it seems, reasons are in a
sense immaterial or ideational. But Weber’s response to the considerations so
far adduced is conclusive: in some manner reasons should be causes, though
at times they may fail to be.