Ideal-types are integral to this process and as such indispensable for and unique
to the social sciences. The social theorist must construct an ideal-type—of the
Puritan-minded capitalist, the charismatic leader, the bureaucratic official, the
system of traditional authority of tribes, and of whatever other figures or institutions
are being studied—in order to portray as fully and as coherently as
possible the assumptions, aims, and expectations of the personage, role, or
practice in question. But the social theorist’s ideal-type must ultimately reveal
whether and how the agents’ understanding of the situation has to be altered
or amended to provide the needed explanation of it. An ideal-type is only
provisional (a “work in progress”) until this last stage is completed.
Let us spell all this out by first going back to see more precisely why theoretical
models in the natural sciences that depict idealized situations or phenomena
not found in reality, as with a perfect vacuum or a frictionless surface,
do not constitute ideal-types in Weber’s sense. This is so for two related reasons.
Initially it is because Weber’s notion of ideal-types has no foothold or
applicability if inanimate matter or mindless forces are the topic of explanation.
In all cases, there must be agents who adopt some meaningful orientation to
the world, but selectively so. That qualification signals a second way in which
Weber’s notion of ideal-types is different from the pure or perfect models in
the natural sciences such as a frictionless surface and the like.