Excerpt from Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences

It was a time when patriotic professors were invoking the authority of their academic disciplines for the legitimation of their political arguments, when Weber himself was engaged in a series of titanic polemics against the prevailing political system and while he was still working on the sociology of religion. (perhaps he had already begun by this time to work on the more rigorously systematic First Part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft?) The essay itself was a revision of a memorandum, written about four years earlier to serve as the basis of a private discussion in the Verein fur Sozialpolitik and never made publicly accessible. A mass of particular, concrete interests underlie this essay - his recurrent effort to penerate to the postulates of economic theory,3 his ethical passion for academic freedom, his fervent nationalist political convictions and his own perpetual demand for intellectual integrity. Max Weber's pressing need to know the grounds for his own actions and his strong belief that man's dignity consists in his capacity for rational self-determination are evident throughout this essay - as well as his contempt for those whose confidence in the rightness of their moral judgment is so weak that they feel the urge to support it by some authority such as the trend of history or its conformity with scientific doctrine in a sphere in which the powers of science are definitely limited. On this occasion too, Weber worked his way through to the most fundamental and most widely ramified methodological problems in the attempt to reach clarity about the bases of his own practical judgment. Here, of course, he was not dealing primarily with the methodology of research, but his procedure and his success illustrate the fruitfulness of methodological analysis when it has actual judgments and observations to analyze rather than merely a body of rules from which it makes deductions.

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