A - Weber, Max "The Methodological Foundations of Sociology." (c 1897)

An alternative take on the human transfomation of human conditions and their history

1. Meaning, value and history

   The real empirical sociological investigation begins with the question: What motives determine and lead the individual members and participants in this socialistic community to behave in such a way that the community came into being in the first place, and that it continues to exist? Any form of functional analysis which proceeds from the whole to the parts can accomplish only a preliminary preparation for this investigation -- a preparation, the utility and indispensability of which, if properly carried out, is naturally beyond question. ([1897] 1998: 9)

   1. "motivations" (belief about work and wealth)
   2. "determining" (causation)
   3. "behavior" (accumulation of capital, conspicuous conception)
2. "ideal type" as methodology
   1. deducing a "rational" course of action given conditions (e.g., under Corona, wearing a mask both for health and public order)
   2. comparing the actual course of action to the ideal-typical (e.g, under Corona, not wearing a mask perhaps because of male bravado, or political alignment)
3. On religion and economics (rather than economics and religion)
   1. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism ([1905] 1958)
4. Weber's futures
   1. theoretically: values as cause (Parsons)
   2. policy: economic "development" by the "global north" of the "global south"
   3. theoretical/methodological developments: Discourse and narrativity
      1. Discourse and narrativity: on the inevitability of a (religious, moral, ideological) justification of practical, economic, activity (and vice versa). Not causality but co-evolution.
      2. identity
      3. Latour and the need to stop separating the subjective from the objective which is either a final rejection of Weber or a way of translating Weber into the future of the social sciences