Max Weber and Interpretive Sociology

Weber argued that the social sciences had a fundamentally different task from the natural sciences. Where the natural sciences look for objective laws governing the physical world, the social sciences, in Weber's view, exist to develop an 'interpretive understanding of social action'. By 'social action' he meant any human behaviour to which the actor attaches a meaning -- and since meaning is subjective, studying it required a different method from studying, say, the motion of physical objects. The sociologist's task, Weber argued, was to recover the meaning an actor gave to their own action, by imaginatively putting themselves in that actor's place -- what Weber called 'empathetic understanding': not 'feeling for' someone (sympathy) but 'feeling with' them (empathy), so as to grasp their motivations from the inside. This raised an obvious difficulty: how can an enquiry built on subjective meaning still be objective? Weber's answer was the demanding standard he called 'value neutrality' -- the sociologist must faithfully record the values, beliefs and meanings of the people being studied without letting his or her own opinions about those values colour the description. The job of the sociologist is to describe, not to judge, and Weber was honest that this required real self-discipline (he called it an 'iron will'), since researchers, being members of society themselves, inevitably carry their own beliefs and prejudices. Alongside empathetic understanding, Weber offered sociology a second methodological tool: the 'ideal type'. An ideal type is a deliberately simplified, logically consistent model of a social phenomenon that sharpens its most analytically important features -- it is not meant to describe reality exactly, and should be judged by how useful it is for analysis, not by how photographically accurate it is. Weber used ideal types across his work: to compare the ethics of world religions and argue that the outlook of certain Protestant sects h …