Max Weber's Methodology

At a time when historical and cultural analyses are being subjected to all manner of ideological and disciplinary examinations, the work of social theorist, Max Weber, is especially relevant. In this study, Fritz Ringer offers a new approach to the work of Weber, interpreting his methodological writings in the context of the German intellectual debates of his day. According to Ringer, Weber was able to bridge the intellectual divide between humanistic interpretation and causal explanation in historical and cultural studies in a way that speaks directly to our own time, when methodological differences continue to impede co-operation between humanists and social scientists. In the place of the humanists subjectivism and the social scientists naturalism, Weber developed the concepts of objective probability and adequate causation. This text grounds technical theories in specific examples, and shows how fully reconstructed, Weber's methodological position in fact anticipated the most fruitful directions in our own contemporary philosophies of the cultural and social sciences. Ringer's conceptualization of Weber's approach and achievement elucidates Weber's reconciliation of interpretive understanding and causal explanation and shows its relevance to intellectual life and culture in Weber's own time and in ours as well.