The author is Acting Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. The research for this paper was originally undertaken as part of a collaborative project with Professor Neil J. Smelser, to whom I am deeply in debt for stimulating advice and necessary encouragement. I have also received important suggestions from Professors Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth and from Mr. Jeffrey L. Berlant. Mrs. Bettina A. Warner has helped with translation. I am most grateful to them all.

¹ Due, no doubt, to the evolutionist and Social Darwinist connotations of the term in his day. Yet Weber did apply the subtitle, “Outline of Interpretive Sociology,” to Economy and Society, the massive treatise he was working on at the time of his death.

² For example, on the influence of religious ideas, Morris, Morris David, “Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in South Asia: An Historical Survey,” Journal Of Economic History, XXVII (December, 1967), pp. 588–607CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samuelsson, Kurt, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber, translated by E. C. French, edited with an introduction by Coleman, D. C. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964)Google Scholar. On the definition of capitalism, Journal Of Economic History, XXIX (March, 1969). On the use of models in economic history, Redlich, Fritz, “‘New’ and Traditional Approaches to Economic History and Their Interdependence,” Journal Of Economic History, XXV (December, 1965), pp. 480–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fogel, Robert William, “The Specification Problem in Economic History,” Journal Of Economic History, XXVII (September, 1967), pp. 283–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religionssoziologie (Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1920–1923), 3Google Scholar volumes (referred to hereafter as GAzRS). The essays were originally published in 1904–1919). The complete collection is now available in English translation in the volumes, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (abbreviated hereafter as Protestant Ethic), translated by Parsons, Talcott (New York: Scribner's, 1958)Google Scholar; From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (abbreviated as Essays), translated, edited, and with an introduction by Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946)Google Scholar, chs. 11–13; The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (abbreviated as China), translated by Gerth, H. H., introduction by Yang, C. K. (New York: Macmillan, 1964)Google Scholar; The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (abbreviated as India), translated by Gerth, H. H. and Martindale, Don (New York: Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar; and Ancient Judaism (abbreviated as AJ), translated and with a preface by Gerth, H. H. and Martindale, Don (New York: Free Press, 1952).Google Scholar

⁴ Weber undertook his comparative studies for a number of different and not always well-articulated purposes; in particular, the study of ancient Judaism is a different type of inquiry than those of India and China. To delve into this question is beyond the limitations of the present essay. See, however, Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1962)Google Scholar, ch. 8; Bendix, Reinhard, et al., eds., State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)Google Scholar, introduction; and Warner, R. Stephen, “Die Methodologie in Karl Marx' vergleichenden Untersuchungen ueber die Produktionsweisen,” Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie und Sozial-Psychologie, XX (1968), pp. 223Google Scholar–49, at. pp. 244–5.

⁵ Roth, Guenther, “Max Weber's Comparative Approach: Genesis and Maturation,” forthcoming in Smelser, N. J. and Vallier, I., eds., Comparative Methodologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 2 (MS).Google Scholar

⁶ On Marx, see Lichtheim, George, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Praeger, 1961)Google Scholar; on Weber, see Bendix, , Weber, Max, and Roth, Guenther, “Introduction to Max Weber,” Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Roth, G. and Wittich, Claus, Translated by G. Roth, C. Wittich, et al. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), Vol. I, pp. xxvii–civ.Google Scholar

⁷ For example, Lane, Frederic C., “Conclusion,” Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, edited by Lane, F. C. and Riemersma, J. C. (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1953), p. 532Google Scholar; and Cuzzort, R. P., Humanity and Modern Sociological Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 51.Google Scholar

⁸ For example, Morris, in his useful and generally fair survey, still focuses exclusively on the problem of the relatively direct influence of values as it appears in Weber's Religion of India, disregarding the extent to which Weber may help to explain the institutional factors he suggests to be more important; “Values as an Obstacle,” esp. pp. 594, 597.

⁹ E.g., ibid., and Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action. But see also Bendix, Reinhard, “The Protestant Ethic—Revisited,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, IX (1967), pp. 266–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Tilly, Charles, The Vendée (New York: Wiley Science Editions, 1967), preface.Google Scholar

¹¹ Reported by Honigsheim, Paul, On Max Weber, translated by Rytina, Joan (New York: Free Press, for the Social Science Research Bureau of Michigan State University, 1968), p. 43.Google Scholar

¹² As. it appears to be in Neal, Marie Augusta, S.N.D., Values and Interests in Social Change (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965). One respect in which Marx and Weber do present clear alternatives is in the methodology of concepts, to be discussed below.Google Scholar

¹³ E.g., the case of Taoism and the merchant stratum; China, p. 196.

¹⁴ Marx admitted the possibility in a less explicit way; Warner, “Die Methodologie,” pp. 237–9.

¹⁵ Essays, pp. 286, 352; China, p. 249.

¹⁶ India, pp. 270–82, esp. 271. Cf. Bellah, Robert N., Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), who takes a much broader view of the meaning of “religion.”Google Scholar

¹⁷ He does, however, confess his “inability to understand the view which would deny the possibility”; Protestant Ethic, p. 212, n.9.

¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 277–8, n.84.

¹⁹ Weber apologized for the incompleteness of his studies as due, in part, to his war service; GAzRS, Vol. I, p. 237n.

²⁰ Protestant Ethic, pp. 73 and 200–2, n.29. In general, Weber regarded such specific anti-chrematistic rules as parameters; India, p. 112.

²¹ Ibid., p. 24.

²² Ibid., pp. 27, 99, 112, respectively. Morris, “Values as an Obstacle,” has criticized the last of these propositions as based on a fundamental misunderstanding of caste terms as well as an overestimation of the strength of such prescriptions.

²³ China, pp. 196–9. The Judaic conception of a providential God, whose purposes were served by both the good and the evil in the world, made magical compulsion of the deity irrational as well as blasphemous, and it thus contributed to the specifically occidental Entzauberung der Welt; AJ, pp. 4, 222–3, 394.

²⁴ Sociologists will recognize that this distinction between the first and second levels of the role of religious ideas is identical to a widely-recognized distinction between “norms,” on the one hand, and “values,” on the other.

²⁵ See, e.g., India, pp. 16, 130–1; and China, pp. 143–4, 195–6, 213. For a general statement, see Economy and Society, Vol. III, pp. 953–4.

²⁶ India, pp. 86–90, 127–8; China, pp. 236–7.

²⁷ India, pp. 130–1; China, pp. 193–4; AJ, pp. 49–57,105–17.

²⁸ Essays, p. 280. It is worth noting that this statement is a theorem a priori to the empirical research of the comparative studies.

²⁹ E.g., India, p. 114; it should be noted, however, that Morris denies that the backward-bending supply curve of labor is a real economic problem in South Asia. Marx, as occasional remarks indicate, was aware of the phenomenon, but his theoretical system, in contrast to Weber's, directs attention away from it; see Warner, “Die Methodologie,” pp. 233–4, 238–9, and the references cited there.

³⁰ Talcott Parsons has placed great emphasis on this proposition as a necessary addition to the means-ends schema of utilitarian theory. See his essay, “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory,” Ethics, XLV (April, 1935), pp. 282–316Google Scholar, and his major work, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949)Google Scholar. “Refraction of Interests” is, of course, relevant to social action in general as well as to purely economic action; see Essays, p. 351, and India, pp. 147, 158–62.

³¹ This statement may surprise those who take too literally Weber's rejection of “Psychology” (e.g., Protestant Ethic, p. 244, n.114; Essays, pp. 270, 286; India, 339–40). His remarks, however, are directed against the connotations of the primacy of “emotional,” as opposed to “rational,” connections of racialism, of pretentious jargon, and of the claim that reality could somehow be deduced from psychological “laws.” Whether he would similarly reject today's social psychology, especially of the school of George Herbert Mead, is extremely doubtful. In fact, Weber held human personality to be “comprehensible” starting point for historical interpretation; Weber, Max, “Roscher und Knies und die logischen Probleme der historischen Nationaloekonomie,” Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre; second ed., edited by Winckelmann, Johannes (Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1951), p. 132Google Scholar. (Hereafter abbreviated GAzW.)

As the discussion in the second part of this paper will show, we are now proceeding through the construction of an ideal type of “refraction.”

³² See especially Essays, ch. 11. The title supplied to this essay by the American translators, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” (its original title was simply “Einleitung” to “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen”) indicates its character. See also, Protestant Ethic, pp. 97, 197 n.12, 228 n.38, 229 n.48; Essays, pp. 351, 358; China, p. 206; India, pp. 122, 133, 205–6; AJ, p. 12. I have extended Weber in providing this list in the sense of making explicit what is only clearly implied in his work.

³³ Protestant Ethic, p. 20. This is the heart of Weber's verstehende analysis of religion.

³⁴ This is true of Talcott Parsons who takes his lead in this respect from Durkheim rather than from Weber, although he does duly note Weber's emphasis on the cognitive aspect; Structure of Social Action, p. 534. The extended critique of the usefulness of the concepts of values and norms by Blake, Judith and Davis, Kingsley (“Norms, Values, and Sanctions,” in Handbook of Modem Sociology, edited by Faris, R. E. L. [Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964],.p. 456–84) is directed for this reason at the Durkheim-Parsons conception, rather than to the heart of Weber's analysis.Google Scholar

³⁵ Protestant Ethic, p. 172. I have presented the merest sketch of this rich essay, in particular passing over Weber's discussion of the contribution of Luther.

⁸⁶ China, p. 208.

³⁷ India, p. 122. Hinayana Buddhism placed less emphasis on dharma, offering merely theoretical praise of the vocationally stable worker. In this respect it lacked even Hinduism's incentive for intensive labor. Thus Buddhist Burma found it necessary to import lower-caste Hindus for this purpose; Ibid., pp. 261–2.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 204–13.

³⁹ The affinity of Weber's notion to the “cake of custom” of Walter Bagehot (Physics and Politics) is striking.

⁴⁰ India, p. 218. See also Essays, pp. 289–92; China, pp. 208–9, 230–3; India, pp. 217–9, 243, 291, 320, 326, 330, 335.

⁴¹ E.g. Protestant Ethic, pp. 172, 192 n.24, 197 n.12, 259 n.4; Essays, pp. 331–2; China, pp. 151, 238, 245; India, pp. 122, 261; AJ, pp. 98–102.

⁴² This is true of Marx' theoretical scheme. In his comparative studies of China, India, and Mediterranean Antiquity, classes do not have a prominent role; see Warner, “Die Methodologie,” pp. 234–5.

⁴³ Roth, “Introduction” to Economy and Society, p. lix. This was a long-held view which Weber attributed to the influence of his teacher, August Meitzen; Roth, “Max Weber's Comparative Approach,” in Comparative Methodologies, p. 7 (MS). Weber even uses the typically Marxian locution “not by chance” (nicht zufaellig) in expressing the association between a stratum and its religiosity; e.g. AJ}, pp. 116, 118, 119.

⁴⁴ See, for example, Protestant Ethic, p. 197 n. 12, and India, p. 331, on the inadequacy of the mere appearance of a religious ethic; China, pp. 196–201, on the interested use of magic; China, p. 137, on the lack of a self-conscious bourgeois stratum; India, pp. 234, 282, 297, 303, on religious competition; and, in general, see Bendix, Max Weber, ch. 8.

⁴⁵ History of Economic Analysis, edited by Schumpeter, Elizabeth Boody (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 534Google Scholar, 541. I owe to Reinhard Bendix the suggestion that Weber's methodology must be inferred from his practice more than from his programmatic writings and to Neil Smelser a number of the questions to be asked in pursuing such an investigation.

⁴⁶ Parsons, Structure of Social Action, ch. 16. Among other useful treatments are Hempel, Carl G., “Typological Methods in the Social Sciences,” in Philosophy of the Social Sciences: A Reader, edited by Natanson, Maurice (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 210–30Google Scholar; Alfred Schutz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” ibid., pp. 302–46; Salomon, Albert, “Max Weber's Methodology,” Social Research, 1 (1934), pp. 147–68Google Scholar; and Watkins, J. W. N., “Ideal Types and Historical Explanation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3 (1952), pp. 22–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁷ “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated by Finch, H. A. and Shils, E. A. (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), pp. 89–90Google Scholar, 93 (Hereafter cited as “Objectivity.”)

⁴⁸ Cited by Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, “Introduction to Arthur Spiethoff,” in Lane and Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and Secular Change, pp. 436–7.

⁴⁹ Arthur Spiethoff, “Pure Theory and Economic Gestalt Theory; Ideal Types and Real Types,” translated by Fritz Redlich, ibid., pp. 444–63, at. p. 458.

⁵⁰ For this summary, I have drawn on the following: Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis pp. 807–19; Charles Rist, “The Historical School and the Conflict of Methods,” in Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines, translated by W. Smart and R. Richards (Boston: D. C. Heath, n.d.), pp. 388–98; and Cahnman, Werner J., “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Sociology and History, edited by Cahnman, W. J. and Boskoff, A. (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 103–27. Weber's notion of ideal and material interests, discussed above, was an attempt to transcend the second of these issues.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Redlich, “‘New’ and Traditional Approaches”; Fogel, , “The Specification Problem”; and Alexander Gerschenkron, “The Discipline and I,” Journal Of Economic History, XXVII (December, 1967), pp. 443–59.Google Scholar

⁵² “Objectivity,” pp. 112, 64–5, passim. See also, “Roscher und Knies,” in GAzW, p. 131n.

⁵³ “Objectivity,” pp. 78, 106.

⁵⁴ Essays, p. 147. Weber's insistence on conceptual nominalism applied equally, of course, as a warning to theorists, whether classical or Marxist.

⁵⁵ However, Weber's position was not identical to that of such modern analytical philosophers as Hempel and Nagel; see note 81 below.

⁵⁶ This presentation has gained much in orientation from Roth, “Max Weber's Comparative Approach”; from Randall Collins, “A Comparative Approach to Political Sociology,” in Bendix, et al., eds., State and Society, pp. 42–67; and from some unpublished notes of Arthur L. Stinchcombe.

⁵⁷ I am inclined to minimize the extent to which Weber's undoubted errors and obfuscations of historical sequence, especially in The Religion of China, are inherent in his method. More likely are they due to the attempt to handle large questions and to a nineteenth-century Western stereotype of Chinese history.

⁵⁸ The former term is used by Bendix, Max Weber, p. 269; the latter, following a lead of Weber, by Roth, “Introduction” to Economy and Society, p. xxx.

⁵⁹ See, respectively, China, pp. 196–201; India, pp. 237, 295; India, pp. 263–4, 282; China, pp. 44–5, 136; India, pp. 39, 74–5, 235; China, pp. 193–4; India, pp. 259, 271.

⁶⁰ Lane and Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change, pp. 436–7; Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, pp. 809–12.

⁶¹ Economy and Society, Vol. Ill, p. 957; Weber is vulnerable to criticism for his rather offhand use of such rules of experience.

⁶² Ibid., Vol. I, p. 231–2. For another definition, see Essays, p. 296.

⁶³ Respectively, India, pp. 233–4; ibid., p. 3; ibid., pp. 68–74. For other examples of Weber's apparent use or “the logic of patrimonialism” as an explanatory device, see China, pp. 47–62, 120, 133, 136, 137, 164; India, pp. 16–17, 67–9, 90, 99, 235, 240. Weber even uses ideal-typical reasoning to conjecture what plausibly occurred in a given instance in the absence of or conflicts among “empirical data.” For example, India, pp. 39, 240, 266, 275–6; AJ, pp. 26–7 and notes. On limitations of analogical reasoning, see AJ, pp. 84–6, and GAzRS, Vol. III, pp. 93–5.

⁶⁴ E.g., China, pp. 45, 48.

⁶⁵ “Die Grenznutzlehre und das psychophysische Grundgesetz,” GAzW, p. 395; “Objectivity,” p. 99; Essays, pp. 323–4.

⁶⁸ In the Protestant Ethic (p. 183), Weber insists, as he does elsewhere, that onesided, ideal-typical orientations are not to be used as the result of, but as the preparation for, empirical investigation; yet he also claims (ibid., p. 47) that the ideal type of the capitalist spirit cannot be defined a priori but can only be formulated at the end of the investigation. This is wholly legitimate; it demonstrates the extent to which ideal type construction is based on empirical research as well as the fact that Weber regarded the GAzRS as preliminary essays.

⁶⁷ Reading the whole of Weber's famous essay on the ideal type should have made this clear; “Objectivity,” pp. 94, 99, 102, 107, passim. A few other commentators, in very different contexts and for very different purposes, have also noted qualifications on Weber's nominalism; see Cahnman, Sociology and History, pp. 117–19; Parsons, Structure of Social Action, p. 635; Antoni, Carlo, From History to Sociology, translated by White, Hayden V. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), pp. 173–5Google Scholar, 183; Blau, Peter M., “Critical Remarks on Weber's Theory of Authority,” American Political Science Review, LVII (1963), p. 311Google Scholar; and Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), p. 292Google Scholar. So recent a commentary as that of Freund, Julien does not: The Sociology of Max Weber, translated by Ilford, Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 59–79.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Good examples of such continuing work are Guenther Roth, “Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism, and Empire-Building in the New States,” in Bendix, et al., eds., State and Society, pp. 581–91; and Bendix, Reinhard, “Bureaucracy,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), Vol. II, pp. 206–19.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ “Objectivity,” pp. 90, 93, 102. The “flashlight” metaphor was suggested by Redlich (“‘New’ and Traditional Approaches,” p. 492), although in conjunction with the static notion of “comparing” models to reality.

⁷⁰ China, p. 48; India, p. 72. For other examples of such specification, modification, and combination of ideal types, see Essays, pp. 294–300, 337–8; India, pp. 77–85, 100–1; AJ, pp. 7–8, 108–15, 116–7; and GAzRS, Vol. III, p. 126.

⁷¹ The references are to Spiethoff (page 90 of text). As could be shown through an analysis too long to be pursued here, Weber in many instances did not live up to the high standards of his own methodological demands.

⁷² The vigorous conceptual nominalism of Weber's methodological essays is surely to be contrasted with the apparent “realism” of those of Schmoller and Spiethoff, The differences are less pronounced in research. Schumpeter (History of Economic Analysis, pp. 814–5) claims that the earlier Methodenstreit was as much a reflection of misunderstandings and rivalries as a true intellectual confrontation.

⁷³ See Weber's argument quoted by Roth, “Introduction,” in Comparative Methodologies, p. xxxviii. Weber “agreed completely with someone who said, ‘Whoever uses the word “synthesis” today, without making the meaning explicit, deserves to be boxed on the ears.’” (Honigsheim, On Max Weber, p. 14). For Weber's treatment of analytical economic forms, see Economy and Society, Vol. I, Part II, chs. 3–4.

⁷⁴ Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 40–2, 60 n. 24, and Vol. III, p. 1377. For a stimulating contrast of system and Weberian approaches, see Collins, “A Comparative Approach.”

⁷⁵ “Objectivity,” pp. 68–70, 103. I have shown elsewhere that Marx’ Hegelian conceptual realism is, as is Weber's Kantian nominalism, compromised in his comparative research; see Warner, “Die Methodologie,” pp. 240–2.

⁷⁶ “Objectivity,” p. 80.

⁷⁷ See ibid., pp. 57, 108–10; Essays, p. 147 and chs. 4–5 passim; China, p. 221, 294–5 n. 52; India, pp. 341–2; GAzRS, Vol. II, p. 377; AJ, pp. 4–5, 426–8. For an illuminating discussion, see Mommsen, Wolfgang, “Max Weber's Political Sociology and His Philosophy of World History,” International Social Science Journal, XVII, 1 (1965), pp. 23–45.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Fischoff, Ephraim, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: the History of a Controversy,” Social Research,XI (1944), p. 74. Parsons (Structure of Social Action, pp. 607, 618, 626) complains that Weber's type atomism leads to a “mosaic” view of society; in fact, quite the reverse is true.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ In order that the foregoing attempt at reconciliation of methodologies not be understood as a claim that Weber's position is wholly on the side of the analytical philosophy of history as represented by Hempel, Carl G., “The Function of General Laws in History,” Journal of Philosophy, XXXIX (January 1942), pp. 35–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961)Google Scholar, chs. 13–15; and others, it is necessary to point out that he differed with them on at least two counts. (1) He insisted that the type of science in which we are interested is an empirical science of concrete reality. Accepting, in large measure, the neo-Kantian classification of the cultural sciences as “idiographic,” he maintained that to fulfill this purpose the most general laws were also the most useless (“Objectivity,” pp. 72–80, and GAzW, pp. 179–80). (2) The specific method to the end of illuminating concrete historical situations was Verstehen or meaningful interpretation, the logical analogue of which was not natural-scientific ‘laws” or “theories,” but rather the attribution of responsibility in legal proceedings (Bendix, Max Weber, p. 267n). See also Parsons, Structure of Social Action, ch. 16, and especially the writings of Alfred Schutz. Among analytical philosophers, Michael Scriven seems to take a position closest to Weber's (although without mentioning Weber explicitly) in “Truisms as Grounds for Historical Explanation,” in Theories of History, edited by Gardiner, Patrick (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959), pp. 443–75Google Scholar, esp. pp. 455 and 474. Although I am not satisfied that Nagel and Hempel have spoken to the heart of Weber's philosophical position, the practical effects of such disagreements may be slight. As Schumpeter (History of Economic Analysis, p. 819) appraises Weber's methodology, it “is quite neutral as between the various kinds of analytic activity. In particular, economic theory in the traditional sense is not ruled out. And it makes precious little difference to the practical work of a theorist whether Mr. Methodologist tells him that in investigating the conditions of a profit maximum he is investigating ‘meant meanings’ of an ‘ideal type’ or that he is hunting for laws’ or ‘theorems.’”