Max Weber: Selections in Translation

The defining characteristic of ‘social life’, its ‘formal’ property, according to Stammler, is that it is a ‘rule-governed’ communal life, consisting of reciprocal relationships ‘governed by external rules’. Let us immediately pause and ask, before following Stammler any further, what might be meant in total by the words ‘rule-governed’ and ‘rule’. ‘Rules’ might mean first (i) general assertions about causal connexions, or ‘laws of nature’. If the term ‘laws’ is to be reserved, in this context, for general causal propositions of unconditional strictness (in the sense that they admit of no exceptions), then the term ‘rule’ may be kept only (a) for all those empirical propositions which are incapable of this degree of strictness; but no less (b) for all those so-called ‘empirical laws’ to which, on the contrary, no exceptions can be discovered empirically, but for which we lack insight (at any rate of a theoretically adequate kind) into the decisive causal determinants of this lack of exceptions. It is a ‘rule’ in the sense of an ‘empirical law’ (sense (b)) that men ‘must die’; it is a ‘rule’ in the sense of a general empirical proposition (sense (a)) that certain reactions of a specific nature are an ‘adequate’ response on the part of a student belonging to a fraternity to a slap in the face.