Max Weber: Selections in Translation

‘Sociology’ is a word which is used in many different senses. In the sense adopted here, it means the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By ‘action’ in this definition is meant human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful: the behaviour may be either internal or external, and may consist in the agent's doing something, omitting to do something, or having something done to him. By ‘social’ action is meant an action in which the meaning intended by the agent or agents involves a relation to another person's behaviour and in which that relation determines the way in which the action proceeds.

METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

(1) The ‘meaning’ to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the ‘meaning’ to be thought of as somehow objectively ‘correct’ or ‘true’ by some metaphysical criterion.