Sometimes a sociologist

writes a book that takes such a central position

in his whole oeuvre, that his admirers bestow upon it
the honorary title Magnum opus. In the case of Durkheim for example,
there is not such an outstanding book, but with Weber, this is an easy one. The
Magnum opus is
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Economy And Society,
an enormous masterpiece in which Weber tries to summarize his
whole theoretical enterprise. He passed away before he could finish the
book, but what we are left with contains more than enough interesting thoughts for
many generations to come. The first word of that important
book is the word sociology. In fact, Weber begins this study
with a definition of sociology. In this discipline, he says,
we study social action. People can reflect on how they act, they can tell us why
they acted
in this way or in that way. They may come up with motivations for
what they did. And this is why Weber didn't call
it social behavior, [FOREIGN], but he calls it social action, [FOREIGN]. Now the
action is social because it
is directed towards other people. A man who tries to cover his
head against the pouring rain is not engaged in social action. But two people on
the sidewalk of a street
who try not to bump into each other are involved in some
kind of social action, at least they take each
other into account. Weber says that social action is the basic stuff that
constitutes
the study object of the sociologist. The first thing you can do is to
classify types of social action. You can, for example, differentiate between social
action
that is shrewdly calculated beforehand and social action that is driven
by an explosion of emotions. Weber believed that he could discern four very general
ideal types of social action,
and I will return to that subject in a few minutes when I discuss
Weber's theory of rationalization. The sociologist tries to
interpret social action, and he or she tries to causally
explain social action. On the one hand we try to understand
why certain individuals or certain social groups act in a certain
way under certain circumstances, and on the other hand we try to discern
chains of cause and effect. Now if you agree with the idea that
there are in fact two types of academic disciplines, the humanities like history,
and the sciences like physics, then you can say that Weber here
tries to combine elements from those two broad categories to create a new
place for the social sciences. Interpretation demands
the qualities of the historian. You should try to see through the eyes
of the people that you study. You want to see their objects
the way they see them. You fight your way into their heads
because you need to understand their systems of bestowing meaning
upon the world around them. When the sociologist tries to
shed light on cause and effect, he is more like the physicist who
is always keen on causal relations. It has often been said that Weber here
tries to bridge the gap between what was called in classic German universities,
the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of mind, and the Naturwissenschaften,
the sciences of matter. Sociologists have a tendency to look up at natural
scientists with their
elegant models of cause and effect, but those scientists must do their job
without a possibility that historians and psychologists, anthropologists and
sociologists can profit from. Because they study human beings who
are in many ways similar to themselves, of course, they can try to imagine
what it must be like, for example, to be the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte or to be
the leader of the Dutch Socialist
Party between the two world wars. This intimate understanding from within,
that is what the Germans called verstehen,
interpretative understanding, and Weber thought that it played
an important role in the human sciences. We can imagine what the famous general
must have felt on the eve before an important battle, but we can also try
to understand a member of a certain social group, let's say a carpenter in
a medieval French small city or a proletarian factory worker in
Manchester around the year 1848. Emil Durkheim, for example, tried to understand
the religious
feelings of an Australian aboriginal. Verstehen really helps the sociologists or
the anthropologists in
studying social action. Verstehen always leads to hypotheses
about causal relationships, and those relationships should then
be tested in a more rigorous fashion, often by using quantitative data
looking for statistical correlations. Here the research strategies that proved
to be so enormously successful in the natural sciences should
also help the sociologist. And it is this combination of
the more quantitative approach and the more quantitative approach
that characterizes the style of work in sociology that Weber favors. And maybe that
is also one of the reasons
why all sociologists hold Max Weber in such high esteem whether they favor
the hard-nosed quantitative proof or whether they feel more at home with
the methodology that has been so successful in the humanities. Weber's approach,
starting with the very first sentence in his Magnum opus,
goes against the tendency to completely separate the quantitative
from the qualitative style, a tendency that has become so
common in sociology today.