Max Weber
Translated and Edited by
EDWARD A. SHILS and HENRY A. FINCH
The essays in this book were written, as all methodological essays should be written, in the closest intimacy with actual research and against a background of constant and intensive meditation on the substantive problems of the theory and strategy of the social sciences. They were written in the years between 1903 and 1917, the most productive years of Max Weber’s life, when he was working on his studies in the sociology of religion and on the second and third parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Even before the earliest of the three published here —” ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy”^— was written, Weber had achieved eminence in Germany in a variety of fields.
He had already done important work in economic and legal history and had taught economic theory as the incumbent of one of the most famous chairs in Germany; on the basis of original investigations, he had acquired a specialist’s knowledge of the details of German economic and social structure. His always vital concern for the political prosperity of Germany among the nations had thrust him deeply into the discussion of political ideals and programmes. Thus he did not come to the methodology of the social sciences as an outsider who seeks to impose standards on practices and problems of which he is ignorant. The interest which his methodology holds for us to-day is to a great extent a result of this feature of Weber’s career just as some of its shortcomings from our present point of view may perhaps be attributed to the fact that some of the methodological problems which he treated could not be satisfactorily resolved prior to certain actual developments in research technique…
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