Abstract
A full representation of all events in society is not possible. The Weber–Rickert solution to the establishing of transparent concept formation requires both theoretical and practical value relevance, that is, our fashions of today shape our selections from the past which, though, also have to be valid for the period studied. Max Weber’s tools for the selection of relevant information without risking uncontrolled value intrusion are influenced by Rickert’s historical relativism, which, however, is not free from lingering ‘objectivism’, transcendental metaphysics in the form of normatively generally valid values, while Weber only claims general empirical validity for values serving as tools for abstraction in a process of double historicity. Today’s historical conceptualizations are not immune to conjectures and fashions; there is no permanence or resistance to the ‘teeth of time’. Weber manifests the post-Enlightenment predicament of anxiety and necessity of choice, which Rickert tries to escape by an ‘Indian rope-trick’ or Icarian flight. Weber’s solution anticipates Gunnar Myrdal’s explicit value premises anchored in significant social movements; a more radical anti-metaphysics. Weber’s ‘sociology’ grew out of history and its contemporary problems. His way of dealing with the value-incommensurability problem makes him part also of a long trend of secularization.
Introduction: Weber’s context
Max Weber’s transformation from history to sociology has to be understood in its contemporary context, which means in the light of a bundle of methodological controversies of his days and the difficulties of the historical school in accounting for the necessary selections from a vast reality in a transparent and ‘testable’ way. The famous Methodenstreit, between German historicism (Schmoller) and ‘positivism’, in the form of Austrian marginalist economics (Menger), is the main controversy.
The necessity and anxiety of choice (Giddens’ formulation) in the post-Enlightenment makes uncontrolled value intrusion into a problem of objectivity, which the narrative tradition in the wake of Ranke was poorly equipped to deal with, all the more so since the Historical school was part of German Sonderweg and nation-building, rediscovering and redefining the past in a Romantic vein.
On the anti-positivistic side Wilhelm Dilthey distinguishes a demarcation line to defend the specificity of the cultural sciences, under threat from the unified science ideal of the positivist side, in terms of the object of research. Heinrich Rickert emphasized method as the main demarcation line, everything could be studied as history or nature. Weber sides with Dilthey on the object as peculiar for the cultural sciences but develops Rickert’s method, for the purpose of avoiding uncontrolled value intrusion, by means of neo-Kantian nominalist and lucid concept formation, with the Austrian rational actor model as a prototype (Carl Menger).
Weber was not a philosopher and hated the sharpening of methodological tools if there were nothing on the table to be carved. Rickert’s historical relativism proved useful for Weber’s qualification of value freedom to value relevance (or orientation). His way of optimizing objectivity and minimizing bias is rather similar to Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) approach, to use explicit value premises in rationalizing value hierarchies.
This article is focused on Weber’s and Rickert’s so-called double historicity and the complex relation between Weber and his philosophical mentor.
From history to sociology
History is all events past, the study of which is not a feasible research task. By means of selection historical memory tends to be redefined every generation, which poses a problem of objectivity. Social science is a battlefield of concept formation, drawing on methods developed in history. How can uncontrolled value intrusion be avoided? A value-free social science is not possible. Our perceptions vary with a moving time horizon, responding to the community of values among those living today and those once acting, together defining what is worth knowing. The classics of social science must be contextualized from their own time perspective; their problems were not our problems. Interpreting the classics involves context, formative experiences and influences and also tradition. The use of values as tools for selection from a vast reality is an elegant and paradoxical solution for accomplishing a restricted perspectivistic but intersubjective objectivity.
Max Weber was not a philosopher himself but relied on his neo-Kantian mentor and colleague in Heidelberg, Heinrich Rickert, the figurehead of the South-western or Baden school of neo-Kantianism. The relation between Rickert and Weber has generated much controversy. This article deals with values and the so-called double historicity and its place in Weber’s ‘value-aspect-choice’ methodology and its contemporary context, in what I call ‘modalities of value-incommensurability’. In addition I try to envision the much longer line of secularization, in which Weber appears as a proto-rational actor theorist and anti-sociologist within sociology. Secularization is an amorphous concept and relevant for the development in social thought since around 1500, although the turn of the 19th century is momentous for addressing problems of value intrusion and objectivity. Various scholars, such as Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, Edward Westermarck and Axel Hägerström, all launched similar anti-natural law positions, independent of each other. Rickert’s and Weber’s views almost coincide, but with a telling difference, regarding lingering ultimate cultural values. There is no place for objective norms and evaluative judgements in Weber’s so-called scientific value relativism. There is no firm answer to the norm-sender problem, equally disturbing to post-Enlightenment as to post-Modernity (late modernity). Firm norms and values are needed for instrumental means–end analyses, but cannot be proven as valid truth; they have to be postulated and have no truth-content that can be argued on a scientific basis.
We cannot in science escape post-Enlightenment ‘value polytheism’, to use a term associated with Max Weber’s neighbour in Heidelberg, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who dealt with the crisis of historicism. Weber’s methodology avoids uncontrolled value intrusion by explicit value premises, using values as tools for intersubjective selection from a vast reality. ‘Value freedom’ is modified to value orientation or value relation.
Most debates on Rickert’s influence on Weber and its limits make the distinctions between practical vs theoretical value relation and empirically and normatively valid values and focus on them. General empirical validity sounds acceptable from the point of view of accumulation of knowledge – but what is general normative validity? It appears from a neo-Kantian perspective as ‘horsefeather’ or ‘fried snow’, if one does not believe in a transcendental scheme of objective values, which would have some explaining to do, how to become intersubjective. Intersubjectivity is better served by explicit postulated points of departure.
Weber’s solution to a historicist dilemma of lucid concept formation in a time of value polytheism is an important contribution to the furtherance of secularization in social science.
This article does not deal with Weber’s ‘value-aspect-choice’ methodology as a whole. It does not even exhaust the complex relationship between Rickert and Weber. But it does demonstrate how their neo-Kantian nominalism with its lucid concept formation reduces the playground for uncontrolled value intrusion, which is an important step forward at the service of objectivity in history and social science.
In the literature we find some examples of attempts to grasp the differences between Rickert and Weber and some examples of how to systematize Weber by use of Rickert. What follows below clarifies both approaches. Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of the values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith. It may perhaps be a task for the speculative interpretation of life and the universe in quest of their meaning. But it certainly does not fall within the province of an empirical science in the sense in which it is to be practiced here. (Weber, 1949: 55)
Weber’s renewal of concept formation in social science
The views of Rickert and Weber on value relation were developed as an attempt to find objective criteria for transparent concept formation, originally in the discipline of history but soon extended to social science – and ultimately
During the period of the historicist hegemony in the academy, sociology was not viewed favourably nor was it regarded as a prestigious undertaking. The academic atmosphere rather favoured the dominant historicist tradition. Therefore, many factors impeded the cultivation of sociology in its early days, a tactical aspect that cannot be overlooked. In the case of Weber, moreover, it takes several years from his early methodological essays until his overt appearance as a sociologist, and although he was a central figure in the German Sociological Association from its inception, his transition to sociology is not easily demonstrable in his writings before 1913. However, it would be a mistake not to place his early methodological essays within the context of a nascent sociology. 2
More importantly, Weber’s elegantly paradoxical dismantling of value intrusion in social science marks a decisive step forward in the secularization of social science, by employing the device of utilizing values, as such, as the vehicle for objective abstraction from an infinite reality. His value philosophy, which is often termed scientific value relativism, is one of the most lasting of his accomplishments – something that both his adherents and critics generally agree on. 3 Before going into some details of interest for the proper understanding of Weber’s ‘normative empirical’ theory I would like to suggest that the magnitude of this problem of understanding becomes clearer in the light of three simple observations. First, it is striking, and ultimately difficult to explain, how innovations in the history of ideas sometimes emerge all of a sudden, simultaneously, and independently in several places – for instance, the revolutionary ideas in 1848 and 1968, pioneering ideas in nuclear physics, etc. In the case of value philosophy nothing suggests that Axel Hägerström, Edvard Westermarck and Max Weber knew much about one another’s attempts to countervail ideological and emotional impediments to the furtherance of social science.
Another trivial but nevertheless important observation is that almost nobody is able to realize the full innovative potential of his or her own thought. The legal positivism of Hans Kelsen, who, like Rickert, was not able to draw for himself the full implications of his own ideas, may also provide evidence that it was, in fact, ‘ideas in the air’. Therefore, whenever book titles appear such as The Foundations of Social Science, they are very likely moss-grown compilations of well-established ideas, legitimated by trading on the standard positions of meta-theory. That is to say that there is a retrospective ex post facto element, which is necessarily present in attempts to calculate the impact of certain positions on the trajectory of social thought.
A third point of relevance for the history of social science doctrine is that the gulf between value objectivism and the anti-metaphysical ‘secular’ and sceptical value ontology of Weber is a genuine paradigmatic division. As American debate in recent decades shows, the insight of post-Enlightenment polytheism advances very slowly and old gods are reborn time and time again. The influence of the Straussians, not yet having accepted the ‘Nietzschean’ existential anxiety of normative desolation as the unpleasant but nonetheless basic practical philosophical predicament of our time, is still immense in the USA. Even Machiavelli and Hobbes could in this tradition be interpreted as classics of the natural law tradition they in effect demolish. 4
In the case of Rickert and Weber several crucial points are worthy of closer scrutiny to determine what is viable and what is flawed.
Weber–Rickert and selection from vast reality
The central problem of the philosophy of social science is that of finding and developing non-arbitrary tools for the selection of data from an unstructured infinite reality, in order to accomplish a scientific representation of the essential elements, and to avoid the extremes of intuitionism or empiricism. Thomas Burger formulates the problem in the following manner: The fact that human knowledge of concrete reality in its entirety is impossible and, therefore, must be selective, must involve abstraction, poses for Rickert the problem of the ‘objectivity’ of scientific knowledge. For this situation creates the possibility that each scientist’s knowledge is different from everybody else’s, that everybody abstracts in a different way and thus arrives at a merely subjective, private picture of the world. (Burger, 1976: 17)
Therefore, if we are able to avoid ending up with intuitionism and subjectivism or simply remaining on the level of sense data, we need access to transparent tools for selection, and must face competing models of reality from different points of view. This allows for the scientific pursuit of cumulative discourses.
The weakness of historicism was its disregard of the ‘selection problem’. Accounting for one’s criteria of selection was rare within the idealist tradition of intuitionism in which essentialism was assumed. The methodological core of such approaches is to grasp the essence through an act of empathy, conceiving of the nature of the phenomenon studied by revealing its conceptual content as if out of the magician’s hat. Therefore, in such a framework, essentialism (non-nominalism) too easily falls into subjectivism – often of a politicized nature.
Even the most down-to-earth ‘empiricist’ variation of historicism, in the spirit of Leopold von Ranke, had severe problems avoiding getting lost in the vast chaos of endless and many-faceted facts. It is characteristic that Gustav von Schmoller himself never successfully accounted for any distinct criteria for the selection of the ‘real factors’ that historicism saw as the cornerstones of explanation in their Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (science of reality/empirical science – we have here a problem of translation, which is simultaneously a problem of interpretation).
There is an unresolved problem lingering in the historicist ambitions: an unrealistic assumption that all facts are unmediated. However, the idiographic ambition taken to its fullest conclusions requires precisely this, as this is the only way to complete Gestalt. Such an undertaking would call for a study of the object under scrutiny from all aspects, which is virtually impossible, since the number of aspects is infinite. Out of necessity one has to restrict one’s representation of reality, i.e. one has to simplify and economize.
There are obvious parallels between Rickert and Weber regarding value-aspect-choice, as a pragmatic way out of the dilemma of the historicists, and the point of view as practised in modern history (as well as the ‘significant’ and ‘relevant’ values later advocated by Gunnar Myrdal and exercised in modern policy science). 5 The positions of both thinkers are what I call normative empirical theories, as contrasted on the one hand with purely normative endeavours, like classical political philosophy, and on the other hand purely explanatory theory, where one is only curious about causes without any instrumental intentions (outside of the search for true scientific knowledge).
The main problem of practical objectivity is therefore how to abstract intersubjectively, which is in fact the very problem in principle solved by the Wertbezogenheit [value relation] by Rickert and Weber. Rickert’s and Weber’s concerns may therefore be surmised in the following manner: taking values as starting points and tools and simultaneously solving the problems of objectivity and intersubjective concept formation. It should be noted that there is no necessary link between the problems of Wertfreiheit [value freedom] (or Werturteilsfreiheit [free from value judgements], to be more exact) and objectivity but Rickert’s and Weber’s approaches try to provide solutions to both issues. Value freedom is qualified to value relation (Wertbeziehung).
Unsurprisingly, from the vantage point of modern philosophy of science, the position that Weber develops from Rickert appears incomplete, since it does not engage in a forceful rejection of purely naturalistic approaches to the unity of science. However, although many of Weber’s methodological essays could be read in their relation to the proper procedure of explanation, he never thoroughly deals with the options of ‘pure’, objective, or actor-independent explanation. Instead, he chooses to develop his alternative as a pragmatic codification of preferred praxis. Considering that Weber was not a ‘card-carrying’ philosopher, but a practising social scientist, he attempts to maintain scientific rigour within the constraints of his problem area, without reverting to meta-theoretical concerns. His development of an instrumental method within the limitations of deutscher Sonderweg, emerges as a commentary on the works of contemporary colleagues, like the medieval historian Eduard Meyer. This makes Weber less interesting, as an up-to-date guide to method in social science, but simultaneously more interesting because of his immense significance in the history of the development of social scientific method during one of its most formative periods. 6
In developing Rickert's ideas, Weber furthers the secularization of social science theory to a degree that Rickert would not have endorsed. Nevertheless, the use of analytical constructs in the cultural sciences profits from Rickert’s philosophy and it is natural that he takes advantage of Rickert, who was not only an available source, but at that time the most elaborate source of discourse available on the very subject for which Weber was to launch a crucial corrective for the flawed and insufficient approach of his fellow historicists. The corrective to which we refer can be concisely summarized as the fact that conceptual definition of unique phenomena necessitates deliberate abstractions utilizing transparent tools in order to transcend the primitive expressions of history as being merely an art.
The Rickert–Weber position undoubtedly fetters Clio, yet, at the same time, the practitioners of pure Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (‘real science’ by the Schmoller school, a concept also used by Weber), are likewise challenged. If we regard Weber’s methodological essays as parts of the same methodological ‘project’ then both ‘The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality’ (1917; Weber, 1949) and ‘The Logic of the Cultural Sciences’ (1906; Weber, 1949) can be understood as making the younger historical school both the target for and recipient of Weber’s criticism. For instance, there are passages in which Weber pays lip-service to the homage of ‘our honoured master’, as he calls Schmoller, and thereafter immediately continues with a direct methodological critique. Therefore, it can be stated that Weber is not eager to provoke, but rather to help, 7 adjusting his contributions to promote their receptivity. His break with historicism is an inside operation.
Beyond historicism?
The historicists could have stubbornly insisted on the status of history-writing as an art, thereby avoiding and making themselves immune to methodological criticism. ‘As long as the firm skeletal structure of established causes behind the artistically formed facade is lacking’, Weber writes in ‘The Logic’, ‘his presentation would be an historical novel and not at all a scientific finding’ (Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre [hereafter cited as GAW], 1988: 278 f.).
However, such an ignorant attitude among the historicists would have meant that they were doomed to lose ground slowly; the positivists could have renewed their aspirations as soon as the need for scientific procedure within the field of historical research was again on the agenda. According to Weber, questions about explanatory significance have to be addressed by the historian, ‘If history is to be raised above the level of a mere chronicle of notable events and personalities’ (GAW: 266 f.). Therefore, historical research after the Enlightenment has a dual character: resisting Enlightenment rationalism and simultaneously secularizing the procedures of historical research. In order to develop as a scientific endeavour, history must continue along the paths of science rather than art (which forms the backdrop of Weber’s long and crucial polemics with Eduard Meyer, see below [p. 10]).
Nationalistic history-writing of the Romantic style had a credibility problem in meeting demands of scientific legitimacy. Historicism nevertheless originated as an attempt to do precisely that: pose questions about truth, critical evaluation and rational use of sources, despite its Romantic roots in an urgent and delayed nation-building. Ranke, however, to mention the foremost representative of this style, was reticent in matters of method. In fact, in his impressive body of historical work amounting to half a hundred volumes, no more than roughly 80 pages, an appendix to his history of the German and Gothic people, explicitly discuss matters of method, albeit indirectly, in commenting upon his colleagues. 8
The historicist product of such a dual inheritance was therefore a mixture of Enlightenment and Romantic elements, ‘truth with tales’. According to Wilhelm Windelband – Rickert’s Doktorvater – history was on the borderline between art and science. Bringing about idiographical Gestalt involves an element of skilful art, which is of course in itself no obstacle to becoming scientific. However, the generalizing as well as the individualizing approaches both have to select from raw reality in order to develop the genre of Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. Weber sometimes speaks of Erfahrungswissenschaft, with slightly different connotations – sometimes translated as ‘empirical science’, a term with a certain paradigmatic smack. Weber’s way of speaking about Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (GAW: 170) provides supportive evidence for Tenbruck’s interpretation of Weber (Tenbruck, 1987). It appears to me, however, as a matter of interpretation (compare GAW: 192): Lucid concept formation is a step on the way to the establishment of reliable and testable theoretical explanation.
The Weber–Rickert solution addresses the initial problems of perception of reality. Rickert’s neo-Kantian nominalism is not sufficient for Weber’s purpose. Weber’s adherence is, however, explicit and uncompromising: It will be profitable for our purposes to dwell a bit longer on the logical nature of value-analysis. The attempt has been made in all seriousness to understand or to ‘refute’ Rickert’s very clearly developed idea that the construction of the ‘historical individual’ is conditioned by ‘value-relevance’ (Wertbeziehung) as asserting that this relevance to values is identical with a subsumption under general concepts such as the ‘state’, ‘religion’, ‘art’, etc., and similar concepts, which are assuredly, it is said, the ‘values’ in question; the fact that history brings its object into relation with these values and thereby attains specific ‘viewpoints’ (Gesichtspunkte) is then equivalent – this is what is added – to the separate treatment of the ‘chemical’, ‘physical’, etc., ‘aspects’ of events in the sphere of the natural sciences. (GAW: 251 f.)
From this telling passage we might note Weber’s reliance on Rickert and his here explicit anti-positivism. In his next step, outlining what explanations are all about, Weber gives himself an eclectic freedom to supplement Rickert with other useful sources, i.e. von Kries and Radbruch and their legalistic purposive mode of subjective determination of events (GAW: 269 et passim, cf. Turner and Factor, 1994; Wagner and Zipprian, 1987; and Bruun, 1972: 137). 9
One might say that the Wertbeziehung (value relation) Weber develops from Rickert, first in history and soon applied to social science, makes the cultural sciences independent of uncontrolled value intrusion, or at least provides that option. One has to restrict one’s study of the infinite reality of existence to one aspect at a time and make this point of view explicit. In contemporary context Weber’s position marks a progressive step.
The value-aspect approach holds that values, as such, have no place in the scientific undertaking except as subject matter, which includes the motivating attitudes of the acting individual. In addition, however, they serve as vantage points for the instrumental goal-oriented action analysis. The scientist thus does not have to generate any value preferences in order to bring about such analysis, she or he might simply adopt what Myrdal called ‘significant’ or ‘relevant’ ultimate values, like economic rationality (search for optimum), or Enlightenment reason. Values are useful points of departure for non-biased means–end rationality.
Values as beliefs should not be excluded. Rather, extra-scientific passions should be brought under control and be given a utility as a vantage point, from which the search for cognitive truth may proceed. This combination of political as well as scientific passion has, as Golo Mann (and indeed many others as well) pointed out, an autobiographical background for Weber. We should, moreover, keep in mind the degree to which social reality was politicized a century ago, when so much happened in a short time, ‘The end of ideology’ not in sight. The citizen in the modern Occidental welfare state is hardly willing to die for his or her country, or party, any longer; rather his or her concern is the return from the distributive system of collective goods and the mortgage on the house, etc. Politics tends to lose primacy and become a function of the welfare system. The heat and passion of Berlin 1848 or Vienna 1927 and 1934 – or Kiev in the winter of 2004–5 – is no longer likely to occur, except as lingering phenomena in areas with undeveloped political culture, like parts of the East of the Elbe area, countries that could be characterized as ‘late children of 1848’. See Portis (1986: 45 et passim).
The Rickert–Weber prescription of value-aspect choice, is a presupposition for analysis in the cultural sciences. The required points of view could be found in culture itself, but how does this occur? The concepts of ‘historical interest’ and ‘teleological dependence’ in the essay on ‘The Logic of the Cultural Sciences’ (GAW: 254 et passim) are central to an understanding of Weber’s notion of Wertbeziehung as a tool for selection. This notion is properly contextualized when combined with those early parts of ‘The meaning of “ethical neutrality”’ where Weber calls for remedies for the predicaments of politicizing professors ‘preaching’ ex cathedra with a complacent pose of objectivity (GAW: 491 et passim; see also Josephson, 2004). Weber discusses the problem of objectivity and practical value relation for the academics once the consensus of rather basic ethical imperatives has been lost. Since no ethical claim of value validity is demonstrable or refutable by means of science, according to Weber, we have to live with the acknowledgement of an absolute polytheism as the only appropriate metaphysic stance (GAW: 507). As Weber remarks, the soul of man nowadays has to choose his own fate (GAW: 508). In social science we have to live with competing value hierarchies. Later on in the same essay, he draws out the methodological consequences, developing how means could be instrumentally related to aims, as in economic theory (see, for instance, GAW: 526). Rationalizing value hierarchies is more refined in modern cost–benefit analyses. Moreover, as Gunnar Myrdal later pointed out, means are not value-neutral, so the problem of uncontrolled value intrusion in cumulative social science appears on several levels. There is no reason to believe that Weber would have objected to such qualifications.
We have now stated that Weber did not develop any philosophy of his own but instead adopted Rickert’s for his own purposes. Whether this was a choice of convenience or genuine necessity remains a much discussed issue. Weber had no taste for methodology for its own sake, as we learn from Paul Honigsheim’s – Weber’s ‘Boswell’ – reports of Weber’s more casual remarks (Honigsheim, 1968), as well as from those passages in the Eduard Meyer part of the ‘Logic’ essay, where Weber states that methodology is no more useful for science than knowledge of anatomy a condition for walking ‘correctly’.
The methodological essays were generated over several years, primarily between 1903 and 1907, although some of Weber’s Entäusserungen [externalizations] in the Werturteilsfreiheit discussion 1911–14 are printed later in Logos (1917; Weber, 1949), or delivered as public speeches (‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ [Science as a Vocation]). Moreover they are anticipated in Weber’s political economy of the 1890s and also present in his industrial sociology from around 1908. One might say that Weber himself is pretty much a presentist, nay utilitarian, in his approach to methodology, trying to articulate an actual procedure in a time of crises, codifying existing practice. Weber’s Freiburger Antrittsrede from the mid-1890s in fact has lots of ‘rational economic actor’ elements. 10
Weber vs Rickert? The double historicity: Theoretical and practical value relation
Although Rickert and Weber are both concerned with the predicament of the historical-cultural sciences – how to defend them from losing their scientific status in an era of unity of science – there are notable differences. Some elements of neo-Kantian anti-metaphysics are more radically fulfilled in Weber’s thought than in Rickert’s; for instance, those concerning the fact–value distinction. Weber liberated himself from the ballast of a lingering value objectivism which can be found in Rickert’s strange notion of normatively valid general values of culture. Such notions are contradictions from a radical historicist view, although they would provide, however illusory, the Wertobjektive that would be needed for value-oriented rational means–end analysis. In a sophistic way, Rickert, then, is more consistent than Weber, however erroneously. Weber had more fully apprehended the methodological implications of post-Enlightenment polytheism.
Moreover, Weber elaborated the notion of practical vs theoretical value relation, deliberating us from some Rickertian confusion. Most debate on Rickert, as a background to Weber’s version of interpretative sociology, is obsessed with the distinctions between practical vs theoretical value relation and empirically vs normatively general or (ultimately) valid values.
It is possible for Karl-Heinz Nusser (1986) and others to argue that Rickert’s objective values make his philosophy more coherent – as a closed system – while Weber has this open normative link in social science to the value hierarchies in contention. Rickert’s coherence is accomplished at the price of the normative ‘Indian rope-trick’, his absolute or eternal values not being intersubjective. Since the whole point of Weber’s scientific endeavour seemingly is to promote the demise of metaphysics by means of the so-called ideal-type this is, indeed, a crucial difference between Rickert and Weber. In my view Weber is a ‘nihilist’ or ‘non-cognitivist’ who does not quite go all the way, tending to fall back into an acceptance of ‘backdoor normativism’. Axel Hägerström is more radical, Kelsen less radical.
A key to Rickert’s position is found in his distinction between practical and theoretical value relation. It is not satisfactory to take any value to provide the necessary point of departure for our analyses, not even if it seems obvious that the value in question catches the aspect one is interested in. ‘On the contrary’, H. H. Bruun writes (1972: 91), ‘. . . the historian may theoretically only relate his raw materials to values which have served as a basis for the practical value orientation (valuation etc.) of persons living in the period under investigation.’
In order to enable objective criteria, the values picked as points of departure should be culturally relevant. In the case of Rickert this has the double meaning that those values should be relevant not only to us but also to the historical actors in the period under scrutiny. A sort of ‘double historicity’ is thus characteristic of our concepts for historical inquiry. History itself restricts our choice. The choice has already been made, by sources created by the actors, etc. This could leave space for voluntaristic and idealistic interpretations – but does not have to do so.
We should observe a certain ambiguity in the term ‘theoretically’ and concerning how theoretical and practical should or could coincide. Depending on the availability of the sources, the scientist might hypothetically be in the position to use only the values serving as value references in the value relations really once operating in the concrete historical process. Sources are generated and some remain intact, while some vanish in ‘the winds of war’. This is one possible interpretation. One might argue that due to principal, theoretical reasons the scientist should utilize only such values that have served in concrete value relations in history. In this interpretation one makes a virtue out of necessity, since the sources are restricted anyway. It seems, however, that Rickert requires practical value relation in the past. It is not merely a strategic choice for the purpose of knowledge formation.
It is a sort of two-step selection. We have a stock of historical ‘raw material’ in the form of preserved sources, and a vantage-point for our inquiry. This could, however, also be rendered a ‘voluntaristic’ twist: if we approach an historical object from our cultural values we might find that it has already contributed itself to the selection of preserved sources, or the production of relevant sources. On both levels the actual historical evaluation is restricted, by our interest and by the availability of relevant sources. For the two basic distinctions in Rickert’s philosophy of value, i.e. practical vs theoretical value relation and general empirical vs general normative validity, see H. H. Bruun (1972, 2001a, 2001b and 2007).
In H. H. Bruun’s analysis, the practical consequences of Rickert’s view are demonstrated. The possible selections, samples, are restricted by, first, the object itself. If, for example, Magna Carta’s relevance was exclusively political in its own day it would be illegitimate to include it in, for instance, a historical exposition of the development of British art in that time period. The scientist’s values of departure should coincide with (some) values actually in use in the period studied, and it should be consonant with the historical object itself.
This example illustrates the limitations of Rickert’s historical approach – and the dangers of taking him too literally in reading him as prescriptive rather than descriptive. It might well be that Magna Carta after all did influence the development of art in medieval England, no matter if anyone actually noticed that or not at the time. Rickert would hardly deny this, of course. However, in this example we are then no longer utilizing historical methods as understood by Rickert (at least some significant actor should have found Magna Carta relevant in order to qualify this art study as Rickertian history). Rickert explicitly states that the values operating in objective concept formation should be found in the historical raw material, which then in fact is assigned a sort of limiting veto in the scientific discourse. This appears as an odd, hardly feasible, position.
Moreover, even if there are good reasons to narrow optional choices in order to promote the growth of cumulative normal science, it is a problematic restriction in Weber’s development of Wertbeziehung into another field of inquiry. As normative empirical theory, value-related means–end analysis, the approach should in principle be equally applicable to future-oriented instrumental analysis as well as to historical-motive investigations. The structure of explanations is the same as the structure of predictions.
A second limitation demands that the cultural values chosen today as the points of departure should be shared by all those concerned. If our contemporaries do not endorse our selection of cultural values as points of departures for our analyses they would result in totally uninteresting accounts and simply not be valid as history, as Bruun puts it (1972: 90). The cultural values serving as points of departure should be ‘empirisch allgemein [have general empirical validity]’ in the community one is writing for. To follow Bruun’s example: a valid family history could thus only be brought about if everybody in the family agrees upon the relevance of the aspects from which facts are recorded as worth
We must here recall the dangers of what Illka Heiskanen once (1967) called ‘multiple realities’, when he discussed the meta-theoretical perils of Weber’s ideal-type procedure. Everything becomes interpretation when we have very many options as to what is family history. Or we get into a predicament similar to the old Polish parliament, where everyone has the right to veto. If family members have different points of view they might also have different family histories, and so competing truths. The general validity is endangered as soon as anyone in the Gemeinschaft, in this case the family, diverges from the consensus position about what is worth knowing. A crucial problem in Rickert’s argument is the confusion of intelligibility with validity. Empirisch allgemein becomes a problematic ‘eye of the needle’ for the conceptual ‘camel’, in Rickert’s two-step selection process. The general idea was, after all, to restrict the possible value-aspect choice to such values that could serve the actors in the period studied as well as those presently having a stake in the historical investigation of that period as relevant points of view.
This double historicity appears to me as an embryonic ‘Myrdalian’ claim for significance and relevance in the choice of point of view. Weber is the intermediary in the transition from history to policy science; Rickert a fallible – not too coherent – original source. Gunnar Myrdal also suspects Weber of ‘transcendentalism’. Maybe he is right in assuming that this is not excluded in Weber’s case, although neither is it sustained (see Eliaeson, 2006).
The limits of Rickert’s influence: Weber’s ‘transcendence’ of Rickert
Intricate problems emerge when Rickert is taken too literally. Many historians indeed question if we at all are able to understand fellow humans before Enlightenment. It is not even clear if medievals before the Renaissance had any concept of the individual. Any application of the model of the rational economic actor would then become dubious, at least in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It is culturally relative, simply a model and not a theory, more applicable in individualistic capitalist societies than in more collective communitarian ones. Weber empathetically denies any ‘basic law of psychophysics’, with its confusion of model and theory, and admits that the ideal type of the rational economic actor has its marginal utility and its acceptance and relevance culturally variable. We can note that Weber and Rickert are not well ‘tuned in’. Weber’s early essays after all deal exclusively with conceptualization and explanation in historical research. 12 Rickert is called the ‘father of historical relativism’ but deals mainly with the limits of the conceptualization of natural science, where Wertbeziehungen are less methodologically useful. Since the degree and nature of Weber’s methodological dependence on Rickert remain controversial it should be emphasized that Weber transcends Rickert’s philosophy of value, as well as his doctrine of conceptualization. Weber’s scientific value relativism (Brecht, 1959) is more full-fledged relativistic than Rickert’s, who suffers from a lingering natural law metaphysics. The centrality of Rickert as a source for Weber’s methodological endeavour is, however, very explicit in Weber’s texts. We have mentioned Weber’s references to Rickert: for instance, in the Roscher and Knies essays which explicitly test the fruitfulness of Rickert for the methodology of historical research (GAW: 7, n. 1), and in the ‘Objectivity’ essay where the introductory footnote acknowledges Rickert’s philosophy of science as a basis for Weber’s own work (GAW: 146, n. 1). Weber’s central concepts in his early methodological essays are taken from Rickert. This goes not only for value relation but also for the ‘historical individual’, the construction of which is the task of the early Weberian ideal-type; for instance, that of the ‘Protestant ethic’. Rickert was used by Weber rather as a tool-shed for his methodological devices. Rickert’s ideas are left somewhat behind by developments in modern social science – hence Rickert’s somewhat grumpy reactions to the use Weber makes of his philosophy of science.
However, no matter the degree of coherence and the precise degree of dependence (Weber takes Rickert’s concepts and uses them independently), Rickert certainly thus deserves credit as a founding father of much of modern social science in which modalities of value-incommensurability play a central role, also in so-called postmodernity (late modernity). When an Anglo-Saxon scholar speaks of ‘points of view’ and perhaps refers to Gardiner the roots are really Rickert’s Werbeziehung and Gesichtspunkte and the pioneering work done by German history-writing. Any study of Weber’s methodological breakthrough reveals a rediscovery of a partly lost intellectual connection, which is more viable than the historicist setting from which it stems. Bruun (1972: 96, n. 10) evaluates the link between Rickert and Weber. The latter was evidently eager to follow the work of Rickert for his own benefit, although at the same time Rickert certainly overestimated Weber’s receptivity to his ‘System der Werte’ [value system].
To sum up: the double requirement of practical and theoretical value relation is intended to assure the objectivity and relevance of historical study. The requirements of general validity, however, in Rickert’s position not only lead to a fettering of Clio by restricting the arbitrariness of the historians – but also make it very hard to bring about any valid history.
Maybe it is in order to avoid such absurdities that Rickert adds the criterion of normative general validity. Because of this, however, he remains stuck with other value-philosophical problems of a standard kind. ‘Backdoor normativism’ is my term for the recurrent Drang nach Wertung and Begründung [longing for firm evaluative foundations], which I simply cannot understand. What is wrong with ‘nihilism’? The position that we are ourselves responsible for our normative choices appears to me as more secular and in a sense also as more ‘Kantian’.
Empirically and unconditionally normatively valid values
In stating that the values chosen should not only be of empirical (accepted by the actors in the Gemeinschaft under study) but moreover also of normative general validity (Rickert, 1902: 626 f.) it appears as if Rickert paradoxically violates the very core of also his own value-philosophical doctrine with its emphatic distinction between sein (is) and sollen (ought), although Weber does not endorse this interpretation to judge from several passages; for instance, the letters to Gottl of late March 1906 mentioned in note 11. Rickert’s rapid traverse over this famous gulf has a scent of an illegitimate deduction from is to ought, and so a postulation of final values within the value hierarchy.
Values vary from culture to culture and historical cultural relativism as a more correct attitude than pre-Enlightenment objectivism is one of the hard lessons of modernity and, moreover, a central feature of historicism (Troeltsch, 1922). Rickert’s introduction of a normative element might resolve some problems – like the ‘historical veto’ by any member of the Gemeinschaft as discussed above – but it certainly creates other difficulties, such as the contradiction between specific, time-bound, and general. The lingering belief in eternal values, which is revealed in any interpretation of Rickert, 13 is at its most problematic when seen from a ‘pure’ historicist position in which, inherently, values change with the times. We have only to read Norbert Elias’ great analyses, which are not wholly un-Weberian, to realize this. Value-historicism and value-objectivism are not easily combined, even if such a position is not necessarily logically self-contradictory. The anti-natural law element intrinsic in value-historicism is not in harmony with the strange belief in ‘supra-historical’ values of an eternal character which we still find in Rickert, not to speak of the problem of how to test such propositions in order to avoid competing values. In Bruun’s terminology, we might speak of a ‘norm-sender’ problem due to value incommensurability that escalates after the Enlightenment. In my view we have a genuine paradigmatic division, for long not obvious to those involved in the transformation process with regard to attitudes to notions like ‘unconditional validity of values’ which Oakes (1988: 178, n. 32) still speaks of without irony. It is illuminating to compare this with Bruun’s discussion (1972: 94, n. 48) where he notes Weber’s failure to criticize Rickert’s formulation of the cultural norm-sender as that which should be a matter of the heart for all members of society and which one could demand them to cultivate. Bruun points out how Weber’s feeble ‘defence’ of Rickert’s formulation in fact points in the direction of his own more clear-cut ‘scientific values relativism’, a term not employed by Weber himself. ‘On the other hand Weber’s defence is an indication of his own solution of this problem, a solution which – at least unconsciously – carries him quite far away from Rickert’ (ibid.).
To a retrospective reader brought up in the tradition of modern anti-transcendentalist value-philosophy, moreover founded in Weber’s value-philosophy, the odd notions in Rickert about, for instance, Goethe or Luther as manifestations of ‘valid values’ of culture clearly appear as a very ‘pre-neo-Kantian’ not to say Hegelian metaphysics. Guy Oakes (1988) has a long discussion of the problem of the unconditional validity of values in Rickert (ibid.: 102 et passim, esp. 106 et passim) in the chapter ‘Rickert and the Objectivity of Values’. But the attempt by Rickert to destroy ‘the glass house of relativism’ – a strange formulation from someone arguing for the relativism and incommensurability of values – is simply not convincing, notwithstanding Oakes’ sympathetic reading of Rickert’s axiological metaphysics. The plagued and formalistic paradoxes about truth as an eternal value of unconditional validity, as a basis for any cognitive claim, appear as almost juvenile, in the light of, for instance, Weber’s ‘twin lectures’, with their paradox of a value-rational ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility. Weber does not hesitate to draw the methodological consequences of post-Enlightenment polytheism, while Rickert seemingly cannot quite abstain from a badly argued expression of hope of some sort of firm Archimedian point of moral imperatives. The predicament of incommensurability of top values in the value hierarchies in truth leaves us stuck in the ‘glass house of relativism’. Weber indeed manifests the true post-Enlightenment – Nietzschean – dilemma of modernist disorientation and anxiety and necessity of choice.
With the reservation that ‘objectivism’ is a not quite appropriate term in connection with Rickert’s theory of value, it must be kept in mind that Rickert denies values real existence and despite his remaining element of metaphysical belief in unconditionally normative valid values, pleads for the incommensurability of values – the very problem which Wertbeziehung is indeed supposed to solve (the methodological consequences of). We may note, however, that this objectivist element is present in both Rickert and Windelband – and before them certainly also in Ranke; while it is Weber who is the radical scientific value-relativist. The radical step towards a combination of non-cognitivist value-sentence-theory and negative value-ontology is not explicit in Weber, either. This step is not taken until later (Hägerström, 1964[1911]) but the neo-Kantian distinction between reality and value provides the foundation, and after Weber’s methodological elaboration of Rickert the burden of proof increasingly becomes a millstone around the neck in an attempt to plead ‘normative validity’ in any scientific sense. The notion of ‘objective values’ in a merely logical rather than cognitivist sense is evidently the key to the understanding of Oakes’ otherwise incomprehensible argumentation. Evidently some odd transcendentalism is involved, some notion of hierarchy of values, which somehow goes beyond a mere rationalizing of value hierarchies with postulated ultimate values. A comparison with Gunnar Myrdal’s (1933) criticism of Weber himself is tempting on this point.
The problem for Rickert and those who share his views is precisely that of proving the validity of any cultural value that is proposed to be also normatively valid. Probably the best way to ‘save’ Rickert is to regard this as a normative postulate, an utterance with no real reference. Such a postulate, however, would have no argumentative power. A postulate, by definition, is an unproven statement and probably an insupportable one, since any researcher is apt to minimize the number of postulates so as not to weaken his or her propositions. A postulate is something beyond cognitive scientific argumentation. One has to agree – or not.
Discriminating between ‘common’ cultural values and those eternal ones that ought to be demonstrated in some manner in a more specific way than referring to culture is also a problem in Rickert. Bruun’s question remains: Now when God is dead, who is the norm-sender? Goethe and Luther were after all merely manifestations and not creators of those eternal ultimate supernorms. To Weber, these problems are not manifest since he has no claims to normative validity for any of his values that serve as points of view. In his variation of value historicism, the scientific community has, however, a special responsibility to interpret the significant cultural values, relevant for use in current analysis. Weber shares this notion with Rickert, who remains the mentor albeit critically received. 14 In the case of Weber I have a strong impression that his ‘Wahlrecht und Demokratie’ [Suffrage and Democracy] is especially crucial, even tempting us to read between the lines. We come closer to Weber in this text than in any other, including his position concerning the norm-sender problem.
Weber’s ideal-type as an extension of Rickert and as a tender break with historicism
The selection of values that should have cultural significance and depend on the socio-cultural context makes Weber a value-historicist. His historicism is, however, restricted to the genetic aspect: where to find the points of view needed to bring about the instrumental and relevant analysis? In abstaining from claims to normative validity, the historicist position in his case is maintained only in the instance where it remains legitimate. Weber is not a victim of the genetic fallacy, mistaking origin with validity.
Weber translates Rickert’s historical method to the field of social science. Wertbeziehung applied to social science becomes part of Weber’s category of soziales Handeln (social action), the cornerstone in his sociology, forming the early paragraphs of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (hereafter cited as WuG; Weber, 1968[1922]) and his ideal-type procedure.
We have seen how Weber in his context promotes scientific progress and more objectivity and less value intrusion; values are made explicit in order to function in the rational means–end approach. Weber’s solution to the problem of intersubjective concept formation simultaneously solves the problem of objectivity. Wertfreiheit and Wertbezogenheit are thus in a paradoxical interdependence, values becoming the very criteria of selection with the help of which objectivity can be attained.
Values make the crucial difference between the natural and the social sciences, since the existence of evaluating actors is said to be specific to the cultural/human/social sciences. Even if Weber sides with Wilhelm Dilthey on this particular issue, it is nevertheless Rickert’s method he elaborates.
The rational variant of the ideal-type, drawing on the metaphor of the rational economic actor and increasingly relevant from the birth of modern capitalism onwards, is an intermediary ‘model’ Weber developed from Rickert’s Wertbeziehung; though the term ideal-type in itself is neither taken over from Rickert, nor an invention of Weber’s, but a loan from Jellinek who used the term in a normative and thus un-Weberian sense. Goal-oriented value-bound action is a class of meaningful behaviour preoccupying social science ever since it became relatively autonomous from theology, half a millennium ago. The calculability we find in Machiavelli’s The Prince is an ‘early bird’ in this context, although the autonomy for secular social science could be traced back to at least Thomas Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua, with some elements of independent – and relativistic – statecraft.
Weber marks a breakthrough in modern social science, secularized action theory, or a breach in the hegemony of historicism, leading to a breakthrough. But, as we hope to have shown, this could be fully apprehended only as the fruit of a long prehistory. Understanding Weber requires a contextual reading with a sensitive ear for the long-term historic theme of secularization, especially as the identity of sociology as a discipline partly rests upon Talcott Parsons’ creative misreading of especially WuG, interpreting his verstehende Induktionen as systematic theory. As Peter Manicas writes: ‘Sociology would have a particular “theoretical” component – very much in keeping with the later misreadings of Weber’s “sociology”: “the discovery and analysis of categories”’ (1987: 140). Sociology grew out of the tensions in the aftermath of the Schmoller vs Menger controversy over method. Rickert provides the tools for Weber’s way out of the stalemate. For more ‘flesh on bones’ concerning the battle of methods (Methodenstreit), see, for instance, Eliaeson (2002).
It is a response to marginalism and the crisis of historicism. Weber is hardly a ‘happy warrior’ but his receptive synthesis of neo-Kantian nominalism and perspectivism and rational calculable interpretation accommodates the historicists with the polytheistic predicament of modernity. One might note that the first attempt to establish sociology actually failed – also in its own view, to judge from Hans Freyer’s pessimistic verdicts (see, for instance, Kaesler, 1991; and König, 1987) – and it was not until the reimport of the Talcott Parsons ‘Weber’ (1968[1937]) that it once again became a viable tradition in Germany. However, Weber laid down the foundations for what in effect turned out as a methodology for piecemeal social engineering, ‘social technology’, or social engineering, as Myrdal would say.
The double historicity and ‘objective’ norms
Oakes in his learned and penetrating battle with Weber and Rickert seems to be haunted or perplexed by the circumstance that Weber in a way would offer a more harmonious methodology if we could dispose of the objective values which, since the Enlightenment, we are doomed to live without (Oakes, 1988). In this sense, he too is a manifestation of the erroneous efforts in the Gesamtdeutungs [all-comprehensive interpretation] debate to search for a fundamental Weber that would still guide us in our research, trying to find the firm point or the key to the one and only ‘true’ Weber.
Although the distinction of the combined requirements of practical and theoretical value relation is already puzzling in itself, allowing for conflicting and still sensible interpretations, the additional requirement of normative general validity to the empirical general values serving in the combined practical and theoretical Wertbeziehung is evidently utmost enigmatic, resisting many attempts at clarification. To me, Rickert’s denial of a reality status to values makes his plea for some objective values almost – even if not logically – an oxymoron, since the idea of objective metaphysics, the foundations of objectivity of values, transcendentally, appears as merely a task for practical philosophy, rather than cognitive science. Considering the reactions to Burger’s (1976) ‘Rickertian’ interpretation of Weber, one should keep in mind that Rickert after all is a philosopher, utilized by Weber as a tool for the pursuit of anti-metaphysic social science. This indicates the relevance as well as the limits of Rickert’s influences on Weber’s ‘value-aspect-choice’ methodology. Rickert is of lasting interest to the extent he is of use to Weber in the early construction of abstract sociological concepts, much in line with Karl Jaspers’ harsh judgement. When Rickert in the early 1920s criticized some aspect of Weber’s work, Jaspers told him that Rickert himself would become forgotten if it was not for his appearance in Weber’s footnotes. The relationship between the two philosophers never quite recuperated after this encounter.
The fact that there are unresolved problems remaining for Weber, who does not give us much assistance in what Bruun called the norm-sender problem, other than in a more tentative way, is indeed what makes for Weber’s fertility as a classic, rendering his methodology an expression in the scientific field of the same traumatic dilemma of post-Enlightenment modernity as in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and later formulated in a more literary form by Sartre, Camus and others. The individual must choose ‘his’ ultimate values, thus ‘has to decide which is God for him and which is the devil’ (Weber in ‘Science as Vocation’, GAW: 604). 15
I would suggest that Rickert and the young methodological polemicist Weber, as well as the ‘mature’ sociologist Weber, have a secularized normative empirical theory in common. Despite the broader applicability of Weber as a practitioner developing a special discipline, secularized concept-formation is still marked by the tendency to individualize, giving Gestalt to historische Individen, to use Rickert’s terms, in contrast to the generalizing approach of the natural sciences. To Weber, such macro-phenomena as, for instance, ‘modern capitalism’ are also understood as historical individuals, and are regarded in their uniqueness. What makes the basic difference between Weber–Rickert and the older historical school is the conscious abstraction from clearly stated criteria of selection, which promotes intersubjectivity and thus ‘testability’, in the form of rationale Evidenz.
Gunnar Myrdal’s criteria for which values to use as points of departure for policy-relevant instrumental means–end analyses are that they should be significant and relevant, connecting, for instance, with the values of huge popular movements, or the constitution, or Enlightenment reason. His alternative is more successful in the days of mass democracy but does not escape the problem of multiple models at the cost of cumulativity.
Naturally the procedure of Wertbeziehung, value relation, does not call for any value allegiance on behalf of the practising scientist, in order to function in the due process of science. However, some forces in society must have an interest in the applications of the recommendations resulting from normative empirical theory – in line with Karl Popper’s call for the subject matter being ‘worth knowing’, or, in the case of Weber, the analysis of consequences of goal-attainment.
Gunnar Myrdal (1958) develops his variant of social technology very much in the same vein. He applies his modality of how to deal with value incommensurability in An American Dilemma (1944), with its explicit starting points in the American constitution. His rationalizing of value hierarchies is more sophisticated than Weber’s, taking into account that means are not value-neutral, values thus entering an investigation in several places.
Weber and Rickert are certainly parts of the prehistory of Myrdal’s methodology. Myrdal’s relation to Weber is, however, also complex. One might speak of various stages of anti-metaphysics, since Myrdal has strong reservations against what he conceives of as lingering natural law elements in Weber in the form of transcendental value hierarchies. 16
Beyond: The long line of secularization: A tradition older than sociology
Giving empirical arguments for normative action in a way compatible with the demands of calculability is a central trademark, present already in Machiavelli in his manual for modern statecraft. The development from a natural law to anti-natural law is a much more gradual process. The doctrine is furthered by Hobbes whose pure utilitarian motives for the subservience to power and authority are very modern in their cognitive nakedness. With Bentham’s legal positivist way of understanding the old distinction between jus and lex, and characterizing natural law as ‘nonsense on stilts’, a further step is taken towards the Entzauberung (demystification) of normative belief-system, although of course many Ersatzreligionen prevail, in the form of the still existing – less and less viable – great 19th-century ideologies. World-views in mortal struggle, or competing value-systems, form our destiny, since the choice of value-preferences, alas, cannot ultimately be based on intersubjective reason without an element of faith. Instead choice rather appears as an act of the self and the individual will, a predicament Allan Bloom finds troublesome (1987: 211). When the Ersatzreligionen ideologies lose credibility, the next step is the development of anxiety of the individual in the face of the choice between ideals of which there is a growing and ever more confusing market. This is succeeded by resignation, an acceptance of being captured in the iron cage of increasing – but empty from meaning – rationality. Modernity is succeeded by postmodernity. The age of secularized and rationalized ideologies is leading into a predicament of anarchy and nihilism, with a deteriorating discourse on public affairs.
After the downfall of God as the undisputed source for value-orientation, life becomes ever more frustrating to modern humankind. Scientific analysis can only render coherence to the logical structures of the rational hierarchical chains of values, but it cannot itself catch the points of departure. The ontological impossibility of justifying any value positively in terms of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is the most aggravating, but unavoidable, insight of modernity/post-Enlightenment. This is the unavoidable obstacle faced by practical philosophy in trying to create orientation in our lives. 17
Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) is more pragmatic – and also radical – in his anti-metaphysic, under the influence of the ‘nihilist’ philosopher Axel Hägerström (1868–1939). The ‘chicken and the egg’ problem could take us back all the way to early modernity and Machiavelli, arguably, even longer. Philosophically, David Hume with his strict demarcation between is and ought, and David Bentham with his view on ‘rights’ as fictitious entities, and ‘natural law as nonsense on stilts’, both mark further steps in the demise of natural law. The apprehension of value incommensurability in social science is a slower process, with ever recurring ‘backdoor normativism’, various Indian rope-tricks and Icarian flights. Both Weber and Myrdal are public intellectuals (Burawoy, 2005). As such they work in a ‘normative space’. They have to beat the drums for something, and for what, more precisely, must be lucid and explicit, if the uncontrolled rule by experts is to be avoided (Turner, 2003).
Values were to Myrdal not inherent in the course of history. Myrdal was a man of Enlightenment reason. Human beings impose their own values in an intelligent and reasonable way, with some help from experts. Engaged academics have the task of perceiving correctly the needs of the present, formulating political issues and devising solutions that are both technically sound and politically appealing.
Concluding remarks
In this article I have tried to focus on one problem of interpretation, the evaluation of Rickert’s important but restricted influence on Weber.
However, Weber’s methodology has many ancestors, some of them left out in this article (for instance, from jurisprudence and Georg Simmel). The difficulty in interpreting his methodology is illustrated by the fact that the main competing schools in the social science take their point of departure from Weber, to mention only Paul Lazarsfeld (survey), Talcott Parsons (macro theory) and Alfred Schutz (phenomenology).
Schmoller, Dilthey, Rickert and Menger all play important roles for Weber. Gustav von Schmoller is the figurehead of the dominant historical school which is still today a vibrant tradition in Germany, although less hegemonic than a century ago. Wilhelm Dilthey brings the notion of Verstehen in as a typical trait of the humanities. Heinrich Rickert’s neo-Kantian concept formation is basic for how to avoid bias and achieve (perspectivist) objectivity, and Carl Menger provides the prototype, the rational actor model, useful for rationalizing value hierarchies in modern policy science.
All these contemporary traditions play limited roles for Weber’s ‘value-aspect-choice’ methodology, as one might call it, albeit a monstrous but pedagogic term. Weber in fact commits a tender break with the historicist legacy but as an ‘insider crime’ (some remarks on Schmoller are very telling), helping the historicists out of a cornered position. Dilthey’s influence is really far less important than some scholars still believe today. Dilthey is a prominent point of reference only in part one of the Roscher and Knies volume (Weber, 1975[1903–6]). It is also clear that Weber’s notion of Verstehen is a rational one and not of the empathetic brand. But the influences from the rational actor model taken over from Menger are also restricted; Weber likes what the Austrian school is doing but not what they believe they are doing, since he is against the basic law of psycho-physics.
The influences from Rickert are the most controversial ones, intensely discussed in the Weberology of recent decades, and I have tried to show both these influences and their limits in dealing with value incommensurability at the service of rational and intersubjective policy science. Weber’s neo-Kantian concept formation makes social science more intersubjective than Hegelian strategies would allow.
It should be added that it might be useful to approach Weber’s methodology through his close contemporaries, such as Ernst Troeltsch, Georg Jellinek and Georg Simmel; less visible in the primary sources since they were too close.
Moreover, the possibility cannot be excluded that Weber’s comparative sociology of religion is fuel for a different understanding of his methodology. My image of Weber’s methodology is based on his methodological essays, but finds supportive evidence in at least his famous ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ which is an important key text for his sociology of religion.
Weber is also part of a long tradition of anti-sociology within sociology which can be traced back to the rational actor models we find in Hobbes and Machiavelli.
The long line of secularization.
CALCULABILITY and ANTI-NATURAL LAW are central elements in this trend, with the rational economic actor as central metaphor/model