Rationality and action

pp. 180-197

in: Stephen P. Turner, The search for a methodology of social science, Berlin, Springer, 1986

Abstract

Mill's writings on cause and economic rationality presumed that a nomic psychology that did not radically conflict with commonsense interpretations of action was possible — indeed, that it was readily achievable. Durkheim wrote after this moment of innocence had passed, and chose to discard both psychology, understood as a foundation for the social sciences, and commonsense interpretation. Reasoning from the broad binary opposition between "events in their full particularity" and "the world known and described through general concepts which abstract from this full particularity", Weber found a place for each set of considerations, and was faced with the problem of sorting out their relations — a problem he never satisfactorily resolved, and on which the emphasis of his writing changed over the years. The writings are not, as in the case of Durkheim, directly concerned with constructing a methodology — they are polemics against the methodological doctrines of his contemporaries.