5 - Weber and the Concept of Action

Summary

While by the early twentieth century major advances had been made in establishing population regularities in ‘volitional phenomena’ through new methods of data collection and analysis, little attention had been given to the basis on which such regularities were to be explained. Lexis had made a start in the context of his critique of Quetelet but it was Weber who, over the course of several large-scale studies of agricultural and industrial labour in contemporary Germany and of his work on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, played a crucial role in insistingon methodological individualism and indevelopingthe concept of erklärendes Verstehen.Explanatory narratives of established population regularities had to be provided in terms of the action of individuals that could be understood - made intelligible – in terms of the at least subjective rationality that was involved. This led to his proposal of sociology as ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.’