Some questions before today's class

1.     I understand from Giddens that Weber in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” reverses the causality and attribute the development of capitalism not to the rationalization of economic life but to the irrational religious ethic. While reading Marx in the last class we discussed how religion serves as an instrument for the ruling classes to promote their ideology (or how bourgeoisie use religion to serve their capitalist greed). But Weber seems to argue that there was something in the religion/belief, in the first place, to make capitalism as we know today possible in the Western Europe. Weber establishes and fixes the causality in the religion/belief and not in the rationalist action of the bourgeoisie who attempt to maximise profit by exploiting what is at their hands. We also had discussed in the last class that Weber as a scholar did not interact with Marx or his works. But what is intriguing is that Weber seems to be critiquing the materialistic interpretation of history, particularly, of capitalism. For both Marx and Weber, the object of the study is capitalism. My question is ‘was Weber interacting with or responding to Marx? Or is it that the materialistic philosophy had gained currency and become popular by the time Weber wrote his book? If that is the case, he could not help but respond and formulate his questions in dialogue with materialistic philosophy.

2.      Giddens also informs us that Weber was trained in economic, legal and historical thought. Given his training, what he couldn’t do was ‘generalize’ because History as a knowledge domain is always preoccupied with the ‘particular’. When Weber thinks of ‘Interpretative Sociology’ to offer general explanations of social actions and develops the concept of ‘ideal type’ as a methodological tool, is he in some way thinking of an epistemological gap that History cannot fill and thus the need for Sociology to do this?

3.      Is Weber assuming that a researcher studying a social action will at all times be able to construct a perfectly rational ideal type to offer a subjective interpretation and causal explanation of a social action? In other words, will a researcher be in full knowledge of all possibilities that an abstracted ideal type can exhaust, such that s/he will be able to understand a real social action juxtaposing it with the ‘constructed ideal type’? When does one build these ideal types? Prior to empirical investigation or after it? What difference does this (construction of ideal types prior to or after fieldwork) make to the research?