ABSTRACT
Equally outstanding in logical stringency, stylistic refinement and in the elegant objectivity of his polemics, he is undoubtedly the most important representative of the abstract and deductive work done by the school of Austrian political economists ... He would make a particularly happy complement to the strictly historically inductive work by Professor Schmoller, whose promotion has been recommended by the other side. 4
This in itself does not signify very much. The best approach towards an understanding of Weber's attitude to (pure) economic theory is without doubt that which can be inferred from his methodological writings, in which the infamous Methodenstreit (methodological dispute) between Schmoller and Menger forms the background. There Weber intervenes with his neo-Kantian conception of the social and cultural sciences. 5
It is precisely the Menger of the Methodenstreit whom Weber credits to be the first (even before Rickert) to have discovered the fundamental methodological distinction or logical opposition between law-based science (Gesetzeswissenschajt) and the science of concrete reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft), between law-based knowledge and historical knowledge; this distinction did not spring from a difference in the object to be investigated (as in Wilhelm Wundt), but from the respective specific epistemological goals and interests, namely, the consideration of the particular or the general, or, alternatively, the individual or the universal.
