ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of the concepts of adequate cause and objective possibility, based for the most part on clues and citations which Max Weber himself provides. The dominant jurisprudential theory of cause prior to the theory of adequate cause was the von Buri-von Bar theory. It held that responsibility attached to those actions that were necessary conditions of a harmful result. The benefit Weber receives as a result of the substitution of the concept of adequate cause for the idea of causal forces is substantial. Weber gets the free use of the everyday notion of single event causality without incurring any obligation to refine causal claims into “laws” or to ground them in laws. By conceiving of probabilistic causes as the broad category and nomic causes as a special case of the aggregation of ordinary single event causalities, he is able to avoid the appeal to general laws and forces.
