ABSTRACT
The impact of the Southwest German School on Weber's methodological work in the period 1903-7 is, of course, well documented. In addition to the testimony of Rickert, Weber's wife Marianne, and the frequent citations and remarks in Weber's own writings, there is the fact that Weber regularly uses the ideas and arguments of these philosophers. Rickert's concepts of the historical individual and value-relevance and his distinction between values and value-judgements, and Lask's analysis of theories of concept formation and his account of his hiatus irrationa/is between concept and reality, name only a few of the most obvious borrowings. To these considerations, we should add Weber's close personal relations with Rickert and Lask - in the case of Rickert, well known; in the case of Lask, not so widely appreciated, but still well documented - and the fact that Weber was uncommonly receptive to the work of acquaintances with whom he enjoyed a close personal
relationship, especially those to whom he was sympathetically inclined. Therefore, the fact that the Southwest German School - Rickert and Lask directly, and through them, Windelband-played some part in the genesis of Max Weber's early methodological ideas may be taken as established. In light of this fact, the purpose of the ensuing discussion is to determine what is responsible for it and how it can be explained. Is it a contingent fact of Weber's intellectual biography, a datum in the history of ideas that can be accounted for by tracing the network of Weber's acquaintances, the books he read, and the order in which he read them? Or are there more systematic considerations that explain Weber's relationship to this philosophical tradition, reasons that are essential to Weber's thought and which in some sense necessitated the acceptance of certain ideas that he found in the Southwest German School? In sum, does the impact of the Baden neo-Kantians call for a historical or a philosophical explanation?
