ABSTRACT
I have singled out Max Weber for special attention in this book because, as well as producing substantive work of great importance and influence, he devoted a great deal of attention to questions of concept formation and upheld a position diametrically opposed to the one I have been arguing for here. Weber develops his account in explicit opposition to what he sometimes calls an ‘antique scholastic epistemology’, (1) which claims to capture the most essential features of reality in some more ambitious way than is allowed for by his own notion of ideal-typical concept formation. Weber’s attacks on this view bear on its Hegelian version, represented, for example, by the economists Roscher and Knies, but as he implies himself, the same objections apply to realist theories such as Marxism. (2) In other words, Weber’s account can be read as a critique of and an alternative to the broadly realist view of concept formation which I am defending here. I shall argue that the antinomies in Weber’s account point to the need to adopt something like the view which he attacks.
