ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Weber’s methodology as addressed in Chapter 2. It is above all characterized by a combination of rigorous model-building on the one hand and a respect for the unique empirical features of cases on the other hand. Chapters 3–8 explored the numerous models that comprise Weber’s civilizations analytic. All serve an indispensable purpose: as orientational guideposts for research, they constitute the tools indispensable to researchers.
Their sheer number testifies to the extreme complexity Weber attributes to civilizations and to his insistence that viable research requires, at its foundation, a radical multi-causality. “No resting place” is to be discovered whenever causal analysis is pursued, he stresses. Because always complex in terms of their sources and development, each empirical case requires, for adequate explanations of its sources, contours, and trajectory, a highly differentiated conceptual framework, Weber maintains.
The sheer pluralism inherent to Weber’s notion of causality leads to another conclusion: because of extreme multiplicity, patterns of action (and the groups within which they exist) “interweave” continuously, forming in the process contexts of groups. Further patterns of action and groups exist “within” these contexts.
Finally, Weber’s sociology of subjective meaning and interpretive understanding repeatedly explores action patterns seemingly at first quite implausible to the researcher. The attention of Weber’s sociology to contexts of action assists comprehension of the interior workings of civilizations far and wide. They do so all the more owing to a pivotal aspect of Weber’s mode of analysis: a principled recognition of the unceasing interweaving of the present with the past.
