ABSTRACT
A comparative outline of Weber’s and Pareto’s methodological ideas may perhaps be useful for drawing the general implications of their theories for social scientific analysis as a whole, as well as for realizing the complementary nature of their substantive conclusions on rational and sentimental aspects of social experience. The difference which Weber postulated between meaningful explanation and causal explanation is fundamental to ideal types, indeed to his sociological analysis as a whole. Weber discusses the orientation of action as the ethics of responsibility and of sentiment and shows, specifically, how one should translate an actual action into the scientific categories. The categorization of reason and sentiment as two sources of the social experience has long been an axiom of knowledge, and the history of social thought contains full development of all that is possible to say in relation to them.
