ABSTRACT
Merton adds that ‘Weber has properly generalized this case, saying that active asceticism paradoxically leads to its own decline through the accumulation of wealth and possessions entailed by decreasing consumption and intense productive activity.’ The influence lies in Merton’s personal selectivity in ideas and their interpretation and in his disregard of the main point of Weber’s and Pareto’s contributions to sociology: the exact analytic relationship between definitional concepts in their substantive theories—which Parsons and Merton have been interested in—and analytical concepts in their methodologies. Pareto’s analytical concepts, like Weber’s, have practical applicability. They would enable one both to test his theory of residues as well as to distinguish the sentiments of an actual society, as the theory of residues is not an axiomatic statement for which it has been mistaken. The noticeable fact in Bendix’s translation is that he translates the word Abgrenzung (delimitation) as delineation; and Wertbeziehungen (value-relations) simply as values.
