ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals at least five distinct, interweaving concerns. The concerns are: A charter for general sociology, a paradigm for analyzing structural interpenetration, an account of the forms and sources of rationalization in world history, a theory of the rise of capitalism, and diagnoses of time. Although social structures are not real entities and it is futile to axiomatize theories about them, they can be systematically conceptualized by using logical schemata of types of action, social relationships, and organizations. Weber belittled sociologists in 1906, and still styled himself an "economist". Only when he began work on this manuscript did a sociological affiliation emerge. Together with the 1913 "Kategorien" essay, Economy and Society is Max Weber''s manifesto as a practitioner of sociology, a discipline that "searches for empirical regularities and types" and "classifies the various kinds of groups". Sociology serves as the handmaiden of history and praxis.
