ABSTRACT
The first time that Max Weber wrote systematically about the methodological foundations of legal sociology was in his Critique of Stammler. This chapter presents Rudolf Stammler's basic concepts about social life, the economy and the law and discusses some of his methodological statements as they compare to Weber's own perspective. It explores the views of two scholars who were influenced by Stammler, although in quite different ways: the economist Karl Diehl and the labour lawyer and legal sociologist Hugo Sinzheimer. Weber considers that the distinction between form and substance is a precondition of knowledge when dealing with human interactions. Weber admits to a limited extent the idea of the formal unavoidability of a unilateral perspective on social life defended by Stammler. But while for Stammler such unilaterality presupposes social monism and the search for nomological regularities, for Weber it implies the opposite. Weber's theory of science has at its core the Sein/Sollen dualism.
