ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that sociology must deal preeminently with one important aspect of Max Weber's work; his conceptualization of 'rationality'. For Weber's intellectual heritage, especially neo-Kantianism, tended to enforce a separation of knowledge and social or material elements, which derived from the initial Kantian division of phenomena and noumena, on prioristic grounds. Weber also takes up one aspect of Dilthey's approach to cultural science, the concept of verstehen as the primary method of apprehending actors' meanings, since his methodological individualism led him to see social phenomena as involving relations between socially constructed meanings. Weber's study of Calvinist Protestantism does not assume it to be the source of rationalism, indeed, as he is careful to point out, his study of the Protestant ethic as a particular form of rationalism, the idea of a calling and of devotion to labour in it, emphasizes the extent to which those components are in fact 'irrational' in ultimate self-interest terms.
