Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory

Abstract

AX WEBER IS widely regarded as one of the founders of twentieth-century social science and probably its greatest practitioner. Modern and ancient theorists commonly believed that founding-or giving a form or constitution to collective life-was reckoned to be the most notable action of which political man is capable. It is superior to other types of political acts because it aims to shape the lives of citizens by designing the structure or dwelling which they and their posterity will inhabit. In describing this extraordinary action, political theorists often had recourse to architectural metaphors: the founder lays foundations. No such images were invoked to explain the routine acts that occur in the daily life of a polity. Ordinary action is commonly described as doing, effecting, or bringing something about. If political actors are to bring something about, they presuppose conditions that make possible the action in questicn and the means for doing it. They also presuppose a context that permits the action to be understood and interpreted. The founder is quintessentially an author of political presuppositions. By analogy, to found a form of social science entails an act of demarcation that indicates the subject-matter peculiar to the science, the kind of activities that are appropriate (e.g., empirical inquiry), and the norms that are to be invoked injudging the value of the results produced by the activities. These demarcations beconme presuppositions of subsequent practice. Weber was engaged in founding when he wrote the following: