Max Weber on methodological individualism and subjectivism

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Clayton Posted: Mon, Jul 9 2012 12:46 PM

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I found this in Weber's Definition of Sociology and I thought it was incredibly lucid:

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9. Action in the sense of a subjectively understandable orientation of behaviour exists only as the behaviour of one or more individual human beings. For other cognitive purposes it may be convenient or necessary to consider the individual, for instance, as a collection of cells, as a complex of biochemical reactions, or to conceive his “psychic” life as made up of a variety of different elements, however these may be defined. Undoubtedly such procedures yield valuable knowledge of causal relationships. But the behaviour of these elements, as expressed in such uniformities, is not subjectively understandable. This is true even of psychic elements because the more precisely they are formulated from a point of view of natural science, the less they are accessible to subjective understanding. This is never the road to interpretation in terms of subjective meaning. On the contrary, both for sociology in the present sense, and for history, the object of cognition is the subjective meaning-complex of action. The behaviour of physiological entities such as cells, or of any sort of psychic elements may at least in principle be observed and an attempt made to derive uniformities from such observations. It is further possible to attempt, with their help, to obtain a causal explanation of individual phenomena; that is, to subsume them under uniformities. But the subjective understanding of action takes the same account of this type of fact and uniformity as of any others not capable of subjective interpretation. This is true, for example, of physical, astronomical, geological, meteorological, geographical, botanical, zoological, and anatomical facts and of such facts as those aspects of psychopathology which are devoid of subjective meaning or the facts of the natural conditions of technological processes.

For still other cognitive purposes as, for instance, juristic, or for practical ends, it may on the other hand be convenient or even indispensable to treat social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, foundations, as if they were individual persons. Thus they may be treated as the subjects of rights and duties or as the performers of legally significant actions. But for the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organisation of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action. Nevertheless, the sociologist cannot for his purposes afford to ignore these collective concepts derived from other disciplines. For the subjective interpretation of action has at least two important relations to these concepts. In the first place it is often necessary to employ very similar collective concepts, indeed often using the same terms, in order to obtain an understandable terminology. Thus both in legal terminology and in everyday speech the term “state” is used both for the legal concept of the state and for the phenomena of social action to which its legal rules are relevant. For sociological purposes, however, the phenomenon “the state” does not consist necessarily or even primarily of the elements which are relevant to legal analysis; and for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts.” When reference is made in a sociological context to a “state,” a “nation,” a “corporation,” a “family,” or an “army corps,” or to similar collectivities, what is meant is, on the contrary, only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons. Both because of its precision and because it is established in general usage the juristic concept is taken over, but is used in an entirely different meaning.

Secondly, the subjective interpretation of action must take account of a fundamentally important fact. These concepts of collective entities which are found both in common sense and in juristic and other technical forms of thought, have a meaning in the minds of individual persons, partly as of something actually existing, partly as something with normative authority. This is true not only of judges and officials, but of ordinary private individuals as well. Actors thus in part orient their action to them, and in this role such ideas have a powerful, often a decisive, causal influence on the course of action of real individuals. This is above all true where the ideas concern a recognised positive or negative normative pattern. Thus, for instance, one of the important aspects of the “existence” of a modern state, precisely as a complex of social interaction of individual persons, consists in the fact that the action of various individuals is oriented to the belief that it exists or should exist, thus that its acts and laws are valid in the legal sense. This will be further discussed below. Though extremely pedantic and cumbersome it would be possible, if purposes of sociological terminology alone were involved, to eliminate such terms entirely, and substitute newly-coined words. This would be possible even though the word “state” is used ordinarily not only to designate the legal concept but also the real process of action. But in the above important connection, at least, this would naturally be impossible.

Thirdly, it is the method of the so-called “organic” school of sociology to attempt to understand social interaction by using as a point of departure the “whole” within which the individual acts. His action and behaviour are then interpreted somewhat in the way that a physiologist would treat the role of an organ of the body in the “economy” of the organism, that is from the point of view of the survival of the latter. How far in other disciplines this type of functional analysis of the relation of “parts” to a “whole” can be regarded as definitive, cannot be discussed here; but it is well known that the biochemical and biophysical modes of analysis of the organism are in principle opposed to stopping there. For purposes of sociological analysis two things can be said. First, this functional frame of reference is convenient for purposes of practical illustration and for provisional orientation. In these respects it is not only useful but indispensable. But at the same time if its cognitive value is overestimated and its concepts illegitimately “reified,” it can be highly dangerous. Secondly, in certain circumstances this is the only available way of determining just what processes of social action it is important to understand in order to explain a given phenomenon. But this is only the beginning of sociological analysis as here understood. In the case of social collectivities, precisely as distinguished from organisms, we are in a position to go beyond merely demonstrating functional relationships and uniformities. We can accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals. The natural sciences on the other hand cannot do this, being limited to the formulation of causal uniformities in objects and events, and the explanation of individual facts by applying them. We do not “understand” the behaviour of cells, but can only observe the relevant functional relationships and generalise on the basis of these observations. This additional achievement of explanation by interpretive understanding, as distinguished from external observation, is of course attained only at a price - the more hypothetical and fragmentary character of its results. Nevertheless, subjective understanding is the specific characteristic of sociological knowledge.

It would lead too far afield even to attempt to discuss how far the behaviour of animals is subjectively understandable to us and vice versa; in both cases the meaning of the term understanding and its extent of application would be highly problematical. But insofar as such understanding existed it would be theoretically possible to formulate a sociology of the relations of men to animals, both domestic and wild. Thus many animals “understand” commands, anger, love, hostility, and react to them in ways which are evidently often by no means purely instinctive and mechanical and in some sense both consciously meaningful and affected by experience. There is no a priori reason to suppose that our ability to share the feelings of primitive men is very much greater. Unfortunately we either do not have any reliable means of determining the subjective state of mind of an animal or what we have is at best very unsatisfactory. It is well known that the problems of animal psychology, however interesting, are very thorny ones. There are in particular various forms of social organisation among animals: “monogamous and polygamous families,” herds, flocks, and finally “state,” with a functional division of labor. The extent of functional differentiation found in these animal societies is by no means, however, entirely a matter of the degree of organic or morphological differentiation of the individual members of the species. Thus, the functional differentiation found among the termites, and in consequence that of the products of their social activities, is much more advanced than in the case of the bees and ants. In this field it goes without saying that a purely functional point of view is often the best that can, at least for the present, be attained, and the investigator must be content with it. Thus it is possible to study the ways in which the species provides for its survival; that is, for nutrition, defence, reproduction, and reconstruction of the social units. As the principal bearers of these functions, differentiated types of individuals can be identified: “kings,” “queens,” “workers,” “soldiers,” “drones,” “propagators,” “queen’s substitutes,” and so on. Anything more than that was for a long time merely a matter of speculation or of an attempt to determine the extent to which heredity on the one hand and environment on the other would be involved in the development of these “social” proclivities. This was particularly true of the controversies between Gotte and Weisman. The latter’s conception of the omnipotence of natural selection was largely based on wholly non-empirical deductions. But all serious authorities are naturally fully agreed that the limitation of analysis to the functional level is only a necessity imposed by our present ignorance which it is hoped will only be temporary.

It is relatively easy to grasp the significance of the functions of these various differentiated types for survival. It is also not difficult to work out the bearing of the hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics or its reverse on the problem of explaining how these differentiations have come about, and further, what is the bearing of different variants of the theory of heredity. But this is not enough. We would like especially to know first what factors account for the original differentiation of specialised types from the still neutral undifferentiated species-type. Secondly, it would be important to know what leads the differentiated individual in the typical case to behave in a way which actually serves the survival value of the organised group. Wherever research has made any progress in the solution of these problems it has been through the experimental demonstration of the probability or possibility of the role of chemical stimuli or physiological processes, such as nutritional states, the effects of parasitic castration, etc., in the case of the individual organism. How far there is even a hope that the existence of “subjective” or “meaningful” orientation could be made experimentally probable, even the specialist today would hardly be in a position to say. A verifiable conception of the state of mind of these social animals, accessible to meaningful understanding, would seem to be attainable even as an ideal goal only within narrow limits. However that may be, a contribution to the understanding of human social action is hardly to be expected from this quarter. On the contrary, in the field of animal psychology, human analogies are and must be continually employed. The most that can be hoped for is, then, that these biological analogies may some day be useful in suggesting significant problems. For instance they may throw light on the question of the relative role in the early stages of human social differentiation of mechanical and instinctive factors, as compared with that of the factors which are accessible to subjective interpretation generally, and more particularly to the role of consciously rational action. It is necessary for the sociologist to be thoroughly aware of the fact that in the early stages even of human development, the first set of factors is completely predominant. Even in the later stages he must take account of their continual interaction with the others in a role which is often of decisive importance. This is particularly true of all “traditional” action and of many aspects of charisma. In the latter field of phenomena lie the seeds of certain types of psychic “contagion” and it is thus the bearer of many dynamic tendencies of social processes. These types of action are very closely related to phenomena which are understandable either only in biological terms or are subject to interpretation in terms of subjective motives only in fragments and with an almost imperceptible transition to the biological. But all these facts do not discharge sociology from the obligation, in full awareness of the narrow limits to which it is confined, to accomplish what it alone can do.

The various works of Othmar Spann are often full of suggestive ideas, though at the same time he is guilty of occasional misunderstandings, and above all, of arguing on the basis of pure value judgments which have no place in an empirical investigation. But he is undoubtedly correct in doing something to which, however, no one seriously objects, namely, emphasising the sociological significance of the functional point of view for preliminary orientation to problems. This is what he calls the “universalistic method.” We certainly need to know what kind of action is functionally necessary for “survival,” but further and above all for the maintenance of a cultural type and the continuity of the corresponding modes of social action, before it is possible even to inquire how this action has come about and what motives determine it. It is necessary to know what a “king,” an “official,” an “entrepreneur,” a “procurer,” or a “magician” does; that is, what kind of typical action, which justifies classifying an individual in one of these categories, is important and relevant for an analysis, before it is possible to undertake the analysis itself. But it is only this analysis itself which can achieve the sociological understanding of the actions of typically differentiated human (and only human) individuals, and which hence constitutes the specific function of sociology. It is a monstrous misunderstanding to think that an “individualistic” method should involve what is in any conceivable sense an individualistic system of values. It is as important to avoid this error as the related one which confuses the unavoidable tendency of sociological concepts to assume a rationalistic character with a belief in the predominance of rational motives, or even a positive valuation of “rationalism.” Even a socialistic economy would have to be understood sociologically in exactly the same kind of “individualistic” terms; that is, in terms of the action of individuals, the types of “officials” found in it, as would be the case with a system of free exchange analysed in terms of the theory of marginal utility. It might be possible to find a better method, but in this respect it would be similar. The real empirical sociological investigation begins with the question: What motives determine and lead the individual members and participants in this socialistic community to behave in such a way that the community came into being in the first place, and that it continues to exist? Any form of functional analysis which proceeds from the whole to the parts can accomplish only a preliminary preparation for this investigation – a preparation, the utility and indispensability of which, if properly carried out, is naturally beyond question.

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I especially liked where he points out that the more precise we make our specification of the psychological phenomena of action, the less accessible to be "subjectively" understood. In an earlier section, he explains that there are different kinds of understanding in sociological science. If someone says, "I feel hot", you subjectively understand his meaning because you also know what it is to feel hot. His statement is an expression of a human experience that you - as a human being - can empathize with. But if someone gives a theory of consciousness that explains how buried instincts within the brain give rise to "unconscious" interpretations of sensory data, and so on, you cannot subjectively understand such a theory for the same reason you cannot subjectively understand the law of gravity or the operation of a cell even though the theory regards the operation of processes that give rise to subjective experience. You only understand these in a functional sense.

This explains some of the limitations of the sciences of human action. It is only by eliminating from consideration large parts of human experience that we can offer anything like an exact scientific theory of whatever remains. And I want to tack onto this my own observation that science - understood in the broadest sense of "the growth of knowledge through experiment and reasoning" - can be understood to subsume culture itself. That is, culture itself (art, religion, politics, the human experience in its broadest sense) is an instance of the scientific method. What is lost in exactitude (pretty much everything) is made up again in understanding. That is, I understand much better what it means to feel hot than I do what it means for two bodies to gravitationally attract, even if I can give many more quantifiable/mathematical details regarding the latter than I can regarding the former.

Clayton -

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vive la insurrection replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 12:53 PM

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Cool that you're into Max Weber.  The more i read of and by him, the more I think Austrians ought to take him much more seriously (he is very much a Proto Austrian who influenced Menger and Mises)

Anyway you may get a kcik out of this:

http://mises.org/books/max-weber.pdf

Other than that, I'll read the rest of your post later, I'm on the run right now

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Aristippus replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 6:10 PM

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I don't think you can really call him a proto-Austrian or say that he influenced Menger - after all, Weber was only 7 years old when Menger's Principles of Economics was published, and it seems to me that much of what Weber knew of economics came from the Austrians.  But to use Mises' terminology, Weber was the foremost subjectivist thymologist.  Unfortunately his methodology was buried by scientism, much like that of the Austrians.

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vive la insurrection replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 7:17 PM

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Good point, poor choice o fwords.  As far as him influencing Menger, he was at least somewhat on his side in the methodology debate was all I really meant.

He certainly influenced Mises.  Maybe "quasi-Austrian", "fringe-austrian", or "Austrianesque" may be better 

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vive la insurrection replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 7:25 PM

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Clayton can rephrase your main point please?

I could be wrong, as I am having a hard time figuring out your point, but I think you may be misunderstanding any usual interpretation of Weber

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Vitor replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 8:01 PM

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Weber is great. A shame that Rothbard mostly decide to get a fight with his work on Protestant Ethics than to do a review of his overall contributions. 

So many sociologists feel random and without methodology, Weber is such a rare thing.

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Clayton replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 8:45 PM

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I wonder if it wouldn't be correct to call him the Mises of sociology. :-P

Clayton -

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Cortes replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 8:59 PM

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Clayton, have you read this: http://171.67.193.20/entries/methodological-individualism/#6 ?

From what I understand, the criticisms here is that there are situations in which MI is ill-equipped to infer anything meaningful from. In his crime study example, we cannot know what criminals were thinking in a study of decreasing crime rates (the observation that they are 'rational-utility maximizers' doesn't cut it), and since different states with different approaches to law enforcement both had lowering crime rates across the board, it is inadequate to simply refer to MI.

The insinuation that a more holistic approach may provide the 'rock-bottom' answers. I may be getting this completely wrong, however, or not even understanding the criticism correctly.

Consider though that this author has claimed that Mises was 'a pure atomist'. Unless there's another Heath.

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Clayton replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 10:16 PM

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The example they use in 6.1 is unintentionally perfect. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) actually studied the crime-rate drop in the 1990's. The "usual suspects" are mentioned in the article - increased policing, tougher sentencing, community initiatives, etc. etc. Turns out, it isn't any of those things:

The above excerpts are only a partial clip of the relevant section from the Freakonomics Movie but they get the essential point across. And methodological individualism is precisely what Steven Levitt's methodology incorporates - it is the status of a pregnancy as "wanted" or "unwanted" that is hypothesized to be the causal factor primarily responsible. All the other "statistical approaches" are just blind groping in the dark and only serve to illlustrate the danger of lead-headed group-think. Any policy can be justified on the basis of such plausible, but false, narratives. "Crime went down because we had more police. Therefore, if we expand the police force even more, crime will go down further." You get the idea.

I think one of the key issues that people don't generally understand about science is that science - at the most basic level - is not a method. While science employs methods, and while not all methods are created equal, that is, some are useful, some less useful and some detrimental, science qua science has no method. This is true even in basic physics. Hell, it's provably the case in pure mathematics. How much more so in the social sciences which deal with the most complex phenomena in human experience. Yet people want "turn-crank" answers to policy problems and social issues and they are shocked and surprised when their lobotomized, activist policies not only fail to work as intended but often create precisely the opposite effect (e.g. rent-control).

Clayton -

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Clayton replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 10:30 PM

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In section 6.2, they discuss step-parental violence against children, "... proponents of methodological individualism are open to the charge that they are promoting half-way explanations, and that the evolutionary perspective offers rock-bottom ones." I think this is seeing a false conflict - MI is not saying that evolutionary explanations have no place - after all, what we evolved to be is part of what makes us an individual.

MI is simply opposed to the reification of a group as if it were a telic, acting, human being. "France was incensed by the incursions of Germany and she declared war." This is gibberish. At the level at which it makes sense to speak of "France", it does not make sense to speak of being incensed. And at the level it makes sense to speak of Frenchmen being incensed, it does not make sense to speak of France.

In section 6.3, they kind of go all over the map. They say that MI leads to an inability to distinguish group behaviors (such as persistence of a belief) from individual behaviors (in which a belief may be short-lived while long-lived in the whole population). But this is not true. I just recently read Mises (I think Theory and History) where he says ideas are real in the sense that they participate in cause-and-effect in a way that cannot be reduced to the atomistic phenomena not because they do not emerge from it but because the relevant mechanisms are too complex, at least for science in its present state. This used to be a radical position. Now that it's mainstream, the human action proponent is accused of being opposed to the analysis of ideas from the point-of-view of the idea itself (i.e. memetic analysis) when, in fact, Mises anticipated this kind of analysis, way ahead of his time.

Here's another whopper, "The most common fallacy arises when theorists treat the “self-interest” of the individual, defined with respect to his or her preferences, as a stand-in for the “fitness” of a particular behavior (or phenotype)," If it's so common, surely they can provide at least one example. The fact is that self-interest is understood to be a fallible indicator of fitness-enhancing behavior and Mises (and probably every other economist who has ever commented on the topic) clearly points out that calculation is always liable to error as a result of ignorance, understood in the broadest sense of the term (i.e. including even the ignorance created by evolutionary traits that "blind" the individual to his true self-interest).

Clayton -

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Cortes replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 10:30 PM

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I'm trying to figure out what he's trying to get at here:

 

This debate, like almost every debate in criminology, lacks microfoundations. It would certainly be nice to know what is going through people's mind when they commit crimes, and thus how likely various measures are to change their behavior, but the fact is we do not know. Indeed, there is considerable skepticism among criminologists that a “general theory” of crime is possible. Nevertheless, we can easily imagine criminologists deciding that one particular factor, such as a demographic shift in the population (i.e., fewer young men), is the explanation for the late-20^th century decline in violent crime in the United States, and ruling out the other hypotheses. And even though this may be a “half-way” explanation, there is no question that it would represent a genuine discovery, one that we could learn something important from.

Furthermore, it is not obvious that the “rock-bottom” explanation – the one that satisfies the precepts of methodological individualism – is going to add anything very interesting to the “half-way” explanation provided by the statistical analysis. In many cases it will even be derived from it. Suppose that we discovered, through statistical analysis, that the crime rate varied as a function of the severity of punishment multiplied by the probability of apprehension. We would then infer from this that criminals were rational utility-maximizers. On the other hand, if studies showed that crime rates were completely unaffected by changes in the severity of punishments or the probability of apprehension, we would infer that something else must be going on at the action-theoretic level.

Is he claiming that the 'mechanism' required by MI ("the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.") can only be derived through statistical analysis, which is the 'half-way' explanation? And that such an analysis will be superior to the requirements of MI in this situation?

Results at the action-theoretic level might also prove to be random or uninteresting, from the standpoint of the explanatory variables. Suppose it turns out that the decline in crime can be explained entirely by demographic change. Then it doesn't really matter what the criminals were thinking – what matters is simply that a certain percentage of any given demographic group has the thoughts that lead to criminal behavior, so fewer of those people translates into less crime. The motives remain inside the “black box” – and while it might to nice to know what those motives are, they may not contribute anything to this particular explanation. In the end, it may turn out that each crime is as unique as the criminal. So while there is a concrete explanation in terms of actual people's intentional states, there is nothing that can be said at the level of a general “model” of rational action.

So therefore is he claiming that there are models that can give more substantial answers, that in essence refer to the existence of a holistic group identity that can be analyzed?

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Clayton replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 10:52 PM

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@Cortes: I'm on my way out the door so I'll just respond briefly - I think the authors are confused about the role of MI, as if MI is an end-in-itself. It is merely a methodology and you never sacrifice the data on the altar of methodology.

The criteria for deciding when MI is or is not an applicable methodology to the problem at hand is cause-and-effect, as well as theoretical coherency. It is causality that any theory is seeking to get at, not merely "prediction". This is especially the case in social science where prediction is usually impossible. So, wherever our causal theory can be advanced by adopting another methodology than MI, we should do so. But if the answers we get from employing two different methodologies are in conflict with one another, then we know something is amiss because the true facts of cause-and-effect can only tell a coherent story.

Clayton -

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vive la insurrection replied on Mon, Jul 9 2012 11:16 PM

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@ Clayton:

Alfred Shutz would probably be better associated as a Mises figure.  Weber and Mises are ultimately two different beasts that have many incompatabilities. 

@ Cortez:

The Austrian claim would be no amount of statistics or psychologizing are going to say anything scientific at all.

"What criminals were thinking" can only be met with a blank stare.