In the meantime, completely apart from everything connected with the logical problems involved in the relation between sociology and history, an important advance had taken place in the logic of the moral sciences.

In Weber’s eyes,

To begin with, departing from the procedure usually followed, one must distinguish the methodological from the logical problem.

As a rule, methodology is understood to be logic conceived as the theory of the methods of thought. We shall speak of it in the less customary sense as the technique of scientific thought (heuristic) and contrast it, as an art (ars inveniendi), to the science of logic.

Rationalism brought about two revolutionary changes in the sciences of human action. Into history, which had hitherto been the only science of human action, it introduced the critical method. It freed that science from its naive attachment to what had been handed down in the chronicles and historical works of the past and taught it not only to draw upon new sources?documents, inscriptions, and the like?but to subject all sources to critical scrutiny. What the science of history thereby gained can never be lost again, nor has its value ever been contested.

1. Vierkandt’s Instinct Sociology

None of the objections that have been raised for thousands of years against hedonism and utilitarianism has the least bearing upon the theory of action. When the correlative concepts of pleasure and pain, or utility and disutility, are grasped in their formal sense and are deprived of all material content, all the objections that have been repeated ad nauseam for ages have the around cut from under them.

1. The Meaning of Neutrality With Regard to Value Judgments

The fact that the science of economics had its origin in economic policy explains why most economists use expressions in the presentation of the theory that involve judgments and standards of value accepted by all mankind, or certainly by almost all men.

1. The Meaning of Neutrality With Regard to Value Judgments

1. The Basic Concept of Action and its Categorial Conditions

The starting point of our reasoning is not behavior, but action, or, as it is redundantly designated, rational action. Human action is conscious behavior on the part of a human being. Conceptually it can be sharply and clearly distinguished from unconscious activity, even though in some cases it is perhaps not easy to determine whether given behavior is to be assigned to one or the other category.

Names are unimportant; what matters is substance. The term “social liberalism” sounds strange indeed as socialism and liberalism are mutually exclusive. But we are accus­tomed to such terminology. Also, socialism and democracy are irreconcilable in the final analysis, and yet there is the old concept of “Social Democracy,” which is a contradictio in adjecto. If today the Brentano School, which adopted syndical­ism, and some “moderate” etatists designate their move­ment as “social liberalism,” no terminological objection need be raised.