Repository | Book | Chapter

This chapter focusses on one main aspect of Max Weber's methodology: concept formation. Ideal-typical concepts were once central to the concerns of Weber scholarship (see Burger, 1976; Oakes, 1988; Drysdale, 1996), and to sociology and the social sciences more generally, but in recent times methodological work on the formation and uses of concepts has fallen into relative neglect (concepts are barely mentioned, for example, by Fritz Ringer in his Max Weber's Methodology (1997)). This is surprising given that concept formation lies at the heart of Weber's interpretive sociology. This chapter will return to Weber's methodology to explore what ideal-typical concepts are and how they can be put to work. It will do so by taking what might initially appear to be an unusual step: reading between Weber's ideal-typical methodology and the empirical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The importance of Deleuze's work is that it offers a radical alternative to most existing sociological conceptions of empiricism (a point largely missed by secondary commentators such as Alliez, 2004), but one that is in many ways anticipated by the work of Weber. What binds Deleuze to Weber is his argument that empiricism must be framed by a theory of the concept. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that "This is the secret of empiricism.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137271181_2

Full citation: