OVERVIEW OF CHAPTER ONE

THE FOLLOWING CHAPTER is based on the 1913 essay on “sociological categories,”1 the arguments of which were subsequently elaborated in two lecture courses—in Vienna in 1918, and then in Munich in 1919. The formal lecture presentations clearly had a major influence on the rigorously didactic formulation of the basic concepts of Weber’s sociology, most obviously in the way the exposition is arranged as seventeen cumulatively definitional paragraphs. These begin by stating that sociology is a science concerned with the causal explanation of social action and conclude with a definition of the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical force. The chapter thus begins with the action of individuals and builds from there to a characterisation of the state in abstract terms, apparently a movement from individual agency to institutional structure. To fully appreciate how Weber achieves this movement in a rigorously logical way, Appendix B presents these definitional paragraphs without the intervening exposition. Here my purpose is to outline how Weber relates these two quite distinct analytical levels, so that a reader can gain some sense of how the chapter’s argument progresses.

As already outlined in the Introduction, Weber referred to the chapters he was writing in 1919–1920 as “my sociology,” but he left little in the way of explanation for how “his” sociology differed from that of his contemporaries. He did emphasise his opposition to the idea that sociology should be oriented to collectivities—for him, individual action and its meaning had to be the basis of any social analysis, providing a concrete empirical foundation in the observable activities of men and women. This human empirical basis for all social analysis implied the situational contingency of action and events, while rejecting the teleology of class analysis, that is, the idea that a sociology of class relationships was the only relevant way the power relationships of modern societies could be understood. Since in this chapter he does in fact move from the action of individuals to the institutional exercise of power, it is important to understand how he does this in a consistent and logical manner.

The chapter can be divided into three broad sections. The exposition that follows the initial definition in §1 extends over more than one third of the chapter, and is divided into two sections: “methodical foundations,” which establish the regularities of action, the possibility of meaningful interpretation of action, and the focus of sociology on typologies of action; and a brief treatment of “the concept of social action,” specifying exactly what is to be treated as “social” action. As such, this is a preamble for the remainder of the book. These points are never reiterated in the succeeding pages; they form presuppositions for Weber’s sociology, they are not “his sociology” itself.

§§2–4 then address the different kinds of rationality that motivate social action, the contingencies and regularities of social relationships, turning in §5 to the orientation of an actor to what Weber calls a “legitimate order,” that is, a convention enforced by social disapproval or by the coercive force of law. In this latter case, Weber introduces for the first time a reference to a “staff,” in this case persons whose task is to enforce conformity. Rather than explore the implications of this directly, however, Weber turns first to the issue of legitimacy and why actors treat orders as legitimate. In §9, he then turns to the distinction between the affective and rational bases of social relationships, and in §11,h to the degree of solidarity in social relationships.

This opens the way to the final section, the concept of an “organisation” (Verband) being introduced in §12 for the first time as a social entity that “organises” social action and social relationships. This represents a major shift away from a focus on individual action to the structures that condense and perpetuate contingent actions into enduring social processes. Note that at no stage has Weber introduced the idea of “society”—sociology is the causal explanation of social action and not a “science of society.” Actions are marshalled by organisations typically with a director, who is possibly assisted by a staff of persons charged with the administration of the organisation. The nature of such organisations can be quite varied, and they can be of any scale. What is important, however, is that social action condenses in organisational forms that are more, or less, autonomous; more, or less, coercive. §§14 and 15 deal with the degree of purposive continuity in the conduct of the organisation; §16 introduces the idea of power as the chance that directions given by the director of an organisation will be obeyed; and so with §17 we arrive at the conception of a “state” as an organisation with a director and a staff dedicated to the business of rule in a particular geographical area. Linking back to §5, what the state monopolises is “legitimate physical force in the execution of its orders”—and politics is described as “the appropriation, expropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government.”

Weber is interested in the regularity and perpetuation of social action, and constructs this framework as one that can comprehend any scale or type of social relationship. He works extremely systematically with a core of basic concepts—action, “chance,” orientation, organisation, rule, administration, staff, institution, legitimation. His sociology starts from individual action, classifies the type of rationality that it represents, argues for the possibility of understanding rational conduct, and then adds to this epistemological prologue the concepts and categories that can be used to analyse social, economic, and political forms. This framework is carried over to the second chapter, which shows how economic action is necessarily social and so subject to the same constraints outlined in the first chapter, and then in the third chapter the practice of rule is set into a typology. As he states in §4, “sociology is concerned with typologies of such modes of action,” and so Chapter 3 relates in this way to Chapter 1. Here we can see how these chapters drafted in the months before Weber’s death can be distinguished from the earlier drafts: what we have here are the analytical components that make these other “special sociologies” possible.

1. Translated as “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” Sociological Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1981): 151–80. All footnotes in the following translation are editorial additions, and incorporate full details of abbreviated references that Weber occasionally inserted into the body of the text. Parenthetical comments made by Weber in the text are moved to footnotes and identified with Weber’s initials.