Weber, together with Émile Durkheim, is generally regarded as the founder of modern sociology as a distinct social science. Of the two, his work is the more complex and ambitious, still providing a rich source for interpretation and inspiration. His life, too, possesses a certain fascination. A mental breakdown in 1897 was followed by four years of intellectual inactivity. His wife Marianne was an early feminist, and the Webers were the heart of the most impressive intellectual circle in early twentieth-century Germany, centered on regular Sunday seminars at their Heidelberg home. Max Weber's contribution to sociology was immense. He offered a philosophical basis for the social sciences; a general conceptual framework for sociology; and a range of learned studies covering all of the great world religions, ancient societies, economic history, the sociology of law and of music, and many other areas. Whereas Durkheim's attempt to found a science of sociology was based on the scientific positivism of his day, Weber's intellectual training was in the neo-Kantian school of philosophy associated with the names of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, dominant in Germany at that time. This philosophy involved a radical distinction between phenomena (the external world we perceive) and noumena (the perceiving consciousness). In Weber's sociology, this became a distinction between the natural and social sciences, the latter concerned with the forms in which we apprehend the world. Thus, whilst we might wish to establish universal laws in the natural sciences, this was not the task of the social sciences-since their interest is in the causal explanation and understanding of social actions in their particular historical contexts.
At the same time, human society was not a matter of chance but of 'probabilities', and what made social science possible was the fact that human beings act rationally for at least a large part of the time. (Oakman, Douglas E (2005)
The proper object of social science, then, is social action: action directed towards significant others and to which we attach a subjective meaning.
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