The Protestant ethic — a moral code stressing hard work, rigorous self-discipline, and the organization of one's life in the service of God — was made famous by sociologist and political economist Max Weber. In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over (...) salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms. (shrink)

Rudolf von Ihering was the leading German philosopher of law of the nineteenth century. He was also a major source of Weber’s more famous sociological definitions of action. Characteristically, Weber transformed material he found: in this case Ihering attempt to reconcile the causaland teleological aspects of action. In Ihering’s hands these become, respectively, the external and internal moments of action, or intentional thought and the factual consequences of action. For Weber they are made into epistemic aspects of action, the causal (...) and the meaningful, each of which is essential to an account of action, but which are logically and epistemically distinct. Ihering thought purposes were the products of underlying interests, but included ‘ideal’ interests in this category. Weber radicalized this by expanding the category and making it historically central. This radicalization bears on rational choice theory: if ideal interests have a large historical role independent of material interests, and are not fully explicable on such grounds as ‘sour grapes’, the methods appropriate to the study of the transformation of ideas, meaning genealogies in the Nietzschean sense, are central to the explanation of action. (shrink)

The study of rationality and practical reason, or rationality in action, has been central to Western intellectual culture. In this invigorating book, John Searle lays out six claims of what he calls the Classical Model of rationality and shows why they are false. He then presents an alternative theory of the role of rationality in thought and action. A central point of Searle's theory is that only irrational actions are directly caused by beliefs and desires—for example, the actions of a (...) person in the grip of an obsession or addiction. In most cases of rational action, there is a gap between the motivating desire and the actual decision making. The traditional name for this gap is "freedom of the will." According to Searle, all rational activity presupposes free will. For rationality is possible only where one has a choice among various rational as well as irrational options. Unlike many philosophical tracts, Rationality in Action invites the reader to apply the author's ideas to everyday life. Searle shows, for example, that contrary to the traditional philosophical view, weakness of will is very common. He also points out the absurdity of the claim that rational decision making always starts from a consistent set of desires. Rational decision making, he argues, is often about choosing between conflicting reasons for action. In fact, humans are distinguished by their ability to be rationally motivated by desire-independent reasons for action. Extending his theory of rationality to the self, Searle shows how rational deliberation presupposes an irreducible notion of the self. He also reveals the idea of free will to be essentially a thesis of how the brain works. (shrink)

This volume is the first collection focusing on the claim that we cannot but account for emotions if we are to understand the processes and evaluations related to empirical knowledge.

This paper attempts to synthesize the Winchian stress on constitutive rules with the Marxian stress on material relationships by developing the concept of emergently material social relations. Such relationships, it is argued, arise from the constitutive rules that constitute a group's way of life. Although such relationships thus are derivative from the conscious rule-following behavior of actors, nevertheless they have an objective existence independent of actors' specific awareness. It is argued that such material relations are an important mechanism beyond the (...) cultural rules through which our behavior is constrained, enabled, and motivated. Yet the Winchian tradition in general and contemporary structuration theory in particular have tended to peripheralize the notion of material relations, treating them largely as epiphenomenal abstractions. This, it is argued, is a mistake and the source of an important lacuna in structuration theory. In particular, because structuration theory decenters the actor, conflates the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, and peripheralizes social relations, it lacks an adequate explanation of motivation, as symptomized by its inordinate appeal to the unconscious. The concept of emergently material social relations overcomes this problem and offers a reintegration of the Marxian and the Winchian traditions. (shrink)

THE PROBLEM OP KNOWLEDGE l CONCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE An immediate difficulty which faces any discussion of the present kind is that there are so many ...

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. This volume, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from (...) large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behavior. It shows that "context matters" in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account. (shrink)

Weber's methodological writings form the bedrock of key ideas across the social sciences. His discussion of value freedom and value commitment, causality, understanding and explanation, theory building and ideal types have been of fundamental importance, and their impact remains undiminished today. These ideas influence the current research practice of sociologists, historians, economists and political scientists and are central to debates in the philosophy of social science. But, until now, Weber's extensive writings on methodology have lacked a comprehensive publication. Edited by (...) two of the world's leading Weber scholars, Collected Methodological Writings will provide a completely new, accurate and reliable translation of Weber's extensive output, including previously untranslated letters. Accompanying editorial commentary explains the context of, and interconnections between, all these writings, and additional useful features include a glossary of German terms and an English key, endnotes, bibliography, and person and subject indexes. (shrink)

The Explanation of Social Action is a critique of the conventional understanding of methods of explanation in the social sciences. It argues that any scientific approach to explanation must build on the phenomenological experience of actors.

For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. _Interpretation and Social Knowledge_ suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.

In this collection of essays on the core values of liberalism, Stephen Holmes—noted for his scathing reviews of books by liberalism's opponents—challenges commonly held assumptions about liberal theory. By placing it into its original historical context, _Passions and Constraints_ presents an interconnected argument meant to fundamentally change the way we conceive of liberalism. According to Holmes, three elements of classical liberal theory are commonly used to attack contemporary liberalism as antagonistic to genuine democracy and the welfare state: constitutional constraints on (...) majority rule, the identification of individual freedom with an absence of government involvement, and a strong emphasis on the principle of self-interest. Through insightful essays on Hobbes's analysis of the English Civil War in _Behemoth_, Bodin's writings on the benefits of limited government, and Mill's views on science and politics, Holmes shows that these basic principles provide, to the contrary, a necessary foundation for the development of democratic, regulatory, and redistributionist politics in the modern era. Holmes argues that the aspirations of liberal democracy—including individual liberty, the equal dignity of citizens, and a tolerance for diversity—are best understood in relation to two central themes of classical liberal theory: the psychological motivations of individuals and the necessary constraint on individual passions provided by institutions. Paradoxically, Holmes argues that such institutional restraints serve to enable, rather than limit, effective democracy. In explorations of subjects ranging from self-interest to majoritarianism to "gag rules," Holmes shows that limited government can be more powerful than unlimited government—indeed, that liberalism is one of the most effective philosophies of state building ever contrived. By restricting the arbitrary powers of government officials, Holmes states, a liberal constitution can increase the state's capacity to focus on specific problems and mobilize collective resources for common purposes. _Passions and Constraint_ is an assessment of what that tradition has meant and what it can mean today. (shrink)

Heinrich Schenker: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and theorist.

With new enhanced pedagogy, this is a famous translation of a classic book - now available for the first time with "Other Writings on the Rise of the West", a collection of Weber's other diverse writings.