Ideal Types

"An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct." (p. 90)

"Its function is the comparison with empirical reality in order to establish its divergences or similarities, to describe them with the most unambiguously intelligible concepts, and to understand and explain them causally." (p.. 43)

"In order to penetrate to the real causal interrelationships, we construct unreal ones." (pp. 185-6)

"However, the `onesidedness'and the unreality of the purely economic interpretation of history is in general only a special case of a principle which is generally valid for the scientific knowledge of cultural reality. The main task of the discussion to follow is to make explilcit the logical foundations and the general methodological implications of this principle."

Sociology's Eternal Youth

"Moreover, there are sciences to which eternal youth is granted, and the historical disciplines are among them--all those to which the eternally onward flowing stream of culture perpetually brings new problems. At the very heart of their task lies not only the transciency of all ideal types but also at the same time the inevitability of new ones....The history of the social sciences is and remains a continuous process passing from the attempt to order reality analytically through the construction of concepts--the dissolution of the analytical constructs so constructed through the expansion and shift of the scientific horizon--and the reformulation anew of concepts on the foundations thus transformed." (pp. 104-5)