Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

When we look at something as complex as human cultures, is it
wants? Max Weber argues that it is not and that to understand
society we need a new set of tools, ideal types
we use as lenses to view the world in a way that creates coherent narratives
about it. In this way, we could see the driving force for social change as
either competition or cooperation. Are humans inherently cooperative or
competitive? Or is Ferdinand Tönnies correct that we are both—that we
group against outsiders?
Before the end of the 19 th century, human experience across
the centuries differed little. There was some social change and
technological advancement, but the day-to-day lives of people were
not terribly different from those of their great-great-grandparents.
But in the middle of the 19 th century, technology spurred the
Industrial Revolution and brought profound change to society.
Durkheim had showed that to make sense of this new social reality,
we needed to look at society as an entity to be studied unto itself.
Following Durkheim was the great German thinker Max Weber, who
disagreed with Durkheim when it came to the sociological method.
For Durkheim, sociology should be driven by data;
mathematical regularities would be the foundation of the study,
and theories would be posited to account for those regularities
and make predictions.
Weber, in contrast, thought that although data are necessary,
interpretation should be the hallmark of sociology. Sociology
should work less like physics and more like history, using data
not just to catalogue truths but to make sense of them.
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