Review of Sociology of the Hungarian Sociological Association [antikvár]

MAX WEBER ON THE METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC THEORY1 In the present essay I want to provide an explication or rational reconstruction of Max Weber's early views on the methodological foundations of economic theory. As a by-product of the analysis, I hope to be able to show that there is a continuity between Weber's not yet fully förmed ideas about the scope and method of economics and his more mature methodological position. My aim is almost purely analytical: I am not going to discuss in detail the historical and intellectual context in which Weber first formulated his methodological creed, and I do not intend to reconstruct or deconstruct the common themes underlying the era's methodological debates (including the different stages of the famous Methodenstreit). By presenting a rational reconstruction of Weber's ideas, I want to demonstrate that a better understanding of his methodological groundwork of the social sciences. Although the technique of rational reconstruction cannot (and does not) offer a unique and preclusive interpretation of the ideas to be explicated, it may contribute to creating the conditions for a rational discussion of alternative point of views. As a starting point for the rational reconstruction to be offered here, I have chosen a relatively early writing of Weber which was first published under the title 'Die Grenznutzenlehre und das psychohpysiche Grundgesetz'" in 1908, in the famous Archív für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. The article was a review essay of Lujo Brentano's Die Entwickelung der Wertlehre , which in turn, was a relatively brief and compact overview of the history of value theory on the one hand, and an exposition of Brentano's own methodological position, on the other. Although this is not the place to go into details, I want to mention that Brentano belonged to a methodological school (the so-called "historische Schule der Nationaloekonomie") the proponents of which argued - as historicists and methodological monists always did - for the basic unity of the social and natural sciences. As a result, they alsó believed that the main cognitive function of the social sciences was to discover universal laws on the basis of empirical studies of society, the economy, and history.4 Psychological reductionism Weber's essay can roughly be divided into two parts. The first part is a devastating criticism of the research program which later came to be know as 'psychologism' or 'psychological reductionism'.5 According to the basic tenet of this program, empirical regularities and explanatory principles in the social sciences, including