In 1833 Carl Menger published a book on the methodology of the social sciences in which he sharply criticized the “historical school” of political economists.  Gustav von Schmoller, one of Weber’s teachers in Berlin, drafted a response to Menger that precipitated a prolonged dispute in German academic circles about the methodological status of the social sciences. Menger was a supporter of classical economic theoryand a defender of the British school of positivist economics.  He argued that the social and cultural sciences should seek “exact laws” describing causal relationship between observable phenomena.  Menger believed that the methods of the social sciences should be the same as those of the natural sciences.

Members of the historical school, like Whilhelm Roscher (1817-1894) and Karl Knies (1821-1898), Weber’s professor at Heidelberg, held that the social or economic life of a nation could not be understood in terms of ahistorical and transcultural abstractions. These “historicists” pointed out that “economic man” – as posited by  classical economic theory – was the product of historical circumstance.  According to the historicists, the meaning of “rational” economic decision making can be understood by the economist only when specific and unique contingencies affecting human choice are taken into consideration.  In short, the historicists believed that an understanding of the consequences of social action could not be severed from the study of a nation’s culture and history. 

Throughout the nineteenth century German scientists acknowledged that different types of methodology were appropriate for the natural and the human, or cultural, sciences.  The conception of this divergence in epistemology can be traced back to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).  Kant agreed that the methods of the natural science give us true knowledge about the external phenomenal world – the world we experience through our senses. He pointed out, however, that the knowledge we have about ourselves as potentially free subjects is qualitatively different from our knowledge of external and impersonal physical objects and forces in the universe.  Human subjects have free will : Their action is not determined in the same manner as the motion of objects like atoms and molecules.

Hence, for Kant, moral philosophy was a vitally important task, for such philosophy explored the very basis of humankind’s social being.  Moral philosophy, however, is not based on the meaning or significance of empirical data; it involves reflection on moral axioms that appear to be innate and are understandable without reference to human experience.

Weber agreed with Kant that intellectual analysis and moral understanding were two quite different modes of thought or reason.  Thus he believed that the human intellect is useless in distinguishing between good and evil.  (In fact, he liked to point out that intellectuals were not particularly adept at making moral judgements.)  On the other hand, Weber also believed that the Hegelian conflation of facts and values (what is and what ought to be) was indefensible.  For Weber, it was axiomatic that sociology could not derive ethical imperatives from the study of cultural values. Sociology can tell us about the consequences of our value commitments, but it cannot tell us whether these effects are good or bad.  This later assessment involves moral reasoning, and Weber agreed with Kant that empirical analysis and moral judgement are incommensurable.

As an epistemologist, Kant showed how scientific knowledge is possible – that is, why it is the subjects can attain secure and reliable knowledge about causal relationships among physical (but not cultural or historical) objects in the world.  The historicist, Dilthey,whom Weber met in his father’s house in Berlin, tried to do for the human sciences, like history and sociology, what Kant had done for natural science.  Dilthey, who was probably the most prominent member of the “historical school”, viewed the “historical sciences” as wholly dependent on interpretive, not positivistic, theory.  He pointed out that human history is the result of the human freedom to create an infinite number of “cultural objects”, including legal systems, political institutions, and aesthetic works of art.

Dilthey explored the logical foundations of cultural history by investigating how the historian could explain a particular epoch by showing how it defined and limited what human subjects find meaningful.  He showed that historical explanation rediscovers the way in which actors respond to a meaningful cultural order created by them.  According to Dilthey, human subjects are intelligible as unique historical actors, not as objects driven by impersonal forces.  Thus the methods of positivism are completely inappropriate for cultural history.

Dilthey’s project was taken up and carried further by the neo-Kantian Rickert.  Ricker agreed with Dilthey that we know cultural and historical phenomena by understanding the meaning of cultural objects affecting how subjects think, feel, and act.  Unlike Dilthey, Rickert did nor try to make a sharp division between science ­– by which he meant objectively verifiable knowledge – and human studies.  He insisted, however, that, whereas the natural science search for general and nomothetic knowledge, the task of th cultural or historical sciences is to try to attain ideographic understanding – that is, such science should try to comprehend hermeneutically the meaning and effect of particular cultural objects within specific historical settings.

Throughout his career as a sociologist, Weber carried out an explicit and implicit dialogue with the neo- Kantians and the historicists.  Weber was strongly influenced by Simmel’s work on the epistemological foundations of social thought.  He agreed with Simmel that meaningful social action is not truly thing-like or extrinsic for subjects but emerges within a social interactional process.  However, Weber rejected both Dilthey’s and Rickert’s claim that general categories of analysis did not exist for the human or cultural science.  Yet, although he denied that the methodology of the human science must be different from that of the natural sciences.

As a young man, Weber was introduced by his mother to the work of the American Protestant theologian William Ellery Channing  (1780-1842), a founder of the American Unitarian Association.  Although he was not a believer in Christian dogma, Weber was strongly influenced by Canning’s theological writings.  Canning argued, that intellectual vigor, analysis, and clear thinking is associated with the life of free men.  According to Channing, “the life of communities is subject to the same moral law as the life of individuals.”

In her biography of Weber, Marianne Weber notes the parallels between Kantianism and Unitarianism. In describing Channing  ’s significance of Weber, she points out that both Kant and Channing believed “that the purpose of political and social institutions is the development of an autonomous [free] personality.”  According to Marianne Weber, this was a “conviction that remained with Weber all his life……..”

Until the 1960s most American sociologists liked to think of Weber’s sociology as being antithetical to Marx’s and often claimed that Weber had refuted Marx’s materialist conception of history.  Although Weber did give more weight to the role of ideas in historical change than did Marx, and although he did try to show that Marx had overemphasized the overaching usefulness of the concept of mode of production.   As a young scholar Weber was exposed to Marxism largely through secondary sources, and at the end of the nineteenth century many of Marx’s German follower’s treated him as if he were a strict economic determinist. 

The contemporary American theorist Irving Zeitlin has suggested that “Weber’s analysis is not so much a refutation as it is an adaptation of Marx’s theory to twentieth-century conditions.”  Weber largely accepted Marx’s conclusions about the significance of capitalism in the modern world.  It was Weber’s belief that “it has been attainment of economic power which has always inspired a class to realize its claim to political leadership.”  He even conceded that “the decisive foundation common to the capitalist private enterprise system” is the “separation” of all kinds of workers from “the means of production in the economy.”

At the same time, however, Weber’s interest in the effects of bureaucratization and rationalization were designed in part to show that alienation in the modern world was not merely the result of the capitalist mode of production.  Weber understood that sociology had to deal with subjects raised by Marx, for these were the critical issues of the day.  In the final analysis Weber’s work complements rather than refutes Marx’s.