Ридер КВ часть 2 / ПОЛИТСОЦИОЛОГИЯ / Вебер / Norkus - Max Weber's Interpretive Sociology and Rational Choice Approach / Norkus - Max Weber's Interpretive Sociology and Rational Choice Approach

MAX WEBER’S INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY AND RATIONAL CHOICE APPROACH

Zenonas Norkus

ABSTRACT

This article aims at substantiating two theses: (1) Weber’s programmatic metatheoretical texts contain a description of the method of socioscientific explanation, which anticipate a specific version of the Rational Choice Approach (RCA) in contemporary sociology, and (2) it is possible to distinguish two versions of this description; the first, however, being closer to the RCA than the second. The late Weberian outline of sociological theory of action is reconstructed out of his famous typology of action.

KEY WORDS ∙ interpretive sociology ∙ Max Weber ∙ rational choice approach ∙ sociological explanation ∙ theory of action

1. Introduction

Theoretical discussion in the field of sociology over the past two decades has been largely influenced by the growing popularity of the methodological line of thought known as the Rational Choice Approach (RCA). Starting out as ‘economic imperialism’, this view is becoming increasingly popular in sociology. Some advocates of the RCA tend to justify the new approach in part by referring to specific programmatic scientific claims by Max Weber, which are interpreted as an anticipation of RCA. In one of the most recent exchanges between defenders and critics of RCA, Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter even designated their version of RCA as analytical Weberianism (Kiser and Hechter 1998: 798).

The aim of this article is to systematically examine the points of convergence and divergence between conceptions of sociological explanation in Weber’s Verstehende Soziologie and in RCA. In section 1, I outline the differences and affinities between the two approaches. These

Rationality and Society Copyright © 2000 Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. 12(3): 259–282. [1043–4631(200008)12(3); 259–282; 013478]

observations are then specified and defined with consideration of the internal distinctions of RCA (in section 2) and the modifications of Weber’s concept of interpretive sociology (in section 3). These modifications are assessed as thoroughgoing enough to distinguish two versions of Weber’s interpretive sociology, the earlier one being closer to RCA than the later, which founds the tradition of specifically ‘sociological’ action theory.

2. Interpretive Sociology as a Meta-Theory of

Sociological Explanation

Weber famously defined sociology as ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences’ (Weber 1922/1968: 4). If we read this definition retrospectively from the perspective of the RCA, two things stand out: (1) Sociology is not defined here by a specific subject area, which would distinguish it from other social sciences, above all economic science, but by the description of an explanatory method.

(2) As I will show, this definition merely contains the description – already familiar to sociological circles – of a schema of sociological explanation as a macro–micro–macro transition (Figure 1), which can be found in all introductory accounts of the leading principles of RCA.1 It may also be of historical interest and relevance that this schema was first published in The Achieving Society, by McClelland, where it is used to illustrate the Weberian methods of argument in his work ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (McClelland 1961: 47). This schema was adopted by James S. Coleman2 and has, with slight modifications, become a type of trademark of RCA in sociology.

In this scheme, the correlation of two (or more) macrosociological variables (represented in Figure 1 by the dotted arrow) is explained through the micromechanism of their relationship, by deducing that the explanandum is a collective consequence of individual actions (right arrow). These individual actions are explained as the consequences of acts of rational choice (bottom arrow), which are completed in the macrosocially determined situations (left arrow).

In the simplest case, a sociological explanation consists of three steps that link the variables of the macro-level to those of the micro-level: (1) from the logic of the situation, in which the relationships between the state of the social system – as the field of activity of individual agents – and their expectations and wants are analysed; (2) from the logic of

Figure 1. ‘Deep’ Sociological Explanation

selection, in which the choice of actions is explained by the expectations and aims of the agents; (3) from the logic of transformation, which, through the deduction of the collective consequences of individual actions, returns to the macro-level of the sociological facts to be explained.

Those three steps of sociological explanation are found in the Weberian definition of sociology presented earlier. The interpretive understanding of social action can be identified with the reconstruction of the subjective definition of situation. This reconstruction results in a macro–micro transition starting from the accepted rules, institutionalized world views, and uniformities that an agent observes in the pursuit of ideal and material interests. It is this step that creates the premises for a causal explanation of the course of social action within the context of the logic of selection at the micro-level. Weber specifically claims that the causal explanation of social action has two, not one, explananda. Both the course and the consequences of social action have to be explained. In Weber’s view, therefore, the explanation of the course of social action is not an end in itself but a means to explain its effects, i.e. the collective or social consequences. After all, interpretive sociology is, by definition, concerned with the explanation of social action. These collective effects could even be unintentional or contrary to the intentions of the agent. ‘The final result of political action often, no, even regularly stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. This is fundamental to all history, a point not to be proved in detail here’ (Weber 1919/1948: 117; see also Weber 1922/1968: 585–6).

The third principal idea in Weber’s concept of interpretive sociology, the one that confirms its status as the anticipation of RCA, is his persistent claim that instrumentally rational (zweckrational) action in the interpretive understanding of social action always has methodical priority or

primacy. An interpretive understanding of social action must always begin by asking how an instrumentally rational agent, whose expectations are objectively rational (richtigkeitsrational) would act in a given situation. These expectations are based on comprehensive and accurate information on the situation. The answer to this question constitutes a sort of zero hypothesis, which should be the starting point for the explanation. Similar to present-day advocates of the RCA, Weber recommends this initial hypothesis both for economic science as a way of explaining the behaviour of market participants, and for an interpretive understanding of other forms of action.

In working out a concrete causal explanation of individual events, the procedure of the historian is essentially the same. Thus in attempting to explain the campaign of 1866, it is indispensable both in the case of Moltke and of Benedek to attempt to construct imaginatively how each, given fully adequate knowledge both of his own situation and of that of his opponent, would have acted. Then it is possible to compare with this the actual course of action and to arrive at a causal explanation of the observed deviations, which will be attributed to such factors as misinformation, strategical errors, logical fallacies, personal temperament, or considerations outside the realm of strategy. Here, too, an ideal-typical construction of rational action is actually employed even though it is not made explicit. (Weber 1922/1968: 21)

However, there are at least three distinctions between the Weberian concept of interpretive sociology and the methodological views of RCA. Jon Elster pointed out the first of these distinctions:

The two main theorists of rationality in the social sciences are, I believe, Max Weber and John Neumann. One of Weber’s main legacies to the sociological tradition is the notion of instrumental rationality, or ends–means rationality. Rationality is to choose the best means for a chosen end, given the initial conditions. The assumption of given conditions I refer to as the assumption of a parametric environment, and the corresponding notion of rationality as parametric rationality. (Elster 1979: 68)

Elster is therefore of the opinion that Weber does not have a concept of a strategic or game-theoretic rationality. However, this concept is essential, for example, in order to make explicit the ‘ideal-typical construction of rational action’ of Benedek and Moltke in the war of 1866. In the above citation, Weber clearly shows no sense of the game-theoretical problems that emerge if one attempts to demonstrate what ‘fully adequate knowledge both of his own situation and of that of his opponent’ actually means in the case of Moltke and Benedek. Weber’s concept of instrumentally rational social actions is that of parametric rationality. The agents in his interpretive sociology are ‘oriented to the past, present, or expected future behavior of others’ (Weber 1922/1968: 22) but do not take into consideration how they determine by their expecta-

tions the expectations of their counterparts, whose object is their own expectations.

Weber’s particular interpretation of instrumental rationality also influenced his stance on the principle of methodological individualism, which he passionately defended in his foundational theoretical writings. Weber’s belief in methodological individualism is shared by the modern advocates of RCA: If sociological explanation is defined as a macro– micro–macro transition, it results in the application of the principle of methodological individualism. Therefore, I want not to treat this as a another one common feature shared by RCA and Weber’s interpretive sociology but, on the contrary, to emphasize the different ways that this principle is interpreted in each case. The principle of methodological individualism can be expressed as follows: All collective facts can and should be explained as consequences of individual action. This principle is the standard for assessing socio-scientific explanations and indicates the direction in which they could and should be improved.

However, two readings of methodological individualism exist: the strict reading and the weak one.3 The individualistic ‘deep explanation’ is weak if the logic of a situation is described to already include the facts of the institutional rules. On the other hand, social theorists can be classified as advocates of strict methodological individualism, provided they attempt to explain the existence of the social system on the basis of a hypothetical presocial state. In this case, the initial conditions of the explanation of individual action must not include the description of sociological institutional rules. The issue is how, as a public good enabling agents to cooperate, these rules are created and continue to survive. This problem can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes. It is the concept of strategic rationality in modern game theory which allows this strict, individualistic problem to be raised once more and elaborated in the context of the RCA. Weber was a passionate advocate of methodological individualism, but did not hold such a radical individualistic position. He was solely interested in the typology of uniformities of the social order and their transformations. It is perhaps worth citing a pertinent remark by one of Weber’s interpreters at this point: ‘no action begins at a social zero state, but is always interwoven with macroconditions. One can therefore change the sequence in the “Basic Concepts in Sociology” [ Economy and Society, Weber (1922/1968: Ch. 1)] and begin with the paragraph on social structures and regularities’ (Schwinn 1993: 235).

The third point of divergence between the RCA and Weber’s interpretive sociology relates to the following question: What should one do if

the zero hypothesis of the objectively rational action, which always enjoys the advantage of the greatest clarity and certainty (Evidenz) or ‘adequacy on the level of meaning’ (Weber 1922/1968: 9, 11) does not prove causally adequate, i.e. if it is contradicted by the actual course of action? What should replace the discarded zero hypothesis? At this point, Weber introduces the concept of subjective instrumentally rational action. These are actions that, although optimizing and maximizing by intention, contain misinformation, strategical errors, maybe even logical fallacies in their actual determinants (Bestimmungsgründe ) (Weber 1922/1968: 312). Thus, the observed deviations of the action in its actual course from its objectively rational course are explained by the hypothesis that the action was in fact instrumentally rational, but only in relation to the subjectively, not objectively, defined situation.

Weber’s concept of subjective instrumental rationality is both complex and fascinating. It is fascinating because it can be linked to the current discussion on substantive and procedural, perfect and bounded rationality. Because of the limitations of space, I confine myself to the minimum of detail needed for a systematic classification of Weber’s views.4 The key question regarding this set of problems is the following: how strictly must one formulate the conditions for attributing (subjective) rationality? If we formulate these conditions very strictly, comparatively few examples of human behaviour can be included in the concept. A good example of this type of formulation of attributive conditions of instrumental rationality is the theory of subjective expected utility. The theory was developed by Frank P. Ramsey and Leonard Savage and explicates the concept of rational decision under risk. The rational action is defined here as an action that maximizes the agent’s expected value. According to the theory, an agent can act rationally, that is in a maximizing or optimizing way, only if his intentional system – i.e. all his wants and beliefs – fulfill specific formal, extremely strict conditions. The wants of the agent should be consistent and manifested in an order of preference that is complete, transitive, continuous, etc. The theory is about the ‘subjective’ rationality, because it allows to attribute the subjective rationality to an agent whose decision is premised on false beliefs. It is not the truth but the degree of belief that matters. This degree of belief is defined as subjective probability. As we all know, even false statements can have a high degree of subjective probability and be an object of firm conviction. Even an action influenced by such beliefs can be classified as instrumentally rational as long as these beliefs are synchronically and diachronically consistent, which they are if the subjective probabilities that quantitatively express the degree of

belief of an agent at a specific time fulfill the axioms of the probability calculus. The beliefs are diachronically consistent if an agent learns from new experiences updating the degrees of his beliefs in the manner described by the Bayesian Rule.5

Agreement still does not exist as to how often the intentional systems of agents fulfill all of the consistency conditions. Experiments in cognitive psychology have produced a long list of systematically recurring discrepancies between the observable decision-making and the consistency conditions, formulated by the theory of subjective expected utility. These deviations are called anomalies of rational choice. Most social scientists who subscribe to the RCA remain cool to these findings, pointing instead to Sir Karl Raimund Popper, who argues for the autonomy of the social sciences from psychology: he recommends the method of situational analysis to the social sciences.6 Popper’s remarks on the matter are interesting regarding Weber’s concept of subjective instrumental rationality on two grounds: (1) His views on the method of situational analysis were probably directly influenced by Weber,7 and

(2) he formulates the conditions under which social action can be seen as instrumentally rational as loosely as possible. In this respect, his conception and the theory of subjective expected utility form to a certain degree the two polarities between which Weber’s theory is situated.

Similar to Weber, Popper recommends that the socio-scientific explanation begins with the zero hypothesis of the objectively rational action, and where deviations occur to revert to subjective instrumental rationality. Contrary to Weber, however, he does not allow this assumption to be dismissed under certain conditions. All conceivable deviations in the course of action from that which was presupposed as instrumentally rational are seen not as evidence that the agents did not act rationally, but as evidence that the explanation was based on erroneously specified initial conditions. In other words, ‘deviations’ merely show that a researcher has not adequately reconstructed the logic of the situation. On the one hand, Popper supports his argument by formulating the rationality principle as vaguely and noncommittally as possible: ‘agents always act in a manner appropriate to the situation in which they find themselves’ (Popper 1976/1994: 172). On the other hand, he understands that the situation is not the objective situation but the situation as subjectively defined. In his view, the beliefs and wants of the agent constitute part of the situation. ‘We must remember, of course, that the situation, as I use this term, already contains all the relevant aims and available relevant knowledge, especially of the various possible means to achieve these aims’ (Popper 1976/1994: 169).

Whether an action is rational or irrational is decided solely by its appropriateness or inappropriateness in relation to the subjectively defined situation. It does not matter how the subjective definition of the situation was produced or how it was justified. Popper is only consistent when he claims that even the actions of a madman are rational in this sense: ‘and understanding his actions means seeing their adequacy according to his view – his madly mistaken view – of the problem situation’ (Popper 1976/1994: 179).

At this point, the intuitions of Popper and Weber diverge, because Weber repeatedly defines psychopathic behaviour as irrational and maintains that it can only be explained psychologically, as in his example of the behaviour of the late Friedrich Wilhelm IV (Weber 1903–6/ 1975: 137). Weber’s definition of (subjective) instrumentally rational action is, however, broad enough to subsume a certain action inspired by a belief in magic or sorcery:

Rubbing will elicit sparks from pieces of wood, and in like fashion the mimetical actions of a magician will evoke rain from the heavens. The sparks resulting from twirling the wooden sticks are as much a ‘magical’ effect as the rain evoked by the manipulations of the rainmaker. Thus, religious or magical behavior or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic. Only we, judging from the standpoint of our modern views of nature, can distinguish objectively in such behavior those attributions of causality which are ‘correct’ from those which are ‘fallacious’, and then designate the fallacious attributions of causality as irrational, and the corresponding acts as ‘magic’. (Weber 1922/1968: 400)

The conditions under which an action can be considered subjectively instrumentally rational are not as strict in Weber as in the theory of subjective expected utility, but neither are they as loose as in the Popperian concept of situative rationality. In recent years, the well-known French sociologist Raymond Boudon has repeatedly attempted to connect Weber’s concept of subjective instrumental rationality with his own cognitive model of rationality (Boudon 1987, 1991, 1994: 1–55, 1995, 1996; see also Boudon 1986/1988). In his view, the subjective rationality is only ostensively definable: ‘behaviour is rational when it can be explained by a sentence beginning ‘X had good reasons for doing Y, because …’., without risking objection, and without oneself having the feeling of having said something incongruous’ (Boudon 1994: 255). The word because should be immediately followed by the description of the beliefs of the agent that motivated his behaviour. Boudon illustrates his proposed solution to the problem with examples:

Thus, one cannot say: ‘the mother had good reasons to slap the children’s face, for she was angry’. Such an expression gives immediately a feeling of absurdity. One would rather say: ‘the mother had no reason to slap the children’s face, but she was angry’ … By contrast, one would say without meeting resistance: ‘the Puritans had good reasons to invest their profits, since they were convinced that one should refrain from superfluous consumption, and that prosperity in business is a sign of election’. (Boudon 1991: 38)

Whether Boudon can solve the problem of subjective instrumental rationality is more than doubtful. One cannot assume that common sense is a guarantee of consensual evaluations in judges. How, for example, can we judge the reasons of an agent if certain judges have the ‘feeling’ that his reasons are good, and others consider them bad? In situations where such conflicts of intuition arise, explicitly formulated criteria are required to classify an action as instrumentally rational. Nonetheless, Boudon’s proposal contains a grain of truth, which can be predicatively formulated. Behaviour can be seen as subjectively instrumentally rational if the motives can be intersubjectively approved. Or, in Weber’s terminology, the context of meaning (Sinnzusammenhang) (Weber 1922/1968: 5) to which the subjective meaning of the action belongs, should be objectifiable, i.e. communicable and intersubjectively shared. So-called madness is always a dropout of social relationships (soziale Beziehung), which, according to Weber, are constituted by common meaning, into total isolation. Shared madness is no longer madness but a new (micro) Lebenswelt, or subculture. In other words, subjective instrumental rationality can be attributed only to actions that are appropriate with respect to shared definitions of the situation, irrespective of how bizarre and grotesque it may appear to others who don’t accept it. To formulate it in Weber’s own terms: The action is at least subjectively instrumentally rational if its subjective meaning content (subjektiv gemeinte Sinn) can also function as the meaning content of a social relationship.

Weber’s interpretation of subjective instrumental rationality differs from Popper’s interpretation of situative rationality, however, not just in the claim that an action must be appropriate to the nonidiosyncratically, socially defined situation. Weber attributes subjective instrumental rationality only to those actions performed by an agent in the clear and distinctly articulated consciousness of its subjective meaning, i.e. those that are the outcome ‘of rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to the secondary consequences, and finally of the relative importance of different possible means’ (Weber 1922/1968: 26). This condition of conscious deliberation in the choice of action led Weber to the conviction that interpretive understanding

through the hypothesis that the agents (subjectively) acted instrumentally rationally, can rarely be causally adequate:

In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate halfconsciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to ‘be aware’ of it in a vague sense than he is to ‘know’ what he is doing or be explicitly conscious about it. In most cases his action is governed by impulse or habit. (Weber 1922/1968: 21)

In such cases, Weber sees even subjective instrumental rationality as having a purely heuristic function: It serves as a passage to other hypotheses that interpret the action of an agent as value rational, traditional or affective. We are now at a point where the methodological views of Weber differ from those of the majority of advocates of the RCA. If the actual course of the action deviates from that predicted under the assumption of (subjective) instrumental rationality, the majority tend toward Popper rather than Weber. They do not want to abandon the assumption of the agent’s instrumental rationality, but to rescue the explanation based on this assumption by reviewing the descriptions of the primary conditions. They thus specify shadow incentives and shadow prices that were not originally considered. In their opinion, the question whether the behaviour was motivated by conscious deliberation or not is irrelevant for the attribution of instrumental rationality.

3. Weber as a Theorist of the RCA

Despite all of these divergences, Weber’s methodological instructions on how to approach interpretive understanding and causal explanation qualify as an anticipation of the RCA. To qualify, however, two assumptions implicit in my comparison of the two worlds of ideas must be explained and revised. I have viewed both the RCA and Weber’s methodology each as monoliths, disregarding the fact that various interpretations of the RCA exist and, moreover, that Weber’s methodological views have also changed, with the result that two versions of the concept ‘interpretative sociology’ in his work can be distinguished.

Not all social scientists who subscribe to the RCA interpret it as the so-called pure universalism of Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro (1994: 192–4). This interpretation, advocated by, for example, Gary S. Becker, amounts to the conviction that all phenomena of socio-scientific interest can be explained in the framework of the RCA. However, attempts to do so encounter certain problems of explanation or anomalies, which cause many supporters of the RCA to modify their core assumptions or