Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises, and the Methodology of the Social Sciences

It is evident that the richness of thinkers like Weber and von Mises cannot be fully captured in a short paper. In 1971 Walter G. Runciman said that the bibliography about Max Weber’s methodology consisted of about 600 works1. In the early 1970’s Wolfang Schluchter and Guenther Roth added that an additional one hundred essays were written every year2. Twenty years have gone by since. Thus, the attainment of complete knowledge of Weber’s thought is almost unachievable. Besides, in a recently published book, Wilhelm Hennis, who knows Weber’s work very well, affirms that “seldom has anyone had such bad fortune in the avoidance of misunderstanding. The libraries written on the ‘Weber thesis’ would otherwise never ever have been written”. And he continues: “Hence Weber has to be read fresh and ‘without prejudice’. And that means the entire corpus of his work”3. Hennis shows us a new and unsuspected Weber. For him, Weber would not be one of the fathers of the sociology, but rather belongs to the tradition of the classical practical or moral sciences4, since he is interested in human nature and the kind of life caused by modernity5. This interpretation is quite different from the usual one -he realizes6-, but his knowledge and his arguments are so convincing that we have to take them into account. Hennis’s essays could constitute something of a turning point in the hermeneutics of Weber’s work. Nevertheless I shall quote him as one opinion, together with those of the traditional interpretations. Von Mises’s work is almost as extensive as the one of Weber. Thus, the following paper will use the original texts and only some of the secondary literature.