Personality and Institution - Reflections on paradigmatic structures in Max Weber’s thinking

Abstract

The structure of scientific revolutions - if we follow Thomas Kuhn - is characterized by crises of knowledge and chances by changes of paradigm, a term that is mostly outside the natural sciences only used metaphorically. But also, in sociology, there are something like paradigmatic premises, questioning, research strategies, conceptual structures and perspectives of research in the competition between successful major theories. At least that could be said of Talcott Parsons’s system theory in the period after the Second World War, maybe also of the Critical Theory or later of the approaches of Niklas Luhmann or Pierre Bourdieu. Against this background, the publishers of the Max Weber complete edition, especially Wolfgang Schluchter and his students, were concerned with establishing a “Weber paradigm” more than half a century after the death of this “Myth of Heidelberg”. The essay proposes a combination of Weber’s concept of action with the development of (institutional) forms of order and their enforcement. The prerequisites of the Weber Renaissance since the 1970s are discussed and then a systematization of Weber’s questions based on its “basic sociological concepts” and their logic of grading are proposed. Aspects of a Weber Paradigm are developed from a presentation of the basic principles of the “Theory and Analysis of Institutional Mechanisms”, because the institutional analytical method was proven in various research contexts, especially in the interdisciplinary research of historians and social scientists.

Keywords

• max weber; institution; concept of action; interpretative sociology; paradigm