Key Arguments

• Weber explicitly allows that social action includes omissions and tolerance, not just active doing, as long as it is meaningfully oriented: 'Social action (including refraining from an action, or tolerating a situation) can be oriented to the past, present, or future anticipated action of others.'
• He clarifies that orientation can be temporal in three directions: 'revenge for earlier assaults, resistance to present assault, defence measures taken with respect to future assaults'.
• He broadens 'others' beyond face‑to‑face partners to indefinite collectivities, as in the money example: the actor accepts money because he 'orients his action to the expectation that very many other people who are unknown and of indeterminate number will be prepared in the future to accept it in exchange'.
• By including such impersonal expectations, he shows that modern institutions like money are grounded in social action even where interaction partners are not known individually.

Source Quotes

The Concept of Social Action 1. Social action (including refraining from an action, or tolerating a situation) can be oriented to the past, present, or future anticipated action of others (revenge for earlier assaults, resistance to present assault, defence measures taken with respect to future assaults). These “others” can be individual and familiar, or indefinitely numerous and quite unfamiliar (e.g., “money” signifies an exchange good that the actor accepts in an exchange because he orients his action to the expectation that very many other people who are unknown and of indeterminate number will be prepared in the future to accept it in exchange).

Social action (including refraining from an action, or tolerating a situation) can be oriented to the past, present, or future anticipated action of others (revenge for earlier assaults, resistance to present assault, defence measures taken with respect to future assaults). These “others” can be individual and familiar, or indefinitely numerous and quite unfamiliar (e.g., “money” signifies an exchange good that the actor accepts in an exchange because he orients his action to the expectation that very many other people who are unknown and of indeterminate number will be prepared in the future to accept it in exchange). 2.

Key Concepts

• Social action (including refraining from an action, or tolerating a situation) can be oriented to the past, present, or future anticipated action of others (revenge for earlier assaults, resistance to present assault, defence measures taken with respect to future assaults).
• These “others” can be individual and familiar, or indefinitely numerous and quite unfamiliar (e.g., “money” signifies an exchange good that the actor accepts in an exchange because he orients his action to the expectation that very many other people who are unknown and of indeterminate number will be prepared in the future to accept it in exchange).

Context

Opening of §II 'The Concept of Social Action', where Weber concretizes his earlier formal definition of social action with temporal and interpersonal scope, including the example of money.