Key Arguments

• He states that he "deviate[s] from the method Simmel adopted" in works such as Soziologie and Philosophie des Geldes by drawing "as clear as possible a distinction" between intended and objectively valid meaning.
• He criticizes Simmel for not only sometimes failing to make this distinction but "often deliberately" allowing the two to run together, implying that Simmel’s method blurs levels of meaning that Weber regards as analytically separate.
• This declared deviation indicates that, for Weber, rigorous sociology requires separating the subjective meaning held by actors from meanings that are valid or significant from an analytical or historical standpoint.

Source Quotes

Stammler, Wirtschaft und Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung, together with my critique of it in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. 24 (1907),5 which contains the foundations of much that follows here. I deviate from the method Simmel adopted in his Soziologie and Philosophie des Geldes6 in that I make as clear as possible a distinction between intended and objectively valid “meaning,”7 a distinction that Simmel not only sometimes fails to make but often deliberately allows to run together. §1. Sociology, in the meaning understood here of a word often used in quite different senses, shall mean: a science that in construing and understanding social action seeks causal explanation of the course and effects of such action.

Key Concepts

• I deviate from the method Simmel adopted in his Soziologie and Philosophie des Geldes6 in that I make as clear as possible a distinction between intended and objectively valid “meaning,”7
• a distinction that Simmel not only sometimes fails to make but often deliberately allows to run together.

Context

Methodological remark in the preamble to 'Basic Sociological Concepts,' where Weber differentiates his interpretive-sociological method from Simmel’s by emphasizing a dual level of meaning in social phenomena.