Quotes from The Legacy of Max Weber

By Ludwig Lachmann (1971)

• Institutions are very important, but their modus operandi must be examined from a firmly founded praxeological basis rather than taken for granted on the strength of some dubious biological analogy.#
  PoliticsPraxeology
• The method of interpretation (Verstehen) . . . is nothing less than the traditional method of scholarship which scholars have used throughout the ages whenever they were concerned with the interpretation of texts. Whenever one is in doubt about the meaning of a passage one tries to establish what the author ‘meant by it’, i.e. to what ideas he attempted to give expression when he wrote it. . . . It is evidently possible to extend this classical method of scholarship to human acts other than writings.#
  Praxeology
• The question we face [in the social sciences] is not whether such [universal] laws exist, but whether those which do (‘All men must eat in order to live’) are of much help in enabling us to understand how social situations change.#
  Praxeology
• As regards initial situations, a human situation can never be defined exclusively in observable terms because all human action is also concerned with an unknown and unknowable future. . . . Human action cannot be regarded as mere reaction to stimulus. To understand it we have to understand what image of the future the actors are bearing in their minds.#
  EpistemologyPraxeology
• The central problem of the institutional order hinges on the contrast between coherence and flexibility, between the necessarily durable nature of the institutional order as a whole and the requisite flexibility of the individual institution. In other words, this central problem does not become apparent until we come to view the institutional order in the perspective of time.#
  Institutions
• It is impossible for all institutions to change at the same rate, and . . . the relative immutability of some institutions is always a necessary prerequisite for the relative flexibility of the rest.#
  Institutions
• May not the struggle for power among political leaders, even irrespective of their personal qualities, gradually lead to an erosion of those fundamental institutions which circumscribe and limit the exercise of political power? Will not the leaders in the course of the political struggle have to make promises to the electorate which cannot be redeemed without whittling away some of the very institutions on which the democratic process rests?#
  PoliticsInstitutions
• Textual interpretation is the prototype of Verstehen. . . . It will be readily appreciated how little all this has to do with ‘intuition’. The procedure is a rational procedure of discursive study.#
  PraxeologyEpistemology
• It is true that in explaining recurrent patterns of action, the essential subject-matter of all social sciences, we cannot provide such explanation in terms of purposes, as elements of plans, because the purposes pursued by millions of people are of course numbered in millions. But often we are none the less able to provide explanations in terms of the elements common to all these plans, such as norms, institutions, and sometimes institutionalized behaviour, the maximization of profits, or the avoidance of the risk of insolvency. As long as we are able to account for the recurrence of patterns of action in terms of such elements of plans, we are successfully employing the classical method of interpretation.#
  PraxeologyHistory
• No ‘explanation’ which has nothing to offer beyond successful prediction of observable events can satisfy the student of action who wishes to understand it.#
  PraxeologyScience
• While ‘description of the initial situation’ is a fairly innocuous requirement in nature, where all we have to do is enumerate objects in time and space, for human action this requirement cannot be met because we should have to include something unspecifiable—knowledge! A human situation without specific knowledge makes no sense. It follows that the ‘scientific method’ of the natural sciences will be of little use to the student of action because he is unable to use the testing procedure this method prescribes.#
  SciencePraxeology
• The relationship between plan and action is not the simple one of cause and effect, but the complex one of interaction between mental acts and observable events.#
  Praxeology
• Those whose minds are too absorbed by the problems of the day are unlikely to be good prophets.#
  Proverb