Max Weber's Empirical Sociology in Germany and the United States: Tensions between Partisanship and Scholarship

1969 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guenther Roth

More than any other man of his generation Max Weber remains today influential as well as controversial. Neither intellectually nor politically are scholars done with the man and his work. However, his impact has not been steady over the five decades since his death. At various times Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Sigmund Freud have attarcted more attention and approbation. Among these members of the “generation of 1890”—as H. S. Hughes has called them—Durkheim emerges, in the long run, as Weber's closest rival in sociology. In one respect his reception has outstripped Weber's: he was incorporated with less strain into stuctural functionalism, the only contemporary “school” in American sociology that may deserve the lable. It is indicative of this difference that the Parsonian or Durkheimian approach is often contrasted with the Weberian, usually as a juxtaposition of an integration versus a conflict model of society. However, the Weberian approach has not given rise to a comparable school, perhaps because its practitioners are concerned less than functionalists with a general systems theory.

Alamedas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
Claudio Henrique Nunes de Sena

Este artigo tem como objetivo realizar uma análise sobre a categoria grupo social a partir da articulação teórica entre as ideias de Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel e Max Weber. Tomando uma interlocução epistemológica comparativa entre os três autores, observou-se e apresentou-se neste trabalho interlocuções na caracterização e configuração de agrupamentos sociais. A necessidade dos sujeitos pela participação em grupos, os tensionamentos entre indivíduo e estrutura grupal, a solidariedade, a importância do conflito no grupo, as relações entre dominação e submissão foram temas identificados e debatidos neste texto.


Author(s):  
Gregorio Bettiza

As progress unfolded, religion was supposed to be consigned to the dustbin of history. So argued many of the 19th-century founding fathers of the modern social sciences such as Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. This insight became conventional wisdom as modernization and secularization theorists sought to systematize and theorize more explicitly God’s demise during much of the 20th century. This understanding of an ever more disenchanted world was increasingly challenged from the 1970s onward by a series of events and process that modernization and secularization theories could hardly explain let alone predict. These events included the Iranian revolution of 1979, the rise of the Christian Right in the United States since the late 1970s, the progressive emergence of religious fundamentalisms across most world religions, the role played by a Catholic pope in Europe and the Mujahidin in Afghanistan in the fall of Soviet Communism, a new post-Cold War security environment with its emphasis on the politics of identity, the so-called New Wars, the clash of civilization scenarios, and religious terrorism—all epitomized by the 11 September 2001 attacks—and, lastly but not least, mounting religious controversies in Europe around Christian values in the European Constitution, the hijab in schools, and enlargement to Turkey. These developments have led scholars to reconsider the role of religion in the modern world, reexamine the Eurocentric and universalist premises on which much secularization theory and the very same concept of religion had been based, and reflexively assess the secularist biases through which social scientists generally understand and explain world politics. The study of religion and its twin concept of the secular are thus currently going through a period of great vitality across the social sciences. This bibliography focuses on debates and scholarship within the field of international relations (IR). As the study of religion is by its very nature an interdisciplinary affair, a number of studies from cognate fields that make a direct and important contribution to ongoing debates in IR are also included. The bibliography is organized along six main sections. The first section is a general overview of key books and articles, journals, and online resources in the field. The second section, titled Understanding Religion in IR, explores why the sacred had long been overlooked in IR and a range of ongoing definitional debates in the discipline. The third section, titled Religion and IR Theory, presents three broad perspectives—non-paradigmatic, paradigmatic, and theological—seeking to integrate religion with IR theorizing. The fourth section briefly presents major studies and debates on the Secular and Postsecular in IR. In the fifth section, titled Religion and International Issues, readers are acquainted with work exploring the complex interaction between religion and a range of issues central to the field of IR, such as the sovereign state, war, and peace. The sixth and final section presents work surveying, promoting and critiquing the growing topic of Operationalizing Religion in International Policy.


1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedrich H. Tenbruck

ZusammenfassungDie Soziologie hat sich weitgehend in irreale Betrachtungen verloren, weil sie die „Gesellschaft“ zum Grundbegriff ihrer Analysen gemacht hat. Der Artikel legt dar, wie dieser Begriff anfangs jene willkürlichen Vergesellschaftungen fassen sollte, die durch die Reduktion der korporativ verfaßten Ordnungen auf den modernen Staat entstanden und später durch die Soziologie elaboriert und mit stillen Annahmen umgeben wurden. Während Georg Simmel und Max Weber nie von der „Gesellschaft“ im Sinne der heutigen Soziologie sprachen, kann Emile Dürkheims Argumentation als exemplarisches Beispiel für „Die Geburt der Gesellschaft aus dem Geist der Soziologie“ dienen, wobei die soziologische Konstruktion der „Gesellschaft“ eher dem Bedürfnis nach einer sinnvollen und vorhersehbaren Ordnung galt als der Aufgabe, die Tatsachen in den Blick zu nehmen. Die Soziologie sollte deshalb von ihrer Erfindung der „Gesellschaft“ abrücken, die wohl dem Selbstverständnis der politischen und kulturellen Eigenständigkeit der Nationalstaaten des 19. Jahrhunderts entsprach, aber die wesentlichen Veränderungen der sozialen Wirklichkeit, nämlich das Wachstum der internationalen und transnationalen Vergesellschaftungen aller Art, gar nicht mehr wahrzunehmen in der Lage ist. So verliert die Soziologie, welche über die charakteristische Eigenart und Problematik unserer Zeit unterrichten sollte, immer mehr den Blick für die entscheidenden Vorgänge und zwingt ihre blinden Befangenheiten auch in dem Maße dem politischen Handeln auf, wie sie ihr gesellschaftliches Weltbild in der Öffentlichkeit durchgesetzt hat. Die soziale Konstruktion der Realität ist langst von der soziologischen Konstruktion der Realität überholt worden.


2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Alzira Lobo de Arruda Campos

As ciências humanas discutiram a questão da interdisciplinaridade ao longo do século XX. Mas, já no século anterior, figuras notáveis, como Wilhelm Dilthey e Karl Marx, questionavam-se sobre os paradigmas monistas da explicação e da compreensão. Interrogação reproduzida, entre muitos, por Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Michel Serres. Em Educação, o grupo de Doutorado em Ciências da Educação, de Paris VIII, há 30 anos adotou a multirreferencialidade como metodologia hegemônica.


Author(s):  
Aref Emamian

This study examines the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on the stock market in the United States (US), were used. By employing the method of Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) developed by Pesaran et al. (2001). Annual data from the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, from 1986 to 2017 pertaining to the American economy, the results show that both policies play a significant role in the stock market. We find a significant positive effect of real Gross Domestic Product and the interest rate on the US stock market in the long run and significant negative relationship effect of Consumer Price Index (CPI) and broad money on the US stock market both in the short run and long run. On the other hand, this study only could support the significant positive impact of tax revenue and significant negative impact of real effective exchange rate on the US stock market in the short run while in the long run are insignificant. Keywords: ARDL, monetary policy, fiscal policy, stock market, United States


Author(s):  
Daniel S. Markey

This book explains how China’s new foreign policies like the vaunted “Belt and Road” Initiative are being shaped by local and regional politics outside China and assesses the political implications of these developments for Eurasia and the United States. It depicts the ways that President Xi Jinping’s China is zealously transforming its national wealth and economic power into tools of global political influence and details these developments in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, it describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. Eurasia’s powerful and privileged groups often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, statesmen across Eurasia are scrambling to harness China’s energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investments as a means to outdo their strategic competitors, like India and Saudi Arabia, while negotiating relations with Russia and America. The book finds that, on balance, China’s deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasian states. To make the most of America’s limited influence along China’s western horizon (and elsewhere), it argues that US policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America’s aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.


Nova Economia ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario A. Margarido ◽  
Frederico A. Turolla ◽  
Carlos R. F. Bueno

This paper investigates the price transmission in the world market for soybeans using time series econometrics models. The theoretical model developed by Mundlack and Larson (1992) is based on the Law of the One Price, which assumes price equalization across all local markets in the long run and allows for deviations in the short run. The international market was characterized by three relevant soybean prices: Rotterdam Port, Argentina and the United States. The paper estimates the elasticity of transmission of these prices into soybean prices in Brazil. There were carried causality and cointegration tests in order to identify whether there is significant long-term relationship among these variables. There was also calculated the impulse-response function and forecast error variance decomposition to analyze the transmission of variations in the international prices over Brazilian prices. An exogeneity test was also carried out so as to check whether the variables respond to short term deviations from equilibrium values. Results validated the Law of the One Price in the long run. In line with many studies, this paper showed that Brazil and Argentina can be seen as price takers as long as the speed of their adjustment to shocks is faster than in the United States, the latter being a price maker.


1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert R. Coll

As of 1997, the United States faces an unprecedented degree of security, stability, and economic prosperity in its relations with Latin America. Never before have US strategic interests in Latin America been as well-protected or have its prospects seemed, at least on the surface, so promising. Yet while the US strategic interests are in better shape — militarily, politically, and economically — this decade than at any time since the end of the Second World War, some problems remain. Over the long run, there is also the risk that old problems, which today seem to have ebbed away, will return. Thus, the positive tone of any contemporary assessment must be tempered with an awareness of remaining areas of concern as well as of possible future crises.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric B. Schneider

ABSTRACTBodenhorn et al. (2017) have sparked considerable controversy by arguing that the fall in adult stature observed in military samples in the United States and Britain during industrialization was a figment of selection on unobservables in the samples. While subsequent papers have questioned the extent of the bias (Komlos and A’Hearn 2019; Zimran 2019), there is renewed concern about selection bias in historical anthropometric datasets. Therefore, this article extends Bodenhorn et al.’s discussion of selection bias on unobservables to sources of children’s growth, specifically focusing on biases that could distort the age pattern of growth. Understanding how the growth pattern of children has changed is important because these changes underpinned the secular increase in adult stature and are related to child stunting observed in developing countries today. However, there are significant sources of unobserved selection in historical datasets containing children’s and adolescents’ height and weight. This article highlights, among others, three common sources of bias: (1) positive selection of children into secondary school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) distorted height by age profiles created by age thresholds for enlistment in the military; and (3) changing institutional ecology that determines to which institutions children are sent. Accounting for these biases adjusts the literature in two ways: evidence of a strong pubertal growth spurt in the nineteenth century is weaker than formerly acknowledged and some long-run analyses of changes in children’s growth are too biased to be informative, especially for Japan.


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