Max Weber, Action, and Sociological Explanations: Methodological Individualism in Sociology

For Max Weber, sociology is supposed to lead to the understanding and interpretation of social action and to explain the processes and consequences of social action. This means that a sociological explanation is not complete when it uses only collective or social factor. Sociological research should take into account and connect both individual and social factors. In this paper, the implications and models of this methodological individualism are discussed. In research based on methodological individualism, data and dependencies have to be found and reconstructed on both the micro and the macro level. As a fundamental guideline, we can say that sociological explanation has to show how the social situation influences the actor, why and how he acts, and what the emergent collective result is. By answering these questions, a sociological explanation has to take into account the logic of the situation, the logic of selection, and the logic of aggregation (generalisation).