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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (42844)	6/30/1999 11:44:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

Weber always struck me as one who decided what he wanted to think and went out to construct a logical edifice around it. Oh, unfair, unfair! I can't think of another sociologist/social philosopher/whatever you want to call it who was more painfully aware of the dangers of bias. I found Weber's comments on the problem of bias more illuminating than practically anything else I have read on the subject. His point, basically, was that complete objectivity is impossible (although it should be striven for). The best you could do, he said, was to be aware of your bias (most people are not), and to allow for it in your investigations. I happen to agree with that. Where Weber's work on religion & capitalism is concerned, you are right, but for the wrong reasons. What Weber said he was going to do -- and did -- was to take Marx's view of religion as arising from economic phenomena, run the string of causation in the opposite direction (economic phenomena arising out of religion), and see what happened. It had nothing to do with his personal beliefs. He just thought (and again I think he was right) that it might be illuminating to look at the same developments in a different way. He never said it was the "only" way to look at them. Joan