‘Average types’

Max Weber:

“It is important to be clear that in sociology ‘averages’ and therefore ‘average types’ can only be formulated with any degree of clarity where it is simply a matter of differences of degree amongst qualitatively similar kinds of meaningful behaviour. Examples of this do occur. In most cases, however, the historically or sociologically relevant action is influenced by a variety of qualitatively different motives which cannot at all be ‘averaged’ in any legitimate sense. The kind of ideal-typical model of social action which is constructed, for example, for the purposes of economic theory is therefore ‘unrealistic’ insofar as it normally asks how men would act if they were being ideally rational in pursuit of economic goals. It does so in order (i) to be able to understand men’s real actions, shaped as they are, at least in part, by traditional restraints, emotional impulses, errors and the influence of non-economic purposes and considerations, to the extent that they are also affected by the rational pursuit of economic goals either in particular cases or on the average; but also (ii) to facilitate knowledge of their real motives by making use of this very deviation of the actual course of events from the ideal type. An ideal-typical model of a consistently mystical and otherworldly attitude to life (to politics and economics, for instance) would have to proceed in exactly the same way. The more sharply and clearly constructed the ideal types are – in other words, the more unrealistic they are in this sense – the better they perform their function, which is terminological and classificatory as well as heuristic.”

From ‘Economy and Society’

Source: MWSIT