We explain what comprehensive theory is and how it explains human behavior. Also, who was Max Weber, its creator.
What is Weber's comprehensive theory?
In sociologyComprehensive theory is known as the current of thought proposed in the work of the German Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the great classics of sociological thought. It addresses the society from a point of view neglected so much by the school Marxist as by the followers of Emile Durkheim: individual decisions, subjectivity and rational actions.
According to Weber's theory, the conduct of the people it is largely determined by imitation or antagonism towards the behavior of others, but not entirely, since there are individual factors, both rational and emotional, that determine it.
However, when subjects give their individual behavior a subjective meaning in direct relation to the behavior of others, that is, when their individual behavior becomes part of a community sense, they form what Weber called "social action". .
Thus, social actions acquire a public meaning that determines our experience of them: getting married, for example, is an individual act in our lives, but it is connected to a whole series of social, cultural, even religious considerations that are largely determined by the collective. Individual acts, then, are private, but social actions are collective.
Weber, from there, concludes that society is a set of significant actions that are experienced both individually and collectively.To understand it as a whole, it is necessary to pay attention to the motivations of people and the meaning that social actions have for them.
In this, Weber's comprehensive theory moves away from Marxism, for example, which assumes the accumulation of material goods and power as the fundamental motivation of people's actions.
This theory was published by Weber in his book Economy and society. Comprehensive Sociology Outline of 1922, considered among the most important texts in the sociology of the 20th century.
However, this book remained unfinished because death surprised Weber in 1920, until his widow, sociologist and legal historian Marianne Schnitger, partially completed it. Hence the book lacks an overall unity and is interpreted in many different ways by Weber's followers.
Finally, it is important to remember that Weber defended a consideration of sociology as a science interpretive, that is, a science that could only interpret its object of study, and not come up with demonstrable objective conclusions, something to which the positivism of the time.
Therefore, despite the fact that social actions generate empirically measurable consequences, the meaning they have within society is entirely subjective, and is subject to ethnic, climatological, religious, etc., variations.
Who was Max Weber?
Max Weber worked as a lawyer and as a university professor.
Max Weber is considered one of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Born in Erfurt, Prussia, in 1864, he studied law, economy, philosophy and history and served as a lawyer and as a university professor in the chair of political economy at the universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg.
His thought, of an anti-positivist nature, goes into the economic field as well as into the religion and the government. particularly his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism explains the importance of Protestantism in the rise of capitalism, hand in hand with bourgeoisie European.
He was the founder of the German Sociological Association in 1909 and editor of leading German sociological journals. He died of pneumonia in Munich, Germany, in 1920.