Consciousness and Society: Weber, Schutz, Ethnomethodology and Rex

Abstract

Weber’s methodological writings can be viewed as the starting point for much of the twentieth-century debate on the nature, forms and determination of social consciousness. The aspect of Weber’s theory which has placed him at the centre of subsequent developments in this area is the tension in his work between the acceptance of the general principle of causality in social life, and its removal from the sphere of exclusively external relations. In particular, he opposed what he saw to be the ‘more naive’ historical materialist thesis that ‘ideas originate as a reflection or superstructure of economic situations’.¹ Causality, for Weber, is a function of the interactive, motivated plans of individual social actors working in a necessarily social environment and deriving the content of their action orientations from the resources available within it. The task of sociology is to formulate law-like generalisations in which motives have a causal role.