Understanding Social Life. The Method Called Verstehen

125 Pages·1975·13.568 MB·English

by  Outhwaite, William

Controversies in Sociology
edited by
Professor T B Bottomore and Dr M J Mulkay
2
Understanding
Social Life
m the same series
Social Theory and Political Practice
by Brian Fay
Understanding
Social Life
The Method called Verstehen
by
WILLIAM OUTHWAITE
Lecturer m Sociology Ummaty of Sussex
London
George Allen & Unwin Ltd
Ruskm House Museum Street

Preface
The issues with which this book is concerned have received httle
systematic discussion m the English-speaking world Even the word
Verstehen has no really satisfactory English equivalent 'Under-
standing' is rather too broad, 'interpretative method' (the term
preferred by Karl Mannheim) is less ambiguous but clumsy I have
therefore used the German word m its various forms (e g the adjec-
tive verstehende) throughout the book, sometimes translating it as
'interpretative understanding' (or just 'understanding' where the
sense seems sufficiently clear)
The concept of Verstehen is most commonly encountered m
discussions of the work of Max Weber and m works on the
philosophy of social science There is, however, so far as I know, no
historical account m Enghsh of the development of the concept and
the way it was used by writers m various disciplines—theologians,
classical philologists, historians and. philosophers of history, and
finally psychologists and. sociologists H P Rickman's Undetstanding
and the Human Studies raises some of the philosophical issues in-
volved, but in only a very general way Modern analytic philosophers
m the Anglo-Saxon world are showing an increased interest m these
questions Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science is an extremely
bold restatement of a verstehende position in philosophical terms
derived from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein G H von
Wright, m his Exploitation and Understanding, discusses some of the
questions which anse in the essentially German tradition with which
I shall largely be concerned, here Karl-Otto Apel, in his Analytic
Philosophy of Language and the Geisteswissenschaften argues that
analytic philosophy is moving closer to the central concerns of this
'human sciences' tradition
Of the pioneers of a verstehende approach to historical and social
reality, only Max Weber has been at all fully translated, and much
even of his work is still not available m Enghsh (including some
important methodological essays) Selections from Dilthey's work
are available in H A Hodges's Wilhelm Du they An Introduction
Rickman has also published a selection which includes a useful
glossary of Dilthey's central concepts, entitled Meaning m History A

1
Introduction
The concept of interpretative understanding or Verstehen was at the
centre of the methodological debates carried on by German-speaking
historians and sociologists m the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries The idea of an interpretative verstehende
method, which could be set against the method of causal
explanation, encapsulated a characteristically German hostility to
the 'positrastic' social thought of France and England, represented
by men like Auguste Comte and J S Mill1
The concept of 'understanding', then, is the nub of a long-standing
theoretical controversy about the sort of method which is appropriate
to a social science On the one hand, there are those who argue that
social science should follow as closely as possible the well-tried
methods of the natural sciences and look for general laws m social
life This was the view expressed by Comte, Mill and (m a rather
different way) Karl Marx, who wrote, 'Natural science will one day
incorporate the science of man, just as the science of man will
incorporate natural science, there will be a single science'2 But
where Marx envisaged a rapprochement of the two sorts of science,
the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle3 meant by 'unified science'
1 Leszek Kolakowski s Positmst Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972)
is a good general account of positivism in its many different forms
2 Karl Marx 1844 mss In T B Bottomore and M Rubel (eds), Kai I Marx
Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1963), p 85 Marx's position is discussed in Chapter 5
s On the Vienna Circle and the 'unified science' movement which grew out of
it, see L Kolakowski, op cit, and O Neurath, 'Unified Science as Encyclopedic
Integration , International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol .1, No 1 (Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1938)
Neurath's view of sociology is clearly expressed in an essay 'Empirical Socio-