Emil Lederer: Zum Methodenstreit in der Soziologie

Emil Lederer’s methodological journal article, originally published in 1925 and republished in 2014, reconstructs Max Weber’s interpretive sociology to expose a problem within its achievement: dissolving institutions into meaningful social action does not by itself yield a concept of society. Across fourteen numbered sections and an intervening methodological discussion, Lederer moves from understanding and causal explanation through a classification of social action to the conceptual construction of institutions, social powers, and society. His central claim is that sociology cannot reach its object through factual description alone. It must employ theoretical constructions while testing their adequacy against historical reality.

Lederer begins with sociology’s unsettled object and consequently divergent methods. Weber offers a starting point because he treats action through its subjective meaning without abandoning causal explanation. An action is simultaneously a physical occurrence and motivated conduct: describing the movements involved in retrieving a windblown hat does not explain what the participants are doing. Understanding supplies motives—including affects and unconscious impulses—as causes within the sequence of events.

Die Deutung menschlichen Handelns aus dem vom Handelnden gemeinten Sinn hebt die kausale Erklärung nicht auf, macht sie vielmehr für die ganze Sphäre des menschlichen Handelns erst möglich.

English translation: Interpreting human action through the meaning intended by the actor does not abolish causal explanation; rather, it first makes such explanation possible for the entire sphere of human action.

Social action specifically orients itself toward other people’s conduct. Lederer reads Weber’s sociology as seeking its essential and typical configurations, rather than universal laws. Yet almost all human activity is socially oriented, so this definition remains too broad to delimit an independent science. His proposed ordering distinguishes singular action, recurrent or stereotyped action, institutionalized action, and complexes of institutions called “social powers.” These groupings depend on meaningful connections, not merely outward similarities.

Institutions are continuous systems of recurrent, mutually related actions. Their persistence requires material and intellectual apparatuses, a sustaining staff, and orientation toward norms. Sociological validity means the probability that conduct follows a norm, not the norm’s rightful claim to obedience. Participants’ belief that their institution exists as a transpersonal entity also enters the explanation. The sociologist must account for that belief without adopting it. The Russian army’s dissolution in 1917 demonstrates the distinction: buildings, administrative personnel, records, and regulations cannot constitute an army once the relevant conduct ceases.

Lederer connects this attack on conceptual realism to Marx’s analysis of human relations confronting their creators as apparently independent powers. But he then qualifies any ambition to strip description of inherited concepts altogether. His deliberately cumbersome account of a military salute becomes intelligible only because readers already understand soldiers, officers, discipline, and punishment.

Ohne diese Begriffe mitzudenken, wäre diese soziologische Reduktion des Tatbestandes auf das, was ‚ist‘, gar nicht möglich.

English translation: Without also thinking these concepts, this sociological reduction of the state of affairs to what “is” would not be possible at all.

Concepts are therefore more than misleading coverings. They organize inquiry and belong to actors’ own consciousness, helping motivate the conduct being investigated. Sociology must dismantle their reification without eliminating their meaningful content. The same difficulty becomes sharper with social powers such as state, church, and economy. Institutions cannot be grouped into these wholes through description alone; an organizing principle must identify their shared purposes and characteristic relationships. Such concepts also overlap: a purchase belongs to economic relations while presupposing legal guarantees.

These organizing concepts are historically bounded. Weber’s state defined through monopolized coercion cannot simply characterize a medieval order with multiple independent power centres. Sociology’s distinction from specialized disciplines consequently lies less in freedom from construction than in its treatment of constructions: it examines their realization and departures from them, while retaining the interaction of phenomena that disciplinary abstractions isolate.

Nicht also zu konstruieren, wie es die Einzelwissenschaft tut, sondern die Konstruktion an den Tatsachen zu kontrollieren.

English translation: Thus, not to construct, as the specialized discipline does, but to test the construction against the facts.

This formulation condenses Lederer’s methodological wager. Concepts make experience intelligible, but facts constrain which concepts can organize it adequately. He leaves the underlying epistemological problem unresolved while explicitly presupposing that objective checking is possible.

Society emerges when social powers form an internally connected system, through leadership by one power or intensive reciprocal determination. It is neither their aggregate nor a further substance above them. Its existence must be established historically; Lederer consequently regards industrial society as less integrated in this sense than medieval or ancient society. Culture concerns realized ideas in intellectual life, whereas society concerns principles embodied in institutions and powers. Their correspondence opens a route toward universal history, without making sociology identical to cultural history.

The closing sections qualify that result. A historical system of social powers does not yet provide a general theory of society or explain the relation between individual and society. Lederer interprets Weber’s resistance to comprehensive unity as “heroic resignation”: admirable personal discipline that risks becoming passive acceptance of facts when generalized. He defends the legitimacy of striving to shape history without claiming that this establishes a scientific theory. Tönnies, Marx, French sociology, and natural-scientific approaches indicate further theoretical possibilities. The article’s enduring methodological contribution is its insistence that interpretive analysis needs explicit construction, and that construction remains answerable to historical evidence.