Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation: History, Laws, and Ideal Types (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 103 Clark nowhere attempts to explain how men can be expected to live together in peace and harmony without government. Stirner turns out to be a defective anarchist, in Clark's view, for he has no regard for the values of "commitment, co-operation, and community" (p. 68). So Stirner's usefulness for Clark is limited to his forceful critique of liberalism, the bourgeois state, and authoritarian socialism (p. 97). Such are Clark's convictions. His analysis of Stirner's thought is guided by these premises, which only begin to become explicit on page 63 of the book---over half-way through. In the earlier portion Clark attempts, with about average competence and precision, to refute Stirner's egoism from ontological, psychological, and ethical points of view. The most convincing part of his argument is presented in the chapter entitled "The Ontology of the Ego" (pp. 17-36), where Clark shows without much difficulty that Stirner has no consistent or even plausible conception of the self. In the first place, Stirner cannot make up his mind whether the ego is soul, will, or body: the ultimate egoist lacks even the rudiments of self-knowledge. Second, he cannot resolve the question whether the ego can become other than it is (i.e., whether it can improve itself) or whether it must be as it is. Here Stirner encounters the supposedly discredited Aristotelian distinction between potentiality (dynamis) and completeness (energeia). He cannot admit this distinction (because the ego cannot have a goal or purpose that would imply a defect in its present state) and yet cannot do without it (because the egoist must become self-consciously egoistic if he is to live properly). Clark's discussion of Stirner's ethics (pp. 37-58) is conducted mostly within the bounds set by current anarchist and libertarian scholarship on the question. He shows no awareness of the Kantian and Hegelian arguments that must have been crucial for Stirner himself--to say nothing of the older ethical traditions, stemming from Socrates, on the one hand, and the Bible, on the other, which begin from a quite different understanding of human nature than that upon which nearly all nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethical thought is based. R. W. K. Paterson's recent study (the only other full-length book on Stirner in English) is superior to Clark's, although it tends to take Stirner too seriously.6 The best treatment of Stirner I have encountered is that of L6with in From Hegel to Nietzsche (cited above). I once heard it said of Stirner that he could have been a character in Dostoyevsky's Possessed. That still seems to me a fitting epitaph for a peripheral thinker whose work scarcely deserves the attention lately bestowed upon it. THOMASG. WEST University of Dallas Thomas Burger. Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation: History, Laws, and Ideal Types. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976. Pp. xvii + 231. This is a closely reasoned, well-argued book. Its four chapters deal with Heinrich Rickert's theory of concept formation in the empirical sciences, Max Weber's formulation of this theory, Weber's own contributions, and "Ideal Types, Models, and Sociological Theory." Burger's reason for writing this work was the attempt "to come to grips with the riddle of Max Weber's methodology, and especially the ideal type" (p. xi), which task requires "an adequate conception of the problem situation as [Weber] perceived it" (p. x). This condition has not been appreciated in the vast literature on Max Weber, with "in a way," the exception of Alexander von Schelting's contributions (p. ix). The "riddle" is not spelled out by Burger; in any event, in addition to understanding Max Weber's "problem situation," the author argues as a clue to its solution the 6The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 104 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY "almost total" agreement between Weber's and Rickert's "theory of concept formation and its epistemological foundation" (p. 7). "Since almost all existing interpretations of Weber's methodological writings have failed to see (or to take seriously the thought) that the latter's unity and inner coherence can be found in...