While by the early twentieth century major advances had been made in establishing population regularities in ‘volitional phenomena’ through new methods of data collection and analysis, little attention had been given to the basis on which such regularities were to be explained. Lexis had made a start in the context of his critique of Quetelet but it was Weber who, over the course of several large-scale studies of agricultural and industrial labour in contemporary Germany and of his work on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, played a crucial role in insistingon methodological individualism and indevelopingthe concept of erklärendes Verstehen.Explanatory narratives of established population regularities had to be provided in terms of the action of individuals that could be understood - made intelligible – in terms of the at least subjective rationality that was involved. This led to his proposal of sociology as ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.’

Toh presents an overview of the relation between legal positivism and meta-ethical theories, arguing that philosophers of law, debating the nature of law, can gain insights from a study of meta-ethics, and that one such insight, a methodological insight, is that legal philosophers can and should follow moral philosophers and give up (what he refers to as) the double-duty presumption, that is, the presumption that theories of (the nature of) law must also give answers to the usual type of questions concerning the interpretation and application of the law.

Max Weber’s influence on currents of thought over the past century has been profound and far-reaching. This chapter surveys four main areas of impact: the philosophy of the social sciences; class, economy, and rationalization; religion, culture, and social change; and power, politics, and the nation-state. A concluding section addresses the contemporary status of Weber’s thinking regarding the “rise of the West” and its place in world history.

Austin Harrington is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. His recent publications include German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2020).