Blackwell Reference Online

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The notion of an ideal type is best known to sociologists through the work of Max Weber, although it was a term in common usage in nineteenth-century German historical social sciences. It was designed to solve the problem of comparison. A historical event cannot be described without reference to the persons involved and to the place and date of its occurrence. Thus, all historical events were unique and one could only tell specific local stories. Forcing these into some overall framework would usually prove, at worst, ideological and, at best, would do violence to the integrity of local detail. What an ideal type captures is meaning: what counts for history is always the meaning of the people concerned in its production and interpretation. As Leopold von Mises (1976 : 60) argued in his Epistemological Problems of Economics : An ideal type cannot be defined: it must be characterized by an enumeration of those features whose presence by and large decides whether in a concrete instance we are or are not faced with a specimen belonging to the ideal type in question. It is peculiar to the ideal type that not all its characteristics need to be present in any one example. Whether or not the absence of some characteristics prevents the inclusion of a concrete specimen in the ideal type in question, depends on a relevance judgment by understanding. The ideal type itself is an outcome of ... log in or subscribe to read full text