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In one of his best-known statements, Max Weber (1948: 280) proclaimed that 'not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently, the "world images" that have been created by "ideas" have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest'. This passage has often been interpreted as Weber's attempt to navigate between instrumentalist and idealist epistemologies. Hence, the metaphor of the 'switchmen' stands for the notion that self-interested actions cannot be decoupled from the already-established 'images of the world' that we all have in our heads. The 'switchmen' metaphor has also been understood differently, with some, such as Parsons (1975: 668), insisting that focus on the 'world images' indicates that Weber ultimately privileges ideas over interests. Others, such as Hechter (1976), argue the opposite and see Weber as the epitome of a materialist scholar who still invokes the centrality of 'interests'. Nevertheless, these debates have overemphasised the agent's motivation and have largely neglected Weber's key pointthe historicity of social phenomena. In other words, Weber makes a cas

Published

2019

Language

EN