I.
INTRODUCTION
Ideal types, Max Weber insisted, are not descriptions of objects in the real world.
They are, rather instruments the social scientist creates to investigate the social world.
Ironically, Weber's very efforts to avoid reification allow a new form of reification in
through the back door. Most social scientists are aware that ideal types are merely
constructs that pick out, indeed exaggerate preselected aspects of social reality.
Nevertheless, a tendency remains to treat them (e.g., bureaucracy, totalitarianism,
types of authority) as if they referred to entities that really exist in the social world.
This article attempts to show how the very attempt to avoid reification by denying
existence to social things results in a tendency to reify the ideal types and other
constructs which social science imposes on social reality. It then suggests how we can
combat the natural psychological tendency to reify concepts by sharpening our notions
of social reality. If we can identify concrete sources of orderliness in social reality, they
can serve as objective constraints on the hypotheses we seek to impose on them.
All science, natural and social alike, strives to simplify and typify the reality it
seeks to represent. The scientist always selects out of an infinite universe of facts only
those which he/she has determined, on priori
а
grounds, to be germane. Once so
selected, the facts become psychologically fused with the conceptual and theoretical
constructs that determined their selection. Even natural scientists commonly confuse
reality as constructed by the theoretical paradigms in which they work with reality as it
really is. This helps explain the recurrent phenomenon of dogmatic resistance to new
theories in the natural sciences that look at reality in a different way. The natural
sciences are by no means free of the problem of reification.
Convention