Ideal types

Sociologists are not professional advocates. They treat values as key parameters of contemporary sociological analysis which establish what we want to measure. This does not mean sociology expects them to be realised, any more than we would expect a cucumber to be straight just because we measure its length. Almost the contrary.

There is nothing extraordinary about this linkage of science and value. What is surprising is that a positivist view of objectivity, that science and values were not associated, should have held sway for so long. It could only do so by insisting that the meaning of ‘equality’ in nature and society was different. This is nonsense: 1=1 in both cases and for all conditions whatsoever. What does differ is our interest in equality, whether we strive for it in some special area, or whether we measure how far conditions of some kind approximate to it. We can for instance measure income differentials, or we can strive to reduce them. We are concerned in each case with the same condition of inequality. It’s a measured fact and a value condition at one and the same time.

The result is that it is impossible to do sociology without engaging with social inequality, for all sciences undertake measurement of equalities and inequalities in their own sphere of interest. Interest in society unavoidably involves measuring social inequality. Sociology is therefore inherently critical as its opponents rightly perceive. If you want to leave society undisturbed by critical accounts then sociology has to be suspended.

It is inherent in our research that we show the conditions and causes of inequality, the varieties of unfreedom and how communities are formed. We might then have the chance to be more effective in our interventions. In this section we review the core ideas in contemporary sociological theory under three main headings: mediation, sociation, and structuration. These roughly parallel liberty, equality and fraternity. Indeed the affinities between the old terms and the jargon might well prompt us to question the need for the new.

However, though the old terminology has its place in political rhetoric sociology’s concern has been to find the conditions for their realisation and it is these realities to which our technical terms refer. Sociological theory is concerned both with the logic of social relations and also with their reality. This is important because the logic leads us into unending chains of reasoning and we need to know when to stop for practical purposes. For research and other practical purposes we stop when we feel we have gained sufficient understanding of a concrete configuration.

So if we take power we try to elaborate its sense in the abstract, which means for any time and place. It is then purified of contamination by local or ephemeral features. But if we want to understand the power of Rupert Murdoch or George Soros, then we need to know how power is lodged today in the ownership of global capital, control of mass media corporations, and how it operates through global financial institutions.

Relations between people operate through the shared experience of an outside world. All social relations work through this medium. The only relations which do not are mathematical or logical. In this sense there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ social relation. This doesn’t mean to say that we don’t look for purity, but it is always something which is negotiated in real social relationships. And the reality comes through feelings, ideas and objects. Strip away these features of the real world and you are left with abstractions.

If, for instance, we consider equality and inequality in a pure sense this is a mathematical notion. As social relations they always have to be expressed in terms of differences in opportunities, talent, wealth, or esteem. If we consider liberty, which can also be expressed mathematically as a constant, a factor which is unaltered by changes in other factors, then in human affairs this has to be seen in terms of independence in respect of others, and then it becomes always a matter of degree.

Fraternity is more difficult to express mathematically because it is paradoxical, but we do so in the statement ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’. We are dealing with effects which only operate when units of an aggregate operate together. Eight people combining to lift an object will achieve much more than each one of them taking it in turns. The combination of capitals works in the same way as the most important collective force of modernity.

Mathematics and logic are tremendously powerful tools for scientific work, but they are aids to understanding society, not to be confused with its reality. Weber pointed out that if we have pure, clear concepts we can advance our understanding. He called them ‘ideal types’ because they were pure ideas (like the ‘straight line’) never to be found in their purity in the real world.

From the scientific viewpoint ideal types are not ideals to be pursued, though they might well be for some people. For Weber the most important ideal type was the purely rational economic agent, and economics has become the most successful social science in applying models of pure rationality. But no person or firm, however much they might seek to be so, is purely rational. No room is ever truly square as anyone who has tried to fit a carpet has found.

Weber was right to emphasise the essential uses of pure concepts but he neglected the fact that it is not only scientists and intellectuals who work with pure notions. People do so in everyday life. This criticism was made by the sociologist, philosopher and banker Alfred Schutz in one of the most important books in sociology. He emphasised that we all interact on the basis of stereotypes, or typifications, images of our society, idealised versions of ourselves and others, hate objects as well as heroic figures.

Weber would have replied that these everyday concepts are less than purely rational. But Weber was over-impressed by the pure logic of economics and the clarity of legal formulations. Economists and lawyers are not necessarily the most successful business people. As a practising banker, Schutz was aware that ordinary people also work on the basis of their own ideals and pure concepts and try to make them work out in practice. His work only became widely known in sociology in the 1960s, and with its stress on everyday rationality provided a major justification for finding out how people actually behave, which had an affinity with the democratic demands of that time. As so often happens political movements and intellectual insights found points of common concern.

As soon as we talk about ‘everyday rationality’ it becomes clear that we are dealing with a vast variety of ways in which people conceptualise familiar ideas. We can talk of ‘the family’ in the abstract but even within a particular society no one family is identical to another.

If we are going to talk sensibly about families and to theorise about them then we have to recognise this diversity.

We will acknowledge different types of marriage, types of relationship which are similar in many respects, like partnership or cohabitation, and the fact that some people are not in any of these. We will recognise the cultural relativity of the family and not expect there to be one right way. We will keep clear in our minds the difference between the ideal we might have of the family and a pure concept as employed by sociologists.

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