History and Sociology: An Analysis Of Weber's The City

Abstract

There is a tension between History and Sociology in which the historian tends to focus on the concrete historical reality while the sociologist focuses on increasingly abstract models. This tension is resolved in historical sociology where implicit sociological paradigms are derived from and applied to concrete historical reality.

In his study The City Weber practices a true historical sociology in contradistinction to the formal theoretical sociology developed in his Economy and Society. In The City Weber develops implicit sociological paradigms of the group, power, and the relation between economics and politics that are nowhere to be found in his formal theoretical sociology, and that indeed, in some instances, contradict the latter.

In The City Weber also utilizes an historical paradigm that resolves the tension between History and Sociology by way of a dialectic in which the sociological paradigm becomes a pure heuristic which is negated at the moment when the historical sociologist returns to the contemplation of the concrete historical reality.