Types

When I was a child, I used to find that my parents would be friendly withour neighbors across the garden fence but talk about “those ardentNazis ” in the privacy of our living-room. Maybe it was such observations of context-related behaviors which I witnessed as a child, which eventually made me into a sociologist. Being a child in the Germany of yesteryear, of course, I would not be considered a person listening in as my parents exchanged their feelings of contempt for the neighbors. Unknowingly, I was engaging in participant observation antici-pating the attitude of the sociologist I was to be. When I overheard with keen atten-tion what my parents were saying to each other in their nightly exchanges of opinions on relatives, neighbors, or strangers, I must have been puzzled about how much situational contexts mattered for taken-for-granted everyday life. Maybe these and other memories of my childhood were the background for my interest in ideal types, the one and only methodological program for modern sociology. From the first day that I came across the works of Georg Simmel and Alfred Schütz, I could not help thinking that they tackled the same problem as did Max Weber. All three analyze, I am convinced, the social as well as sociological world(s) densely populated with ideal types