<ARTICLES>W. Schluchter's Reconstruction of the Weberian Research Program: Weber-Reception in the Context of Contemporary Sociological Theory (2)

This paper examines how Wolfgang Schluchter, in his later works culminating in Grundlegungen der Soziologie (2006/07), tackled the problems unsolved in his early work, Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus (1979): how to locate appropriately the Weberian research program among the competing sociological approaches and how to reconstruct the Weberian approach as a research program encompassing both micro- and macro-sociology. It also clarifies how his relationship with the major theoretical frames of reference has changed in the course of the development of his Weber-interpretation. As for the reconstruction of Weberian theory of societal development, Schluchter, while recognizing a strained coexistence of evolutionary and comparative approaches in Weber, found a model of "stages with alternatives" in Weber's comparative historical sociology, whereas in his earlier writings an emphasis was clearly placed on the evolutionary approach. In the second half of the 1990s, Schluchter came to present Weberian research program as the one integrating theories of action, order, and culture. Increasingly convinced of the incompatibility between action theory and system theory, he ceased to borrow conceptual schemes from Luhmann, Habermas and the later Parsons, and introduced a "multi-level model" originating from the rational choice theory as a basic framework for the reconstruction of Weberian research program. From the outset Schluchter does not, as R. Münch claimed, aim at synthesizing different sociological approaches. What he consistently engages himself in is to demonstrate the actual effectivity of Weberian sociology by clarifying its differences from major contemporary sociological theories, which were also used for digging out its potentiality