Hermeneutics of the State

If Max Weber defines Sociology as a science “that seeks interpretative understanding of social action, and hence causal explanation of the course and effects of such action”, 2 it has to be asked whether the state can be described in terms of the action-oriented perspective of a hermeneutic sociology of Verstehen ; and if so, what might such a description look like? The category of action that is elaborated with such virtuosity in the chapter on “Basic Sociological Concepts” is central to the registration, definition and explanation of sociological phenomena. That is also true for the phenomena of power and rulership, state and politics: here for Weber everything can be reduced to “action.” When formulating programmatically his conception of action, he puts forward the decisive premise that “Action, in the sense of meaningfully understandable orientation of one’s own behaviour, is for us always understood as the behaviour of one or more individual persons,” since for the interpretative understanding of action by means of sociology individual persons are the sole understandable agents “of meaning-related behaviour”. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Action (physics) · Epistemology · Hermeneutics · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Premise · Sociology · State (computer science) · Verstehen · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory