Fun With Ideal Types

I am a big fan of Max Weber, the pioneering sociologist. He had very good advice for would be social engineers. Sociologists, he wrote, could inform public policy by helping to explain what unforeseen impacts proposed legislation or regulations might have, or helping policymakers to calculate the costs of proposals, or rendering opinions on whether policy would have the desired effects. Sociologists could not, however, tell you whether any particular policy or outcome was desirable. In other words, sociology is about what is, not what ought to be.

Another valuable contribution of Weber was his method of constructing Ideal Types as devices for generating sociological questions. An Ideal Type is not ideal in the sense of being desirable; rather, it is ideal in the sense of being unreal, a heuristic useful for thinking about social structure. For example, Weber wrote extensively about what a bureaucracy or a number of other social structures would look like if they conformed to their Ideal Types. In constructing Types, Weber assumed perfect rationality, and research questions arose whenever the actual social structure deviated from what perfectly rational human beings would produce.

I find Weber’s Ideal Types useful for thinking about society even now that I no longer engage in social science except of the strictly armchair variety. I am just another “folk” social scientist trying to navigate a complex social environment. One of the problematic aspects of the device, and what makes it fun, in my view, is that, in order to determine what a perfectly rational human being would do, you have to make some important assumptions about the goals of your theoretical humans. What do you reckon your ideal bureaucrat wants to accomplish? Having decided that, you then determine what a perfectly rational bureaucrat would do under the circumstances to reach those goals. If your real bureaucrat does something different from what you predicted, you have some explaining to do.

One of my favorite mental games is to think about human action that deviates from type by assuming that I got the goals wrong. If you assume that the actor intended the outcome he got, that is one way to explain deviations from type. For example, think about the debacle in Iraq with the assumption that the Bush regime intended everything to happen pretty much as it did. Instead of theorizing that Bush and his minions were incompetent, picture them as evil geniuses. We can’t know what is in another’s mind or what motivates him, but we can judge him by the fruits of his actions, and I find that the evil genius assumption helps me make sense of the actions of the regime. If they were just incompetent, wouldn’t you expect them to get something right occasionally purely by accident? And how is it that every major “failure” of the regime results in increased resources and power for the very people who failed?

Another favorite sociologist of mine is the late MG Smith, whom I consider Weberian to the core. Smith criticized the way sociologists speak about the “function” of social structural elements as if there were some collective motivation at work. For Smith, it was more appropriate to speak of the “effects” of such elements, and he regarded “effects” and “functions” as synonymous. It is fun to think about organizations as functioning to produce some perverse effects. For example, is it the function of the Homeland Security apparatus of the US to render the US less secure by diverting security resources to useless activities? Is a primary function of the US military to redistribute the treasure of the American people to various well-connected contractors? Do political parties function primarily to reduce the number and ideological diversity of candidates for public office?

To me, the world makes so much more sense when I assume a relatively high degree of rationality even when that means acknowledging a lot more evil in the world than I would like to.