Radical Values
Radical Values: The Interests of People and Their Social-Political Implementation
English | 2025 | ISBN: 3658475498 | 823 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 6 MB
English | 2025 | ISBN: 3658475498 | 823 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 6 MB
A famous and frequently quoted sentence by Max Weber states: “Interests, not ideas, directly govern the actions of people. However, the ‘worldviews’ created by ‘ideas’ have often determined the paths in which the dynamics of interests propelled action.” Recent sociology, however, has not done justice to this principle. Values and their effects are either assumed to be given (as in the case of Talcott Parsons) or considered entirely irrelevant (as in Rational Choice and System Theory). Extensive empirical research on values has yielded many results but has largely lacked a theoretical foundation, making its findings often contestable. Weber himself provided only unsatisfactory answers regarding the relevance of values: The decision for specific values is a purely individual matter, and there is an irreconcilable struggle between different values.