The essays in this collection represent a plea for a structuralist-individualistic theory in sociology which evolves from the concepts of action, order and culture combined with a methodological individualism, embedded in a multi-level and two-sided model. Based on the approach of a sociology of Verstehen, which Max Weber developed, Wolfgang Schluchter examines the basic principles of a sociology of Verstehen, the relationship of comparison and developmental history, the way in which ideas work themselves out in history, the role of ethics from a normative and an empirical point of view and the limited capacity of the social sciences to make reliable predictions. In the second part, dedicated to problems of application, he deals, among others, with questions related to German reunification and the reform of the German university system.
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