Excerpt from The Structure of Social Action

In a sense the present work is to be regarded as a secondary study of the work of a group of writers in the field of social theory. But the genus secondary study comprises several species; of these an example of only one, and that perhaps not the best known, is to be found in these pages. The primary aim of the study is not to determine and state in summary form what these writers said or believed about the subjects they wrote about. Nor is it to inquire directly with reference to each proposition of their theories whether what they have said is tenable in the light of present sociological and related knowledge. Both these questions must be asked repeatedly, but what is important is not so much the fact that they are asked, or even answered, but the context in which this takes place. The keynote to be emphasized is perhaps given in the subtitle of the book; it is a study in social theory, not theories. Its interest is not in the separate and discrete propositions to be found in the works of these men, but in a single body of systematic theoretical reasoning the development of which can be traced through a critical analysis of the writings of this group, and of certain of their predecessors. The unity which justifies treating them together between the same covers is not that they constitute a school in the usual sense, or that they exemplify an epoch or a period in the history of social theory, but that they have all, in different respects, made important contributions to this single coherent body of theory, and the analysis of their works constitutes a convenient way of elucidating the structure and empirical usefulness of the system of theory itself.