Theoria

Of the three patriarchs of sociology (viz., Marx, Weber and Durkheim), it is generally recognized that Marx was both the most humorous and most vicious. While Durkheim reviewed nearly a thousand books in his day (including a famously thorough trashing of a book by Marianne Weber, the wife of Max), his tongue isn’t quite as bitter, vicious or witty as Marx’s. However, I’d like to put forward the ordinarily dour Max Weber as a master of the backhanded compliment:

Those familiar with the literature of this subject will recall the part by by the concept of ‘order’ in the brilliant book of Rudolf Stammler, which was cited in the prefatory note, a book which, though like all his works it is very able, is nevertheless fundamentally misleading and confuses the issues in a catastrophic fashion. (The reader may compare the author’s critical discussion of it, which was also cited in the same place, a discussion which, because of the author’s annoyance at Stammler’s confusion, was unfortunately written in somewhat too acrimonious a tone.) Stammler fails to distinguish the normative meaning of ‘validity’ from the empirical. He further fails to recognize that social action is oriented to other things beside systems of order. Above all, however, in a way which is wholly indefensible from a logical point of view, he treats order as a ‘form’ of social action and then attempts to bring it into a type of relation to ‘content,’ which is analogous to that of form and content in the theory of knowledge. Other errors in his argument will be left aside. [...] Stammler succeeds in introducing a state of hopeless confusion into this very simple empirical situation, particularly in that he maintains that a causal relationship between an order and actual empirical action involves a contradiction in terms.

One wants to read the “too acrimonious” comments – if only for reasons of comparison.