1. What did Durkheim, Freud, and Marx have in common, and how does this contrast with Weber?
2. What did Weber mean by Verstehen? How does this make the study of humans different from the study of nature? Why have some called Weber’s perspective “methodological individualism”?
3. What did Weber mean by “ideal-type”? How would use of ideal-types explain, say, the shift toward Christianization in the Roman Empire (this example is used in the text)?
4. Weber thought it was vital to separate facts from values, and argued that scholarship should be value-free. Pals is not convinced, though, that Weber achieved that. What is Pals’ argument against Weber’s scholarship being value-free?
5. What was Weber’s argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism? In other words, according to Weber, why did capitalism start? How is this different from Marx’s argument about why capitalism started?