Commentary on Guy Oakes's Paper on "Max Weber and the South German Neo-Kantians".

Guy Oakes, in one of his introductions to his translations of Max Weber, points out that it is surprising that Weber wrote so many epistemological essays, given his principled preference for substantive work. The use of the historical individual and the ideal type specifies the principles of selection of the problem to be investigated, always with reference to the value relevance of a historian and his age. Thus, the historical individual and the ideal type are constructed by the investigator to create a relatively standard criterion for selecting the facts that in total are infinitely richer than the historical individual or the type itself. Their use can only reveal aspects of empirical reality from the standpoint of a value-relevant problem, but they can never reveal the total reality itself.