# 15 Weber on the scientific conception of The State, and other concepts
When we inquire as to what corresponds to the idea of the “state” in empirical reality, we find an infinity of diffuse and discrete human actions, both active and passive, factually and legally regulated relationships, partly unique and partly recurrent in character, all bound together by an idea, namely the belief in the actual or normative validity of rules and of the authority-relationships of some human beings towards others. This belief is in part consciously, in part dimly felt, and in part passively accepted by persons who, should they think about the “idea” in a really clearly defined manner, would not first need a “general theory of the state” which aims to articulate the idea. The scientific conception of the state, however it is formulated, is naturally always a synthesis which we construct for certain heuristic purposes. But on the other hand, it is also abstracted from the unclear syntheses which are found in the minds of human beings. The concrete content, however, which the historical “state” assumes in those syntheses in the minds of those who make up the state, can in its turn only be made explicit through the use of ideal-typical concepts. Nor, furthermore, can there be the least doubt that the manner in which those syntheses are made (always in a logically imperfect form) by the members of a state, or in other words, the “ideas” which they construct for themselves about the state … is of great practical significance.
The history of the social sciences is and remains a continuous process passing from the attempt to order reality analytically through the construction of concepts — the dissolution of the analytical constructs so constructed through the expansion and shift of the scientific horizon — and the reformulation anew of concepts on the foundations thus transformed. It is not the error of the attempt to construct conceptual systems in general which is shown by this process — every science, even simple descriptive history, operates with the conceptual stock-in-trade of its time … It is the end and the goal of every science to order its data into a system of concepts, the content of which is to be acquired and slowly perfected through the observation of empirical regularities, the construction of hypotheses, and their verification, until finally a completed and hence deductive science emerges. For this goal, the historical-inductive work of the present-day is a preliminary task necessitated by the imperfections of our discipline.
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, The Free Press, Macmillan, 1949 [pp. 99, 105-6]