A Critical Look at Weber’s Interpretative Sociology and Applying His Approach in Research on Historical Sociology of Iranian Society

The main aim of this paper is formulating a theoretical framework, by getting help from Weber’s approach, to apply it while studying the comparative historical sociology of Iranian society. In the first part of the paper, it is attempted to have a selective review of the theoretical perspective of Max Weber.  In this review, in addition to concentrate on the epistemology of modernity and rationality as the main concepts of Weber’s sociology, we considered some important subjects such as the typology of social actions, the interpretative understanding of social facts and the valuable advice of Weberian ideal types. We think that the interpretative understanding of weber’s approach would help us to extend and deepen our understanding of Iranian comparative historical sociology. To obtain satisfactory methodological and theoretical achievements, we studied Weber’s works critically, examined some works on Iran’s social history, and reviewed our long experience of teaching historical sociology. Therefore this paper has attempted to concentrate on the distinguished Weber’s doctrine of ideal types. For us, this doctrine is still a suitable research guideline to prepare an interpretative analysis in historical sociology on the present Iranian society.