No social science can pretend to understand and explain the behaviour of the real human being in the totality of his life. This holds true, of course, for economic science and for sociology. Both disciplines conduct their analyses on the basis of an ideal-type of man shaped by their independent and dependent variables. In the domain of natural sciences, the discrepancy between empirical reality and scientific constructs is taken for granted and does not surprise anybody. As Ralf Dahrendorf put it, ‘we do not much care that the table, the roast, and the wine of the scientist are paradoxically different from the table, the roast, and the wine of our everyday experience’. Indeed, for all practical purposes, scientific reasoning does not play much of a role in the world of everyday life. A table is quite a convenient support if we want to lean on it and a physicist would not change our perception by observing that it is in fact ‘a most unsolid beehive of nuclear particles’.

Two Ideal-Types

As soon as we deal with human affairs, on the contrary, scientific constructs do interfere with our beliefs and our actions. Economists' and sociologists' interpretations of human attitudes and behaviours have a potential influence on social life by affecting decision making. Decisions made on false premises lead unavoidably to wrong expectations and to unintended consequences.