Abstract

Literary study has been thought incapable of progress because its aims and standards were thought to depend too highly on the value assumptions of the culture which fostered it to permit progress across cultures and across centuries. Max Weber proposed a strategy for working toward objective knowledge and progress in the social sciences generally, which can be applied to literary study. The Weberian strategy is to make the value assumptions behind a given theory explicit. Applying the Weberian strategy to literary study will enable us to make our knowledge of literature and of literary study more objective because we can replace a model of chaotic and incommensurable work with a model of competing research programs in literary study and we can then learn to compare and improve these programs.