Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2005, 2 http://www.units.it/etica/2005_2/AGEVALL Thinking about configurations: Max Weber and modern social science Ola Agevall (1 ) School of Social Sciences Växjö Universitet ABSTRACT The article addresses Max Weber’s relevance for modern social science. The first part is a quantitative assessment of Weber’s fate in mainstream sociology; the second part presents an argument that Weber’s work contains elements of combinatorial thinking which makes it suitable for analysis in terms of the methodological apparatus developed by Charles Ragin. On the one hand, it is shown that Ragin’s notation and concepts are useful in bringing out some important features in Weber’s methodology and substantive writings. On the other hand, it is suggested that Weber’s use of configurations extend into areas that have received little attention in mainstream sociology. 1. Introduction The ambition of this special issue of Etica & politica / Ethics & Politics is to assess Max Weber’s relevance for contemporary social science at the beginning of the third millennium. That is a warranted question, but it is too vast in scope to be addressed in one piece. It needs to be sliced up into more manageable chunks. And the question is how. For my part, I would like to begin by taking my cue from Weber’s Science as a Vocation, and indulge in that pedantic custom, peculiar to the empirical scientist, of “always beginning with the external conditions”. (2 ) That is to say, we start out by treating the question as an empirical matter, and ask to what extent elements of weberian thought are present in contemporary social science. This exposition is followed by a discussion where we take leave of the “is” and enter the “ought”. In purely empirical terms, Max Weber has an impressive record. He is rarely absent from sociology textbooks, and there is a bewildering amount of specialist literature on different facets of his work. These categories of writings are no doubt important in their own right. The first provides an index of transmission to future generations of scholars; the second points to the evolution of a separate field of 1