WEBER, GRAMSCI AND CAPITALISM 5 Again, Asceticism was in turn influenced in its development and its character by the totality of social conditions, especially economic The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which they deserve. But it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history.8 Weber's point of arrival rests on the recognition that the elements which combine to make a society are too complex and too numerous to yield any neat formula for its causal comprehension, Further an "action is 'social' insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course".7 Identification of human purposes and motives is inseparable from our understanding of social structure and events. Further, the potential for change and transformation calls for an understanding of things which have not yet occurred and do not yet exist as actual events. Thus, it becomes impossible to have a scientific system inductively based on the observed frequency of the same causes and the same effects. For Weber then, purely economic factors were indispensable, but not by themselves sufficient for understanding the nature of capitalism. One has to take account of "subjective factors' for a causally sufficient explanation. The subjective factors arc shaped by ideas nurturing special psychic traits. Such ideas act complementarily with habitual social conduct to produce the personality types with a distinct orientation towards certain determinate 'maxims' or rules. The subjective meaning will be called valid "if the orientation to such maxims includes, no matter to what actual extent, the recognition that they are binding on the actor or the corresponding action constitutes a desirable model for him to imitate".8 Considering social sciences as historical and admitting the crucial importance of subjective influences on causality, Weber faced the task of clarifying the most significant specifics of a social system. The 'Ideal type* device was used for constructing numerous elements of reality into logical and meaningful categories. It reminds us of Marx's statement that "In the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both".9 The ^ideal type' abstraction consists in what Weber indicated "by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct".30 There remains the question of the elements constituting such abstraction, such accentuation and one-sidedness. It cannot but be related to an investigator's view of the problematic, to the selection of the essential questions which an historian and a social scientist must always make, "since