Die Wahlverwandtshaften / Elective Affinities

"Die Wahlverwandtshaften"
"Elective Affinities"
"Sentakuteki shinwasei 選択的親和性"

　One of Max Weber's most important terms of art in the social scientific method is the following. It appears twice in the renowned "The Ethics of Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism".

　A process that can be rationalized in hindsight, a rational process that can only be discovered a posteriori, is "Elective Affinities." And this has the same logical structure as "evolution" (i.e., prior "mutation" + posterior "selection") clarified by Darwin.

　In other words, if the "law of causality" is "the law of time from the viewpoint of God (a pompous philosopher who talks like God)," then the "law of evolution" is "the law of time from the viewpoint of man.

  Darwin's "evolution," François Jacob's "evolutionary bricolage," Weber's "elective affinity," Neurath's "Neurath's ship," Parsons' "double contingency. They all name and conceptualize a single "phase of change. Their efforts were directed toward rescuing our understanding of "change" and "mutation" phenomena from both the means-ends and the causes-effects relationships. The result is the above group of words. It is also a key concept in my complex systems theoretical historiography.

  Evolutionary systems have a deep theoretical correspondence with the 'Neurath Schiff/Neurath's Ship' or T. Parsons' 'double contingency'. This is the subject of a separate paper.

※This article is a reworked version of the following Japanese article in English.
「選択的親和性」から「進化律」へ ／ From "Elective Affinities" to "Evolutionary Law"(2020/10): 本に溺れたい