One of the most important controversies in the history of social thought has concerned the relationship between our everyday understanding of life in human societies and the attempt to construct a 'social science'. It is often claimed that this understanding merely helps to orientate the search for testable causal hypotheses. Others, however, have argued that if the social researcher's access to his data is via everyday processes of intuitive understanding or linguistic communication, social inquiry should be seen as a matter of interpretations rather than causal generalizations. Serious discussion of these questions used to be largely confined to Germany. Recently, however, analytic philosophers and 'phenomenological sociologists' in The English- speaking countries have restated the case for an interpretative approach to.social life, often in a very uncompromising way" Amid growing ideological and cultural diversity, the idea of a 'natural science of society' has come to seem increasingly problematic" The widespread interest in these questions has suggested the need for an account in English of the historical controversy about the place of interpretative understanding or Verstehen. This book traces the history of the concept from its origins in biblical hermeneutics and the philosophy of history through the work of Dilthey and Rickert to its incorporation in the sociology of Simmel and Max Weber. Later chapters examine the complex relationship of this tradition to Marxism (through a discussion of the work of Max Adler, Sartre, Lukacs, Goldmann and Mannheim) and the contribution of analytic philosophy, phenomenological sociology and the work of Jurgen Habermas.