経済人
It is commonly argued that idealization plays a key role in the methodology of other social sciences, especially of economics. For example, homo economicus is the result of a consistent abstraction-idealization process. One of the fundamental axioms of neoclassical economics, the law of diminishing marginal utility, followed from the highlighting of Weber-Fechner's law in psychophysics, which highlights that the growth of subjectively perceived intensity of recurrent stimuli with the same physical intensity is always decreasing. The same law emerges in the law of diminishing marginal returns. Homo economicus as presupposed by Neoclassicals is an idealized, abstract creature that can be characterized by an intention to exchange and whose only task is to take economic decisions. For homo economicus, there is no time or social and natural environment, he is ageless, he has no whims, and his decisions are not biased by occasional effects from the (social) environment. So, his behaviour only reflects the objective and consistently prevailing economic laws established by formal rationality. After all, human (and social) sciences, similarly to natural sciences, i.e. abstracting from everything subjective, constrained themselves to phrase only objective truths. However, the conceptualizing routine of neoclassical economics differs from the genuine approach of Max Weber in that Neoclassicals focused exactly on finding and deducing economic laws (in accordance with the efforts of natural sciences), while the ideal-types of the Weberian sociology only supported the interpretative understanding of past events with no references to causal laws. Even if the method and the strategy of creating ideal-typical concepts are common, these are two opposing scientific programs eventually. Weber offers an excellent description and a user's guide to the technique of abstraction and idealization that also directly applies to the conceptualizing strategy of mainstream economics that is on a completely different track with its law-seeking efforts.