The previous chapters have shown how Weber's thinking about sects developed in the course of his career and how Weber “applied” his ideas to the analysis of the Pharisees and the Essenes in the appendix to Ancient Judaism. This chapter provides a synthetic treatment of Weber's sociology of sects and applies a number of his concerns and perspectives to the analysis of the Qumran sect(s).

1. Ideal Types and the Central Question of the Development of Types of Personality as Carriers of Social and Cultural Change

Weber's church-sect distinction is an ideal-typical construct in which the church is a polar counterpart to the sect. A Weberian sociology does not develop a definition of a sect with a list of attributes, nor try and establish a range of types of sects with their own list of attributes, but rather highlights an essential feature of the sect from the perspective of the sociological and cultural questions being posed. Weber was aware of other standard definitions of the sect put forward by previous and contemporary scholars, but dismissed them as not getting at the essence of a sect; these other criteria include relations to the state and the size of the community. Weber does not postulate that sects are schisms from parent orthodoxy although he shares the idea that when orthodoxy exists any religious group that is unorthodox is probably labelled as a sect/heresy by the orthodox.