This book is a critique of a critique. In other words, it is a defence. It defends that form of action theory with which Weber's name has traditionally been associated; one which presumes that action refers to behaviour possessed of a subjective meaning. It follows that the object of my attack is that critique of this position which has been mounted over the past twenty to thirty years by the proponents of a newer, ‘social’, form of action theory. One that has come to the fore as a result of what has been called the micro-sociological revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s (although this phrase is rather misleading as those perspectives that rose to prominence at this time were actually less specifically ‘micro’ than ‘interactional’ in character). For it was generally proponents of these perspectives who took it upon themselves to launch an attack on the traditional idea of action, aided in large part by certain post-Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophers and philosophers of action. The critique that they launched can now be judged, from the standpoint of the 1990s, to have been successful. For one can say that most contemporary sociologists, at least in Britain, now accept this critique as valid. This would appear to be just as true of those sociologists who do not adopt a micro or interactional perspective as of those who do. Consequently to reject this critique and defend the traditional theory of action is, in effect, to attack contemporary sociology in general.