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Normal type (in German: Normaltyp) is a Typification term in sociology coined by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). It can be considered both as a forerunner of, and a challenge to, the rather better known concept of Max Weber’s: the ideal type (in German Idealtyp).C. Schlüter/L. Clausen eds., Renaissance der Gemeinschaft? (1990) p. 135
Tönnies’ Normaltyp was thus a conceptual tool created on a logical basis,P. Muljadi ed. Community (nd) p. 11 an almost mathematical concept always open to subsequent refinement from a confrontation with the empirical evidence.W.J. Cahnman et al. Weber and Toennies (1943) pp. 69, 128
The contrast with Weber’s ‘ideal type’ came from the latter’s ‘accentuation’ of certain elements of a real social process, which is under sociological (or historical) scrutiny - “the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view ... of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena”, as Weber himself put it.Quoted in Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (1997) p. 243 From Tönnies’ point of view, an ideal type cannot explain reality, because it is derived from reality by accentuation, but might help to understand reality.
The normal type moved from abstract to concrete; the ideal type from concrete to abstract.
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