Normal type
Normal type is a typological term in sociology coined by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. 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.
Tönnies’ distinctions
Tönnies drew a sharp line between the realm of conceptualization and the realm of reality. The first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way ; the second, empirically and in an inductive way. Following Tönnies, reality cannot be explained without concepts, which belong to the first realm, or else you will fail because you try to define x by something derived from x.Tönnies’ Normaltyp was thus a conceptual tool created on a logical basis, an almost mathematical concept always open to subsequent refinement from a confrontation with the empirical evidence.
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 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. 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.