the importance of ideal-types

I'm intrigued by the rhetorical function of ideal-types in creating convincing theoretical arguments. Ideal-types are some kind of game of pretending: let's pretend things are black and white, let's pretend the extreme case. Just came to think of it as I'm struggling to make my own personal/mass media argument convincing. I can inform my old readers that I'm still, or rather again, working on thesis-article #1 in order to resubmit it taking my reviewers points into consideration.

Oh, googling ideal-type gives you quite a few interesting results.