Max Weber and the cultural history of modernity

Abstract

This article takes a new look at Weber as a historian. The MWG's detailed reconstruction of the scientific and intellectual historical context provides a clear insight into how all the different topics on which Weber worked - the capitalist market economy, world religions, or the modern state - were ultimately treated "from the view-point of cultural history." In response the article examines four aspects: Economic history; or more precisely, the cultural meaning of economic action as a key to Weber's historical thinking as a whole (I); Weber's insistence on the primacy of analytical problems and of choices of perspectives as intellectual presuppositions of historical knowledge (II); the cardinal question of cultural history in general: how ideas take effect in historical constellations and conflicts, and how the peculiarity of European cultural development is to be described in its universal-historical significance (III); the relevance of the First World War for Weber's problems and perspectives: his concentration on a historical-political theory of power and domination and of the genesis and structure of the modern state and democracy (IV).