MAX WEBER E LA CRITICA DEL MATERIALISMO STORICO

Abstract

Capitalism emerges as the common ground in the works of Karl Marx and Max Weber, both seeking to use the scientific method in order to answer to the question about the des-tiny of human being in the contemporary world. In Marx’s view, mankind attains freedom by overthrowing the capitalistic establishment of society and its formal rationality; in We-ber’s view, on the other hand, socialism ends up being nothing but a degenerating bureau-cratic rationality. Weber stands as a critic of historical materialism, in pointing out how the relationship between structure and “Überbau” is not grounded on a primacy of economy, rather on a mutual conditioning that only particular analysis can bring to the open; in other words, similar economic structures can be related to different ideal responses. Even when acknowledging its inherent dangers, Weber sees the process of general rationalization as the zone of freedom for contemporary man; after careful reconsideration of all the themes of Historismus, in fact, any mono-causal model to explain social transformations is therefore rejected. Historical development, in the end, does not follow any “a-priori” known trend, and the connection between past, present and future cannot to be read in terms of necessity.