Su Weber e i weberiani: l’eredità di Max Weber tra scienze sociali e tradizione occidentale

The “uses of Weber after Weber” is the focus of a recent book, Weber and the Weberians, Lawrence Scaff published for Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Scaff is one of the most distinguished, world-renowned scholar of Max Weber, who contributed to the so-called “Max Weber Renaissance” during the Eighties, with his famous book Fleeing the Iron Cage. This essay takes the balance which Scaff has sketched out in his book, about the different ways Weber’s ideas, concepts, methodologies, and research questions have been appropriated in the social sciences, even going beyond his words and sometimes his “spirit”, as the starting point to discuss the alternative genealogy of his reception: the one understanding Weber as part of a much broader Western tradition of philosophical and political thought. Specifically, by joining a series of insights from the first Italian reception of Weber’s work and the reflections of three of his classic commentators – Karl Jasper, Karl Löwith and Sigfried Landshut – the essay suggests that a distinctive anthropological-philosophical interest was the driving force of Weber’s thought and even of his sociological investigation. In conclusion, the essay argue in favour of a much-needed dialogue between the two traditions, Weberian social science and Weberian thinking within the Western tradition, for it is contended that his empirical sociology was conducted having “ultimate” philosophical-political questions in mind.