FORTHCOMING
Professor Edoardo Massimilla on Max Weber, Eurocentrism and Imperialism (to be published in the next issue of the «Archivio di storia della cultura», XXXVII, 2024, pp. 323-352)
SULL’EUROCENTRISMO DELLA «SOCIOLOGIA STORICA» DI MAX WEBER, A
PARTIRE DA UN RECENTE LIBRO DI SIMON SUSEN
Abstract
The essay discusses some of the theses presented in Simon Susen’s monograph Sociology in the Twenty-First Century. Trends, Debates and Challenges (2020) to determine whether and to what extent Max Weber’s sociological investigations are more or less consciously Eurocentric, as the currents of post and decolonial sociological thought to which Susen refers believe. How Weber examines the emergence of the modern Western world and its particular characteristics is illustrated with several significant examples.
Also examined is a Weberian text to which Susen himself refers, which probably dates from 1910 (i.e. from the earliest draft phase of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) and which the editors of the critical edition have entitled Machtprestige und Nationalgefühl. Indeed, it allows us to examine straightforwardly how Weber was aware not only of the role that the “logic of empire” played in many ways in the process of the formation of modern Europe but also of the renewed relevance of colonialist imperialism in the decades in which
he lived and which would very soon thereafter lead the great European national powers into a direct struggle for world domination.