Search

The article considers a little-researched topic - fundamentally contested classics: when canonical figures in the history of social thought are regularly placed at the center of intense discursive struggles that go beyond the boundaries of normal scientific criticism. First, the author mentions the ambivalent reception of M. Weber’s heritage as a basic element of the sociological canon due to its extremely fragmentary nature even within the positive perception of his ideas. Further, the article schematically reconstructs the long tradition of intellectual struggle with Weber personally and his ideas. The author believes that there is a gap in global Weber studies, which is anti-Weberianism as a significant intellectual and cultural practice that has not yet been explicitly reflected, and proposes an analytical scheme for systematizing permanent attacks on Weber at different levels (personal, discursive and institutional). The first critical strategy focuses on Weber’s personality, emphasizing the incoherence of his scientifictheoretical views and way of life. The second type of criticism focuses on Weber’s ideas, trying, under the guise of academic polemics, to refute the main provisions of Weber’s sociology as untenable for productive work within the current sociological research (as a rule, the leading motives of such a strategy lie outside scientific discussions). The third anti-Weber strategy is openly political/ideological in nature and aims not so much at exposing the scientific fallacy of his theses as at their ideological condemnation, formal ban or “cancellation” as harmful and dangerous for the goals of particular social movements. In conclusion, the author mentions some attempts to “cancel” Weber in Russia - both within the academy and by ideologically biased publicists and bloggers.

The article considers the history of the conceptual pair Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (community/society) used by classics of sociology to explain the fundamental difference of modern society from the previous forms of social life. The author emphasizes the popularity of these categories as identifying the temporally successive types of sociality: Gemeinschaft refers to the original form of traditional organic community, and Gesellschaft - to the mass urbanized society of the modern age. The article shows the structural relationship between the early sociological concepts and the philosophy of modern history as an analytical (self)description of modern societies. The article reconstructs the development of Ferdinand Tönnies’ views, who introduced the pair Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft as an analytical tool for social theory and challenged the opposition of these two types of social integration by emphasizing their presence in every social interaction. The author briefly outlines Max Weber’s perception of this conceptual pair in the form of Vergemeinschaftung/Vergesellschaftung social relations as ideally-typically value-oriented and instrumentally rational. The article explains the drastic politicization of the Gemeinschaft semantics in inter-war Germany - the term became a marker of the social-political polarization. Then the author focuses on the differentiated theory of Gemeinschaft developed in Hans Freyer’s sociology and on the Nazis’ attempt to make this term a basis of their theory of homogeneous society. The article considers the reception of Tönnies’ categories in American sociology, especially by Talcott Parsons, and highlights his contribution to the theory of socialization and integration of large societies with small solidarity groups. The last part of the article emphasizes the significance of the conceptual pair for the theory of late modernity - its structure of social action consists of elements of both community and society.

The article considers a little-known topic in the history of the social thought, which has regained relevance under the pandemic - the discussion between the outstanding philosophers of the German idealism on the conceptual interpretation of police as an earlymodern form of biopolitical control. In the introductory part, the author argues that the critique of the science and practice of policing by the classics of the German idealism is paradigmatic for the present-day study of the new/old functions and powers of the sanitary-police state concerning the modern civil society’s self-reflection. In the first part, the author describes the tension between the Enlightenment philosophy and the ‘science of policing’ developed by the Cameralists of the 17th-18th centuries, and emphasizes the significant intellectual contribution of the Enlightenment thinkers, primarily Kant’s legal doctrine, to the radical innovations in the political semantics at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. Such innovations became the philosophical basis for the rule of law which questioned the discourse of the absolutist state control over its subjects’ welfare by means of police. In the second part, the article presents a brief reconstruction of Fichte’s attempts to combine the old Cameralist ideas with the new modern principles of individual freedoms at the end of the 18th-century era of the science of police - after Kant’s explicit criticism of the state care unauthorized from below. The third part of the article focuses on Hegel’s critique: in the history of the political thought he was often considered an apologist of the authoritarian Prussian state, but questioned the very possibility of the police-scientific idea of the total biopolitical control over social and economic activities of free modern-type individuals. The author reconstructs Hegel’s argumentation of the absurdity of the total sanitary-police regulation as suggested by Fichte, and insists on the relevance of these thinkers, concepts and thematic fields for reconsidering the failure of the Early-Modern biopolitical utopia under the current intersections of lockdowns and sovereignty.

In the Weberian literature, it has been repeatedly noted that there is no serious theological interest in the most important provisions of the sociology of religion by Max Weber. This seems paradoxical given the religious-theological context for the development of Webers intellectual project of the social-theoretical hermeneutics of Western modernity. In the first part of the article, the author reconstructs the family and friends religious constellation which determined Webers understanding of the existential significance of religious meanings for certain groups of the modern era. The author mentions Webers close ties with a number of leading theologians of Germany in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, which influenced the heuristics of his writings. The second part of the article focuses on the multifaceted figure of Friedrich Naumann, a public intellectual, who was a Protestant pastor and a reactionary-conservative theologian and became a spiritual-political leader of the German left liberals. The author shows the initial ambivalence of the political-religious situation in the German Empire in the 1880s-1890s, in which Naumann tried to combine Christianity and socialism, and provides a brief overview of the young theologian and social activists gradual turning into a prominent figure of the German journalism and politics. In the third part of the article, the author describes the meeting of two thinkers as fateful for both Weber and Naumann, and emphasizes a radical turn in the worldview of the famous religious theorist and practitioner, who under the powerful influence of Webers personality and argumentation gave up both many previous ideas and pastors office. In conclusion, the author identifies the paradigmatic nature of Naumans ideological-political evolution as typical for a significant part of German intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, and considers Naumanns Hegelian acceptance of the modern nation-state as the highest value (following Weber) as a self-fulfilling diagnosis for the crisis modernity on the eve of the First World War catastrophe.