Макс Вебер и глобализацията
Max Weber and Globalization

Summary/Abstract: There are almost as many Webers as there are Weberians: as the spokesman of modernity, as the cultural theorist, the liberal individualist, the disillusioned relativist, the precursor of postmodernity, the founder of sociology, the universal historian, to name but a few. Here we will concentrate on two others, as historian of the present and as analytical theorist, in order to gain a view on how he would have reacted to globalization. For theorists of late modernity, globalization appears as an extension of the world historical process of rationalization. Weber's prognoses tended towards the 'end of history' approach. My contention is that the transformation between 1945 and 1989 represents the arrival of a new epoch (The Global Age, 1996), not a continuation of the old, and certainly not the end of history. Weber's futurology does not help us to anticipate this. However, if we focus less on his forebodings and more on his approach to analysing his own time, we can argue that Weber would have been well prepared to recognise epochal change when it happened. To the extent that we remain true to his impulses while departing from his account as a narrative for our own time, we are now post-Weberians.

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