„Има науки, надарени с вечна младост...“ Веберовият отговор на „кризата на историзма“
„There are Sciences to Which Eternal Youth is Granted…“ Weber’s Response to the „Crisis Of Historicism“

Summary/Abstract: Max Weber’s methodological essay Objectivity of Social Science and Social Policy is considered as a response to a distinct situation in the methodology of the historical science at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, specified as „crisis of historicism“. The polysemantic term „historicism“ is used here in a narrow sense as denoting a distinctive methodology that originated and won recognition in the 19th century as a leading scientific program both in history and humanities. At the beginning of the article the author outlines the basic features of the historicism and points at the main symptoms of its crisis. The most important of these symptoms is value relativism, which has strongly negative cognitive and moral consequences. Weber offers a comprehensive innovative response to the challenge of historicism. This response consists of two interdependent parts: first, argumentation of the requirement for strict separation between empirical knowledge and values, second, theory of the „ideal types“ as changing and conditioned by history concepts, suitable for comprehending the changeability and historicity of cultural-historical reality itself .

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