МИКРО-ИСТОРИЯТА КАТО СЛЕДА
MICRO-HISTORY AS A TRACE

Summary/Abstract: Reviewing the approach of and the debate about the more and more influential research perspective of “micro-history” the author is interested in the methodological problems of the so-called understanding sciences in the aspect of what Weber calls microscopic dividing line between science and faith, and a third way between the guild of factologists and the guild of the adherents of meaning. The text tries to restore its controversial history and its doubtless contributions to a renovation (and not to false innovations as Bourdieu puts it) of the social sciences. That means the critique of the “totalizations and reifications of the concepts” in the “old” social history, of the anthropology of Geertz's type, etc.; the “playing with scales”, i.e. the alteration of the levels of observation; the understanding of the contextuality of experience and of the temporality of the social action; of the so-called strategies; the role of the detail in the sign (indice) paradigm. C. Ginzburg's arguments about the “non- Galilean character” of the historical science are discussed. Through an analysis of Max Weber's methodological writings and more precisely of what he understands as “objective possibility”, as causal ascribing in multi-causal contexts the author shows in what sense not only micro-history can be a critique of sociology but sociology can be a critique of micro-history.

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