Up and Down. Generale e particolare in Max Weber

This paper situates Max Weber’s methodological commitment within the Methodenstreit, the late nineteenth-century dispute on method that shaped German intellectual life. Moving beyond the sterile opposition between nomothetic and idiographic approaches, Weber develops an original strategy: the construction of ideal-typical, nomological concepts designed not to capture universal laws, but to serve as analytical instruments for historical and social research. These conceptual tools, explicitly “unreal” and non-normative, function as reagents that make visible the distinctive features of individual cases by comparison and contrast. Thus, Weber’s methodology offers a way to reconcile generality and particularity, turning the abstract rigor of conceptual typologies into a means of understanding the singularity of phenomena. In doing so, he affirms the individuality of historical reality and of sociological inquiry, while providing scholars with a precise theoretical apparatus capable of grasping the particular precisely as particular.