The shift of legitimacy in social crises: Max Weber’s historical analysis versus the concept of universal history

Abstract

This paper problematizes the ‘unintended consequences’ that come to light out of the very topic of collective trauma. That is to say, in addressing the processes through which the collective trauma is resolved, the well-known authors in this field give us also a glimpse of the general courses of history, its driving forces. There are two competing and opposing conceptualizations of history on which the debate about the collective trauma is based. The first emphasizes history’s cultural significance and it is teleological. According to the (humanist) teleological perspective, history is a meaningful story, or rather drama with historical actors and groups who are part of different and opposed cultural wholes and whose actions bring about the necessary step to the next and higher cultural stage of humanity. Along with this standpoint, the modem sovereign state represents the pinnacle of history’s development. For the first time, by its rule of law and its legitimacy - its internal sovereignty, the undisputed authority over its citizens - the modem state embodied the principle of Reason, according to which the new, rational social order was based on the autonomy of the individual. But the tme teleological viewpoint (the concept of universal history) is dialectical. It doesn’t assume the overall development as linear and without retrocessions and setbacks. The modem national state is only (though necessary) an outcome of the contradictions of the previous stages of history and contains its own present-day contradictions which result in crises. On the other hand we have the conceptualization of history which follows the assumption of Max Weber that sociology is a logical precondition of the causal (historical) analysis which formulates type concepts and searches for general uniformities. Although, Weber did not deny the “general cultural development”, he saw it only as a structural differentiation and rationalization on versatile levels, as a development that does not unfolds necessarily according to some law or unstoppable teleological process. The main task of this paper is to confront which assists us to see this shift, with its methodology of typologies in the form of generalizations that emphasize the repetitive side of the socio-historical models of authority (traditional, legal-rational and charismatic) which appear in the unfolding of crises.