Method, history, and society. The main road by Werner Sombart

The contribution aims to analyse the interdependence of method, history and society in Werner Sombart. To this end, after reconstructing some central aspects of the relationship between historiography and sociology in time, the analysis focuses on Sombart’s specific interpretation of ‘historicist sociology’, starting from and going beyond the well-known ‘debate on method’. There are two lines of argumentation: the historical-genetic classification of the discipline and the relationship between theory and history through an interdisciplinary approach. These arguments converge in restoring the Sombartian image of a Noo-sociology. In other words, a sociology that is primarily the product of history and economy, and then simultaneously, and with no contradiction, the expression of a science of culture; a science based not on ‘abstraction’ but on ‘position’, that is to say, in the context and in the totality within which phenomena are embedded. For Sombart, this is the meaning of sociology, in the sense of historical sociology, that is to say, as a science of the spirit in a critical perspective.