Miguel Ángel SANZ LOROÑO

Original title: Humanismo y narrativas medievales en la jaula de hierro de Max Weber: el caso de Hayden White

Published in

Keywords: Cold War, Philosophy of History, Weber, White.

This paper attempts to read the “content of the form” of the medievalist work published by Hayden White in his early academic career. Taking Max Weber as the main guide, White plotted the history of papal schism of 1130 with typical tools of social science: Weberian typology and narrative. Also, White began, from the contradictions and limits of the German sociologist, to develop a personal vision of the humanistic and moral function of historiography. The limits to his humanism that he found in Weber's quasi dystopian narrative of modernization, strongly embodied by the realities of the Cold War, were equally important for this development. Over time, these limitations (from political prohibition to antihumanism) led White from Max Weber to Benedetto Croce. Finally, the neo-Kantian dualism of Weber's epistemology, which dramatically embodied the ontological gap opened up by modernity, had developed by the humanist idealism of the Neapolitan philosopher.