“Sostanzialismo” e “costruttivismo” nel dibattito contemporaneo sulle culture: note in margine a partire dalla nozione weberiana di «comunità etnica»

“SUBSTANTIALISM” AND “CONSTRUCTIVISM” WITHIN THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATE ON CULTURES: SOME SIDE NOTES STARTING FROM WEBER’S NOTION OF «ETHNIC COMMUNITY». In the monograph Kultur. Zur Karriere eines sozialwissenschafli- chen Begriffs (2006) Gehrard Hauck records the present trend towards attributing racial connotations to the idea of culture, and pinpoints its condition of possibility in the idea of an “essentialist” or “substantialist” character of the different cultures, idea which, now in hidden, now in evident ways, gives shape to entire fields of the Twentieth-century debate. Nevertheless, since the Eighties of the last century, Hauck remarks the unifying of a broad “constructivist” front within the theory of culture and identifies, through a rapid and clearheaded examination, the prototype of this different settings in Max Weber’s analysis about the notion of “ethnic community” (1910-1913). This essay recalls and deepens this subject, showing how Weber’s elaborate pages contains some precious prompts in order to stress all the implications of the connection between the present notion of “culture” and the old notion of “race” highlighted by Hauck. This connection, albeit scientifically discredited by the convergent anti-substantialist criticism of constructivism, imbues strongly and at various levels our ways of feeling and the public discourse which reflects them. More specifically, the essay demonstrates how the unmerciful critical dissolution of the notion of “ethnic commu- nity” (of its substantial foundation and conceptual definiteness) coincides, in Weber, with the analysis of the subjective certainty which forms its core, whereof Weber looks into the genesis, the function and the capacity of incidence on the historical process.