L'Incidenza dell'Antico nel confronto tra Weber e Meyer sull'oggetto della conoscenza storica

In order to reflect on the actual and/or desirable influence of the ancient world and its ideal heritage on present-time Europe, its current features and its future construction, may be worth first of all considering the different meanings that can be given to the notion of historical effectiveness, that is the notion of the influence of the past on the present. From this perspective, this essay proposes a reinterpretation of some arguments employed by Max Weber in the first of the Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik (1906) in discussing the theses on the theory and method of history as a science of the great historian Eduard Meyer. The core of Weber’s analysis is the meaning of the response Meyer gives to the problem of the specific object of historical knowledge, according to which «the historical is that which is or has been effective»