Abstract

At the turn of the century, Marxists found themselves facing a problem concealed from Marx by remnants of Hegelian dogmatism. How can relativism be overcome? Not by ignoring it, but by actually surpassing it, and proceeding further in the same direction. Weber caught a glimpse of the route: ideal types, the meanings which we introduce into our image of the past, could separate us from the past only if they were arbitrary. However, they themselves belong to history: the science of history with its methods and idealizations is an aspect of historical reality, of capitalistic rationalization. Our ideas and meanings, precisely because they are relative to our time, have an intrinsic truth and they will reveal it to us only if we succeed in situating them in their context, in comprehending instead of merely submitting to them.