Abstract

Otto Hintze was an excellent example of the cultural turmoil that hit historical and political studies in the great crisis between nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with respect to the destiny of the European tradition and its projection in a political world dominated by new universalistic perspectives. Hintze moved thus between a historiography which was for long time attentive to the Prussian case – which he considered almost a paradigm of the modern State – and political science, in constant tension with Weber’s contemporary foundation of a comprehensive sociology. The essay attempts to investigate the foundational question of legitimacy as the deepest and most innovative character of Hintze’s work.