ABSTRACT

Max Weber, a leading theorist of modernity, may be constructively viewed as a culminating figure in a lineage of nineteenth-century German social analysts. This school of thinkers, including such eminent figures as Ranke, Dilthey and Rickert – the latter being a contemporary of Weber – have come to be referred to as the Heidelberg ‘cultural philosophers’ and were all, in their various ways, contributing to the debate concerning the constitutionandepistemological status of cultural phenomena.To this end their legacy has made a considerable contribution to our contemporary thinking about the cultural realm, one which has some continuities with the English literary tradition, already discussed, but one which is also utterly opposed to the once predominant anthropological sense of social structure, previously considered. This body of ideas proceeds from a strong sense of the a priori, that which is intrinsic to and universal within the human condition.