ABSTRACT
The field, specifically ‘worthy of being known’, in which Weber’s investigations move, is basically a single one. It is not this or that particular fact, nor the ‘general cultural significance’ of capitalism. This field, whose scholarly investigation was Weber’s aim in the midst of all his methodological considerations and his wide-ranging substantive investigations, was the following: ‘The social science we wish to pursue is a science of reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). We wish to comprehend in its specific quality the reality of the life which surrounds us and into which we are placed-the interrelation and cultural meaning of its individual phenomena in their contemporary form as well as the causes of their having developed in the way they have.’2 In consequence, it is not the purpose of historical investigation to
find out how it was (as in Ranke),3 nor how it had to be because of historical necessity (as in Marx). Rather, historical investigation should render comprehensible how we are today as we have become. ‘Capitalism’ is one of the factors, indeed a pre-eminent factor, in this history of the present, which is however itself merely a ‘segment of the process of human destiny’.4
