1920 - A Caesura in Social Theory?

The centenary of Max Weber's death raises the question of the wider significance of 1920 as marking a break in the history of social theory. This essay focuses on Germany and Austria, where the political break with the past was particularly sharp and the discontinuities in the social and intellectual configuration of the social sciences were most obvious. Three trends are particularly striking: the development of neo-Marxist social theory with Gyorgy Lukacs and Karl Korsch and the later emergence of critical theory, the polarisation between neo-positivism and interpretive sociology, and the consolidation of the sociology of knowledge.