Max Weber and political theology of Friedrich Naumann

In the Weberian literature, it has been repeatedly noted that there is no serious theological interest in the most important provisions of the sociology of religion by Max Weber. This seems paradoxical given the religious-theological context for the development of Weber’s intellectual project of the social-theoretical hermeneutics of Western modernity. In the first part of the article, the author reconstructs the family and friends’ religious constellation which determined Weber’s understanding of the existential significance of religious meanings for certain groups of the modern era. The author mentions Weber’s close ties with a number of leading theologians of Germany in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, which influenced the heuristics of his writings. The second part of the article focuses on the multifaceted figure of Friedrich Naumann, a public intellectual, who was a Protestant pastor and a reactionary-conservative theologian and became a spiritual-political leader of the German left liberals. The author shows the initial ambivalence of the political-religious situation in the German Empire in the 1880s-1890s, in which Naumann tried to combine Christianity and socialism, and provides a brief overview of the young theologian and social activist’s gradual turning into a prominent figure of the German journalism and politics. In the third part of the article, the author describes the meeting of two thinkers as fateful for both Weber and Naumann, and emphasizes a radical turn in the worldview of the famous religious theorist and practitioner, who under the powerful influence of Weber’s personality and argumentation gave up both many previous ideas and pastor’s office. In conclusion, the author identifies the paradigmatic nature of Nauman’s ideological-political evolution as typical for a significant part of German intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, and considers Naumann’s Hegelian acceptance of the modern nation-state as the highest value (following Weber) as a self-fulfilling diagnosis for the crisis modernity on the eve of the First World War catastrophe.