La comunidad según Max Weber: desde el tipo ideal de la Vergemeinschaftung hasta la comunidad de los combatientes

Abstract

The problematization of community is omnipresent in contemporary times. Whether as an artefact constructed "from above" by State programmatic, or as identitarian groupings formed "from the bottom up", references to community proliferate everywhere. Nevertheless, this is not entirely new: also between the late XIX and the early XX century, community was a high priority on the political-intellectual agenda. In different ways, classical sociology sought to account for this issue. This paper will focus on the work of Max Weber. There, we will not only find a conception of community as historical background of modern society (feature that histories of sociology often emphasize to a greater extent), but also two other notions of community: one, in which it appears as a fundamental sociological concept, as a general and abstract ideal type of social relations; the other one, in which community acquires a political-utopian character, as the name of what may be able to reheat social bonds in a societal context marked by rationalization and disenchantment. Hand in hand with this analysis, we expect to find in those old weberian concepts some inspiration to understand the various configurations that community is currently undergoing.