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Макс Вебер и политическая теология Фридриха Наумана
Recent Weberian scholarship has already noted the lack of serious interest on the part of theology in the essential propositions of Max Weber's sociology of religion. This statement could be considered paradoxical, taking into account the religious and theological context in which Weber's intellectual project of social theory for Western modernity took its shape. The first part of the article reconstructs friends and family religious constellation which largely determined classical sociologist's understanding of the existential significance of religious implications for certain groups of modern people. The author points out Weber's close ties with a number of leading German theologians of the late 19th - early 20th century, who had a noticeable substantive influence on his writings. In the second part of the paper, the focus of interest shifts to the complex figure of Friedrich Naumann, who, being a public intellectual, has significantly evolved from a Protestant reverend and a reactionary theologian to a spiritual and political leader of the German liberal left. The paper traces the initial ambivalence of the political and religious situation in the German Empire in the 1880s and 1890s when Naumann attempted his synthesis of Christianity and socialism. It gives a brief overview of the views of the young theologian and social activist, who gradually turned into a prominent figure in German journalism and politics. The third part of the article is devoted to the meeting of two thinkers - crucial for both Weber and Naumann. It highlights the radical turn in the worldview of the already famous religious theorist and practitioner, who, under the powerful influence of the great sociologist's personality and argumentation, not only abandoned many of his previous ideas, but also his reverend’s desk. In conclusion the paper draws some inferences on the paradigmatic character of Naumann's ideological and political evolution for a significant part of the German intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century. Naumann's Hegelian acceptance of the modern nation-state as the highest value, along with Weber, is interpreted as a self-fulfilling diagnosis for the age of the crisis of modernity in the run-up to the First World War disaster.