L’erotica tiranna. Weber, Monte Verità e la Considerazione intermedia

Abstract

The article faces a short period of time in Max Weber’s life before and during the Great War. In 1913 Max Weber found himself spending more than some days in the vegetarian and anarchist community of Monte Verità, in Italian Switzerland. This meant a chance for empirical observations of life forms imbued with free love and hints of counterculture. While his personal life went through changes, due to both the war and new emotional ties, in the Intermediate Reflections he came to consider the role of eroticism in the spheres of life, as a way to organize the world, or to refuse it. Further on, in the famous Science as Vocation conference, in his attempt to deal with the normative-axiological domain, as noticed by E. R. Curtius, the erotic sphere will become a model, through its ‘failed relationship’ in the way values are thought and believed in by subjects.