Abstract

The following text is the first Italian translation of two speeches Max Weber gave at the First Conference of German Sociologists in Frankfurt am Main in 1910. The session was opened by Troeltsch’s lecture entitled Stoic-Christian natural law and modern secular natural law and the discussion was attended, among others, by Weber, Tönnies and Simmel. In these two speeches, Weber presents and discusses some of the central themes of his sociology of religion: his critique of historical materialism and his understanding of historical change, the definition of the ideal-types of church and sect and, unprecedented in these terms, the relationship between mysticism and Russian religiosity.