The Place of Art in Social Theory: A Possible Approach to Max Weber and Michel Foucault

Max Weber dedicates his work to the delimitation of the historical specificity of the West taken in terms of culture. His study on the rational and social foundations of Western music is his only formulation of that cultural specificity within the aesthetic sphere. This unique trial presents a precious articulation between the formal analysis of an aesthetic language and the definition of the specificity of Western culture through a method of historical sociology that settles the singularity of its objects by comparing them with similar expressions located in different historical contexts. In turn, Michel Foucault takes the literature, understood as a specific happening that emerges in the eighteenth century, as a privileged locus for defining the knowledges and practices, double dimension of his conception of experience that takes place outside of a discourse systematically ordered. Therefore, it is up to investigate it in order to define the present as historical uniqueness. The purpose of this communication is to examine the possible similarities between methodological arrangements proposed by both authors to undertake the analysis of aesthetic expressions in order to formulate the historical specificity of the modern world.