Democracy & the Political in Max Weber's Thought

Democracy & the Political in Max Weber's Thought
Author: Terry Maley
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-10-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1442695951

Max Weber is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology and the author of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but he also made important contributions to modern political and democratic theory. In Democracy and the Political in Max Weber's Thought, Terry Maley explores, through a detailed analysis of Weber's writings, the intersection of recent work on Weber and on democratic theory, bridging the gap between these two rapidly expanding areas of scholarship. Maley critically examines how Weber's realist 'model' of democracy defines and constrains the possibilities for democratic agency in modern liberal-democracies. Maley also looks at how ideas of historical time and memory are constructed in his writings on religion, bureaucracy, and the social sciences. Democracy and the Political in Max Weber's Thought is both an accessible introduction to Weber's political thought and a spirited defense of its continued relevance to debates on democracy.

The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy

The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy
Author: Pedro T. Magalhães
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351654004

By re-examining the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, this book offers a reflection on the nature of modern democracy and the question of its legitimacy. Pedro T. Magalhães shows that present-day elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and often complicated ways, an intellectual debt to the interwar era, German-speaking, scholarly and political controversies on the problem(s) of modern democracy. A discussion of Weber’s ambivalent diagnosis of modernity and his elitist views on democracy, as they were elaborated especially in the 1910s, sets the groundwork for the study. Against that backdrop, Schmitt’s interwar political thought is interpreted as a form of neo-authoritarian populism, whereas Kelsen evinces robust, though not entirely unproblematic, pluralist consequences. In the conclusion, the author draws on Claude Lefort’s concept of indeterminacy to sketch a potentially more fruitful way than can be gleaned from the interwar German discussions of conceiving the nexus between the elitist, populist and pluralist faces of modern democracy. The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy will be of interest to political theorists, political philosophers, intellectual historians, theoretically oriented political scientists, and legal scholars working in the subfields of constitutional law and legal theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315157566, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary

Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary
Author: Andreas Kalyvas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2008-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139472429

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular founding has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. This study shows why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of democracy's beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders.

Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics

Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics
Author: David Beetham
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745676626

Max Weber's writings on the politics of Wilhelmine in Germany and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 are much less well known than his contributions to historical and theoretical sociology, yet they are essential to any overall assessment of his thought. Drawing on these writings, still mostly untranslated, David Beetham offers the most comprehensive account available in English of Weber's political theory. The book explores Weber's central concern with the prospects for liberal Parliamentarism in authoritarian societies and in an age of mass politics and bureaucratic organization, and shows how this concern led him to a revision of democratic theory which is still influential. It argues that Weber's analyzis of the class basis of contemporary politics necessitate a modification in some of the accepted interpretations of his sociology of modern capitalism. A special feature of the book is its full treatment of the extensive German literature on Weber's political thought. This second edition contains a substantial new critical introduction and an expanded bibliography. Otherwise the text of the widely acclaimed first edition remains unaltered. This is a book which adds an essential dimension to the understanding of Max Weber for students of sociology and politics who have previously only approached his work through his sociological writings.

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics
Author: Nasser Behnegar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2005-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226041433

Can politics be studied scientifically, and if so, how? Assuming it is impossible to justify values by human reason alone, social science has come to consider an unreflective relativism the only viable basis, not only for its own operations, but for liberal societies more generally. Although the experience of the sixties has made social scientists more sensitive to the importance of values, it has not led to a fundamental reexamination of value relativism, which remains the basis of contemporary social science. Almost three decades after Leo Strauss's death, Nasser Behnegar offers the first sustained exposition of what Strauss was best known for: his radical critique of contemporary social science, and particularly of political science. Behnegar's impressive book argues that Strauss was not against the scientific study of politics, but he did reject the idea that it could be built upon political science's unexamined assumption of the distinction between facts and values. Max Weber was, for Strauss, the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science, and Behnegar's explication artfully illuminates Strauss's critique of Weber's belief in the ultimate insolubility of all value conflicts. Strauss's polemic against contemporary political science was meant to make clear the contradiction between its claim of value-free premises and its commitment to democratic principles. As Behnegar ultimately shows, values—the ethical component lacking in a contemporary social science—are essential to Strauss's project of constructing a genuinely scientific study of politics.

Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920

Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920
Author: Wolfgang J. Mommsen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 1990-07-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226533999

A major work of German historiography, this comprehensive account of Weber's political views and activities reveals that, paradoxically, Weber was at once an ardent liberal and a determined German nationalist and imperialist. Wolfgang J. Mommsen shows the important links between these seemingly conflicting positions and provides a critique of Weber's sociology of power and his concept of democratic rule. First published in German in 1959, Max Weber and German Politics appeared in a revised edition in 1974 and became available in an English translation only in 1984. In writing this work, Mommsen drew extensively on Weber's published and unpublished essays, newspaper articles, memoranda, and correspondence.

Max Weber and International Relations

Max Weber and International Relations
Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108416381

This book offers new readings of the epistemology, methods and politics of Max Weber, a foundation thinker of modern social science and international relations theory.

Max Weber's Theory of the Modern State

Max Weber's Theory of the Modern State
Author: A. Anter
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2014-02-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137364904

Andreas Anter reconstructs Max Weber's theory of the modern state, showing its significance to contemporary political science. He reveals the ambivalence of Weber's political thought: the oscillation between an étatiste position, mainly oriented to the reason of state, and an individualistic one, focussed on the freedom of individuals

The Orbán Regime

The Orbán Regime
Author: András Körösényi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429624417

This book gives the first comprehensive and theoretically substantiated political science account of the Orbán regime in English. It argues that Viktor Orbán’s regime-building and reconstructive leadership is more than just an example of hybridisation, a successful populist appeal or a backlash against the earlier neoliberal hegemony in Central Europe. It unfolds the major traits of the Orbán regime and argues that it provides a paradigmatic case of the Weberian model of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD). Beyond explaining the backslide of liberal democracy in Hungary, the book aims at two additional contributions of wider significance. First, by applying the concept of PLD to the Hungarian case, it reveals that the authoritarian elements are products of an endogenous drive of modern mass democracy. Second, through the glass of PLD, the Orbán regime can be seen as an experimental lab of global trends like mediatisation and personalisation of politics, populist style, the deconsolidation of liberal democratic order, and what is often labelled as "post-truth politics". This book will be of key interest both to scholars and students of Hungary, Post-communist and Central and East European politics and to those interested in populism, democratisation and democratic deconsolidation as a broader trend in a variety of countries.

The Spirit Vs. the Souls

The Spirit Vs. the Souls
Author: Christopher McAuley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Political sociology
ISBN: 9780268106010

Despite the extensive scholarship on Max Weber (1864-1920) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), very little of it examines the contact between the two founding figures of Western sociology. Drawing on their correspondence from 1904 to 1906, and comparing the sociological work that they produced during this period and afterward, The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship examines for the first time the ideas that Weber and Du Bois shared on topics such as sociological investigation, race, empire, unfree labor, capitalism, and socialism. What emerges from this examination is that their ideas on these matters clashed far more than they converged, contrary to the tone of their letters and to the interpretations of the few scholars who have commented on the correspondence between Weber and Du Bois. Christopher McAuley provides close readings of key texts by the two scholars, including Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, to demonstrate their different views on a number of issues, including the economic benefits of unfree labor in capitalism. The book addresses the distinctly different treatment of the two figures's political sympathies in past scholarship, especially that which discredits some of Du Bois's openly antiracist academic work while failing to consider the markedly imperialist-serving content of some of Weber's. McAuley argues for the acknowledgment and demarginalization of Du Bois's contributions to the scholarly world that academics have generally accorded to Weber. This book will interest students and scholars of black studies, history, and sociology for whom Du Bois and Weber are central figures.