max weber and international relations

Max Weber and International Relations

Max Weber explored the political, epistemological, and ethical pro-blems of modernity, and understood how closely connected they were.His efforts are imaginative, sophisticated, even inspiring, but alsoflawed. Weber’s epistemological successes and failures highlight unre-solvable tensions that are just as pronounced today and from which wehavemuch to learn. This edited collection of essays offers novel readingsofWeber’s politics, approach to knowledge, rationality, counterfactuals,ideal types, power, bureaucracy, the state, history, and the non-Westernworld. The conclusions look at how some of his prominent successorshave addressed or finessed the tensions of the epistemological betweensubjective values and subjective knowledge; the sociological betweensocial rationalization and irrational myths; the personal among conflict-ing values; the political between the kinds of leaders democracies selectand the national tasks that should be performed; and the tragic betweenhuman conscience and worldly affairs.

Richard Ned Lebow is a professor of international political theory in theDepartment of War Studies, King’s College London, Bye-Fellow ofPembroke College, University of Cambridge, and the JamesO. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College,USA. He has authored, coauthored, or edited thirty-six books and morethan 250 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. He has made contribu-tions to international relations, political psychology, history, politicaltheory, philosophy of science, and classics. He is a member of the BritishAcademy.

Max Weber and InternationalRelations

Edited by

Richard Ned LebowKing’s College London

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Contents

List of Contributors page vi

1 Introductionrichard ned lebow

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2 Max Weber and International Relationsrichard ned lebow

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3 Weber’s Search for Knowledgerichard ned lebow

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4 The Production of Facts: Ideal-Typification and thePreservation of Politicspatrick thaddeus jackson

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5 Max Weber’s Powerstefano guzzini

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6 International Organizations and BureaucraticModernityjens steffek

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7 Decolonizing Weber: The Eurocentrism of Weber’sIR and Historical Sociologyjohn m. hobson

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8 Weber’s Tragic Legacydavid bohmer lebow and richard ned lebow

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Index 200

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Contributors

stefano guzzini is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute forInternational Studies, a professor of government at UppsalaUniversity, and a professor of international relations at PUC-Rio deJaneiro. He has published nine books, including The Return ofGeopolitics in Europe? Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy IdentityCrises (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Power, Realism andConstructivism (2013), winner of the 2014 ISA Theory Section BestBook Award. He currently serves as the president of the Central andEast European International Studies Association (CEEISA).

john m. hobson is a professor of politics and international relations atthe University of Sheffield and is a fellow of the British Academy. Hehas published eight books, the latest of which is The EurocentricConception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010(Cambridge University Press, 2012). His current research charts theformation and development of the world economy in a non-Eurocentric IPE context, which picks up from his earlier book,The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004).

patrick thaddeus jackson is a professor of international studies andan associate dean for curriculum and learning in the School ofInternational Service at American University in Washington, DC.In 2016, his book The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations wasreleased in a second edition.

david bohmer lebow holds a PhD in political science from YaleUniversity and a JD from the Yale Law School. He has been a MaxWeber Fellow in Law at the European University Institute. He iscurrently a lecturer in social studies at Harvard University.

richard ned lebow is a professor of international political theory in theWar Studies Department of King’s College London, a Bye-Fellow ofPembroke College, University of Cambridge, and the James

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O. Freedman Presidential Professor (Emeritus) of Government atDartmouth College, USA. His most recent books are NationalIdentifications and International Relations (Cambridge University Press,2016) and Avoiding War, Making Peace (2017). In December 2015, hecompleted fifty years of university teaching.

jens steffek is a professor of transnational governance at TechnischeUniversität Darmstadt and a principal investigator in the Cluster ofExcellence “The Formation of Normative Orders,” hosted by theUniversity of Frankfurt/Main. He holds an MA degree in politicalscience from the University of Munich (1998) and a doctorate fromthe European University Institute (2002). His research interestsinclude international relations (in particular the study of internationalorganizations), international law, and international political theory.Jens Steffek has published six books and some fifty journal articlesand book chapters. He contributed, inter alia, to the European Journalof International Relations, Ethics & International Affairs, InternationalRelations, International Theory, Millennium, and Review of InternationalStudies.

List of contributors vii

1 Introduction

Richard Ned Lebow

MaxWeber is not an international relations theorist, yet he is arguably thefather of modern IR theory. He provided an analysis of the state and itsintimate relationship to violence that is central to the realist paradigm.Hefocused attention on the drives for power and domination, which areequally central to realism. He was a major influence on HansMorgenthau, the most prominent postwar realist theorist. Weber alsospeaks to constructivists. He emphasized the importance of diversemotives in foreign affairs, including those of honor and status, and howforeign policy goals and the concepts we use to understand them areculturally determined. He also made a persuasive case for combininghistorical and sociological analyses. Weber was deeply concerned withethics and its relationship to politics and scholarship. Ethics has becomea core concern of contemporary international relations theory, and formany of those who work in this subfield, Weber’s “Politik als Beruf[The Profession of Politics]” essay is a jumping-off point.

This is not a work of intellectual history; contributors are not drawn toWeber only because of his influence on our field.We believe thatWeber’slife and writings remain relevant to contemporary international relationsand its study. He sought to come to terms with the political, epistemolo-gical, and ethical problems of modernity, and to understood how closelyconnected they are.His efforts are imaginative, sophisticated, even inspir-ing, but also flawed. His epistemological successes and failures highlightunresolvable tensions that are just as pronounced today and from whichwe have much to learn. In the 1930s and early postwar decades, Weberwas incorrectly represented as a structural-functionalist by TalcottParsons and as a positivist by Edward A. Shils and C. Wright Mills.1

Their translations and readings of his work wash out the tensions in hiswritings and continue to resonate among so-called mainstream Americansocial scientists. It is important to present a different and more accurateversion of Weber to present-day social scientists.

Weber wrote before, during, and immediately after the cataclysm ofWorld War I. He lived most of his life in what we have come to view in

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retrospect as Europe’s golden age. Many educated Europeans of his erabelieved inmaterial, cultural, and ethical progress andwere self-confidentabout their place in society and their countries’ role in the world. Otherartists and intellectuals rejected this “bourgeois” certainty as delusional,were alienated from their culture, and had deep forebodings about thefuture. In Germany, historian Heinrich Treitschke and philologist-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche gave voice to this pessimism. Weberstraddled this divide, as he did so many others.2 He saw the state asa progressive instrument and was an unabashed German nationalist. Henevertheless followed Nietzsche in believing that the gods had departedfrom European skies, compelling individuals to invent their own.

Nietzsche focused on Europe’s underlying cultural crisis, and Weberon its political and epistemological manifestations.3 In a disenchantedworld, there was no certainty of any kind, not only about values, but alsoabout scientific knowledge. Weber warned: “Even though the light ofratio may keep advancing, the realm of what may be known will still remainshrouded in unfathomable mystery. That is whyWeltanschauungen can neverbe the product of progressive experience and why the highest and moststirring ideals can become effective for all times only in a struggle withother ideals that are just as sacred to others as our ideas are to us.”4

Because beliefs are arbitrary, people need to convince themselves of theirvalidity and often do so by warring with those espousing different beliefs.

Weber saw a second threat arising from modernity in the form ofbureaucracy. It was an expression of “formal rationality” and gainedtraction because of its efficiency. He considered bureaucracy stifling tohuman creativity in the first instance because it imposed rules to govern asmuch behavior as possible. Rules had to be simple to be understood andwere likely to be enforced in a heavy-handed way. They reduced theauthority and independence of individuals, and, as circumstances chan-ged, ultimately stood in the way of efficiency and common sense. Weberfeared that ordinary citizens would live in “a steel-hardened cage” ofserfdom, helplessly, like the fellahin in ancient Egypt. Bureaucracy alsothreatened to reorient people’s loyalties by narrowing their horizons tothose of their institution. In the absence of deeper ethical commitments,bureaucracy would impose its own values on people. The Kulturmensch(man of culture) would give way to the Fachmensch (occupational specia-list). For the latter, the only ethical yardstick would be the interests andpower of the organization. Quoting Nietzsche,Weber predicted “the ‘lastmen’” would be “specialists without spirit [and] sensualists withoutheart.”5

These threats were equally evident in the academy and political life.In the course of his university career, Weber complained vociferously

2 Richard Ned Lebow

about colleagues who put their personal interests above those of theirdiscipline or university. He wrote bitterly about the National Party, theCatholic Center Party (Zentrum), and the Social Democratic Party(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), whose leaders pursuednarrow class and party goals at the expense of the nation. They defendedthese interests, andmore troubling still, held worldviews that discouragedcompromise with other parties.6He developed a powerful and compellingcritique of Wilhelminian Germany that challenged head-on the Bismarckmyth and attributed the nation’s political crisis to the Prussian autocrat’sutter contempt for and demagogic dealings with anyone who showedpolitical talent or opposed his domestic and foreign projects. Weberbelieved that Prussian aristocrats had served their country well, but inmore recent times consistently abused their power for parochial, self-serving purposes. The middle class and workers, who might opposethem, lacked experience and confidence.

Despite his powerful critique of formal rationality and bureaucracy,Weber recognized their positive side. They made possible the industrialrevolution and modern state, both of which led to a significant rise inliving standards, health, and education. They provided at least the theo-retical potential for human fulfillment if some means could be found ofholding bureaucratization in check. He rather naively looked to capital-ism as a possible counterweight as it encouraged individual initiative andwas creating multiple centers of power independent of government.Socialism, he was convinced, would further encourage the growth andencroachment of government bureaucracy and rapidly lead to the worstkind of dystopia. His concept of “plebiscitarian leader democracy” wasanother possible counterweight because it used charisma to constrainbureaucracy and bureaucrats.7

In his thinking about international relations Weber is very mucha product of his time. Following Hegel and prominent German histor-ians, he endows the state with ethical potential and gives its priority of thewishes and self-interests of citizens. He adheres to a Darwinian view ofpolitics and routinely describes peoples and states as competitors in anunending and unavoidable struggle for survival. He treats states as fullyindependent units and is oblivious to the process of globalization that wasmaking national economies interdependent, although it would be haltedtemporarily in 1914. More relevant to our world are Weber’s under-standing of science, ideal types, singular causality, and the relationshipbetween science and value. Our book focuses primarily on these conceptsand problems and their contemporary import.

Chapter 2 by Ned Lebow provides an overview of Weber’s political lifeand activities and political writings. It explores his thoughts about the

Introduction 3

state, politics, and tragedy. This analysis of Weber’s political commit-ments and approach to domestic politics and international relationsprovides a useful background for the chapters that follow. Lebow arguesthat Weber’s approach is anchored in Hegel’s view of the state and SocialDarwinism and its emphasis on survival of the fittest. Few, if any, twenty-first-century scholars would subscribe to his assumptions about econom-ics and politics. His epistemology rests on different foundations: Kantand historicism. Both remain relevant to contemporary social science.Weber’s approach to politics and social science offers a double cautionarytale. The inconsistency, even contradiction, between his political andscholarly commitments is hardly unique, but is all the more striking ina man who tried so hard to recognize his priors and take them intoaccount. His failure should make us more aware of the extent to whichour own normative commitments and theoretical writings are deeplyembedded in and restricted by our place in society and the contemporaryZeitgeist.

In Chapter 3, Ned Lebow elaborates Weber’s approach to knowledgein the context of controversies between historicists and positivists, andhistoricists and neo-Kantians. He argues that Weber sought to build onthese traditions while finessing their drawbacks and limitations.The result is a definition of knowledge as causal inference about singularevents that insists on the individual as its unit of analysis, uses rationalityas an ideal type, and employs counterfactual thought experiments toevaluate putative causes. For many reasons this approach is no “silverbullet,” but represents an imaginative and fruitful attempt to chart a morerewarding path toward knowledge in what Weber, following Dilthey,called the “cultural sciences.”

Lebow contends that Weber’s approach has unresolved tensions.The most important is the contradiction between his recognition of thesubjective nature of the values and interests that motivate research butinsistence on the objective means by which it might be conducted. Factsand values are not so easily reconciled, and Weber came to understandthat they influence, if not determine, the questions we ask, the methodswe choose to research them, what we consider relevant evidence, and theinferences we draw from it. Weber acknowledges that research questionsare subjective, and answers too, because they depend on contextualconfigurations. All knowledge is ultimately cultural and local in nature.Lebow concludes by exploring some of the lessons ofWeber’s project andits problems for contemporary international relations theory.

In Chapter 4, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson confrontsWeber’s conceptionof the “ideal-type,” a term, he contends, that is not well understood in thecontemporary social sciences. All too frequently it is operationally

4 Richard Ned Lebow

defined – or at least “used” – as an excuse not to expose one’s conceptualequipment to any form of empirical evaluation, whether this meansdescriptive accuracy, explanatory utility, or something else. Simply calla dubious notion an “ideal-type,” and one can deflect all manner ofcriticisms by suggesting that one is only making a “first cut” at somephenomenon – a “first cut” that will eventually be replaced by a betterdepiction.

Jackson laments this misuse of the ideal type because, for Weber, it wasclosely connected with an entire strategy of scholarly analysis that bearslittle resemblance to the neo-positivist hypothesis testing so dominant inmuch of contemporary social science. Ideal-typification is one part ofa procedure that devalued general laws in favor of case-specific config-urational explanation, eschewed universal notions of causality in favor ofsingular causal analysis, and preferred value clarification over the effort torationally legislate courses of action.

Ideal-typification is the heart of Weber’s methodology, and misun-derstanding it as a form of “approximation” underpins a whole seriesof misreadings of Weber. There is something quite epistemically radi-cal going on in Weber’s rejection of the idea that theoretical conceptscapture the determinate essence of their objects of analysis, and hisembrace of a form of cultural relativity that links ideal types firmly tothe value commitments of the scholars and scholarly communitiesdeveloping and deploying them. Politics – the arena of decision,compromise, and creative action – is thus freed to be a realm inwhich reason can advise, but not dictate, and scholars can clarifysocial and political dilemmas, but not resolve them by academic fiat.To minimize this dimension of Weber’s methodology is to ignore thecriticism that this founding figure of the modern social sciencesleveled against his contemporaries – and would level once againagainst much of our current academic practice.

In Chapter 5, Stefano Guzzini addresses the question of power. Heargues that Weber’s power analysis is at the crossroads of two differentanalytical domains. First, there is the domain of political theory; it isconcerned with the nature of the “polity” in which questions of theorganization of (organized) violence and of the common good, as wellas questions of freedom, are paramount. It is whereMacht andHerrschaftrelate to “government” or “governance” and political order, as well aspersonal “autonomy.” Second, there is the domain of explanatory theory,in which the purpose of power analysis is understanding behavior and theoutcomes of social action. Hence, instead of relating to a theory identify-ing the nature of the polity, it is embedded in a theory of action andsubsequently a social theory of domination. Power does not refer to

Introduction 5

government or authority, but to terms like “agency” and “influence,” ifnot “cause.”

Weber is both a scientific protagonist for the defense of this divide andan attempt at a synthesis. Weber’s synthesis mobilizes a praxeologicaltradition, where politics is the “art of the possible” in which collectiveviolence is not antithetical but fundamental to politics, and where poweris furthermore connected to the idea of state sovereignty and the discourseof the reason of state, including his famous ethics of responsibility.The chapter connects Weber’s political ontology of existential strugglewith his sociology of Herrschaft and with his political praxeology, byembedding it into his analysis of world politics and history.

Jens Steffek exploresMaxWeber’s theory of modernization with a viewto the study of international relations in general, and public internationalorganizations (IOs) in particular. Most Weber scholars agree that at thecore of his extensive and multifaceted writings is a theory of moderniza-tion, conceived as an answer to the question of why industrial modernitydeveloped in the Occident and not in other parts of the world. Weber’saccount of modernity is focused on a process of rationalization that can beobserved in changes of individual behavior and societal institutions.At the structural level, rationalization is characterized by the advance offormal law, bureaucratic forms of organization, and the increasing resortto scientific and technical expertise.

In the field of international relations, constructivist scholars havereferred to some central aspects of Weber’s modernization theory intheir study of international organizations. They have applied Weber’saccount of bureaucracy to international organizations, along with theconceptually related notion of a “rational-legal” form of authority andlegitimacy, typical of the modern age. However, it seems fair to say that ininternational relations, the reception of Weber’s modernization theoryhas taken place in a rather piecemeal fashion. Scholars have singled outsome elements from his sociology of authority, not always conscious ofthe overarching modernization-theoretical context in which they stand.

Steffek makes the case for a more comprehensive approach. Heargues that the emergence of international organizations as an organi-zational form needs to be seen in the context of the expansion andprofessionalization of public administration that has taken place in theOccident since the nineteenth century. The universal spread of thisorganizational form, in particular its extensive use of formal law, elimi-nated arbitrariness from authoritative decisions and made them morepredictable – a precondition for the emergence of industrial societiesand capitalism. In his discussion of the relation between organizationalform and rationalizing purpose, Steffek concentrates on the notion of

6 Richard Ned Lebow

Willkür (arbitrariness, despotism) in Weber’s academic and politicalwritings. The term, he contends, is crucial for us to understand thegestalt shift of government in the process of modernization. In fact,Weber chiefly used it when contrasting ancient with modern forms ofgovernment. It is the elimination of the despotic element in decisionmaking that makes the rationalization of government possible. As pre-dominantly bureaucratic organizations, international organizations aredestined to follow the same rationale. Their purpose is to transform thecontingencies of international power politics into rule-bound decisionmaking. His discussion ends on a cautious note. Max Weber presentedthe rationalizing features of bureaucratic modernity as a historicalmatter of fact. Steffek would qualify this account of modernity to theextent that a bureaucratic rationalization of government was alwaysa promise and idealization, not necessarily an unambiguous historicalreality.

In Chapter 7, John Hobson argues that Weber’s work on historicalsociology and IR was founded on a consistent West-centric base. Thisbase comprises what he calls “Eurocentric institutionalism,” which hedifferentiates from scientific racism. Weber’s historical sociology is thor-oughly Eurocentric first because it emphasizes the unique or exceptionalrationalization process as enabling the rise of European modernityand second because he insisted that modernity was destined to materi-alize in Europe and not in the East owing to the latter’s irrational institu-tions and culture. Hobson goes on to argue that this Eurocentrismunderpins the three different approaches that can be found in Weber’swritings on IR.

Hobson argues that Weber’s early writings on IR were marked bya certain realism. However, in his lesser-known wartime writings,Weber became critical of realist IR and moved toward something that isreminiscent (or preemptive) of the Eurocentric rationalist wing of theEnglish School (as inMartin Wight and Hedley Bull). Here the emphasisis on how Germany should play the key role in securing the reproductionof European international society, not least by maintaining the sovereignintegrity of the smaller nations. Here Weber echoed the imperialist argu-ment that Bull and Wight subscribed to when he argued that Germany’s“responsible” role could be secured only through the implementation ofimperialism in the non-Western world. Finally, the chapter closes byconsidering the connections between Weber’s argument for the need tomaintain the integrity of European international society with that pro-posed by the Pacifist Eugenicists, which insisted that Europe must beshored up so that it does not fall victim to the predations of the in-coming“Yellow Peril.” Hobson insists that though there are some overlaps in

Introduction 7

evidence, nevertheless Weber’s approach is thoroughly Eurocentricrather than scientifically racist in nature.

Chapter 8 represents one of the many conclusions that could fittinglybe offered to this volume. David Lebow and Ned Lebow explore theconsequences of Weber’s writings for key theorists of a succeeding gen-eration. If Kant’s shadow extended over the long nineteenth century,Weber’s provided a penumbra for the twentieth. Social scientists inmulti-ple disciplines were influenced by his thought. Lebow and Lebow exam-ine four such thinkers: Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno and MaxHorkheimer, and Hans Morgenthau. They offer a novel take on theirrespective projects by comparing their responses to Weber and the waysin which it shaped their thought.

Lebow and Lebow suggest that much of what makes Weber so inter-esting is the deep tension in his thinking between moral subjectivity andscientific rationality. It runs through his thought, and indeed his life.Weber wrote his epistemological essays before the catastrophe of 1914and died not long after the Weimar Republic was founded. The Weimarand Nazi eras exposed and heightened tensions of all kinds. What toWeber and his contemporaries may have appeared at most lacunae, wenow see as sharp tensions, if not contradictions. His successors feltcompelled to address, and resolve as far as possible, these tensions andcontradictions as they posed stark and compelling dilemmas for them.None of them succeeded because the intellectual tools they inheritedwereinadequate to the task of addressing the dark modernity that hademerged.

Rather than resolving Weberian tensions, Schmitt, Adorno andHorkheimer, and Morgenthau accentuated them. Schmitt transformedthem into absolute oppositions and warrants for excluding ethics frompolitics, and Adorno and Horkheimer into dialectical contradictions.Only Morgenthau managed to preserve Weber’s tragic legacy, althoughhe failed in his attempt to make it a source of political restraint.Morgenthau’s robust notion of politically engaged scholarship is never-theless more authentically Weberian than its alternatives. However,Morgenthau couched his arguments at least in part in the language ofscience, ironically encouraging a misreading of his works that undercuthis political and epistemological objectives.

There is much to learn from Weber and his successors. Their writingsrepresent novel and imaginative responses to modernity and its politicaland ethical problems. Their successes and failures in grappling with theseproblems help us to put them into sharper focus. They also indicate thetruth of Weber’s firmly held belief that all knowledge is contextual.The writings of Weber and his successors, whether addressing

8 Richard Ned Lebow

bureaucracy, the state, capitalism, or international relations, are inspiredand limited in equal amounts by contemporary developments. For thesame reasons, they often led themselves to readings opposed to those theyintended. There is little reason to suppose that we can do any better.We might nevertheless learn some important lessons about the limits andpossibilities of scholarship, and develop more intellectual sophisticationand humility in the process.

Notes

1. S.N.Eisenstadt, “Introduction,” inEisenstadt, ed.,MaxWeber onCharisma andInstitution Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. x–xii;Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Max Weber and Modern Social Thought,” inMommsen, ed., The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 169–96 for accounts of Americansocial science’s engagement with Weber.

2. On Weber’s methodological positions, see Fritz Ringer, Max Weber:An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),chapter 3; and the essays by Guzzini, Jackson, and Lebow in this volume.

3. Weber read Nietzsche and subscribed to his “ethic of human dignity[Vornehmheit],” but made only one reference to him in his letters. Ringer,Max Weber, p. 241.

4. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Wiley, 1974), p. 325.

5. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 178, quotingFriedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

6. Max Weber, Inaugural Lecture, delivered in May 1805 and published as DerNationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Akademische Antrittsrede (Freiburgand Leipzig, 1895). English translation, “The Nation State and EconomicPolicy,” in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, Weber: Political Writings(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–28. WolfgangJ. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber. Collected Essays(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989), chapter 5 onWeber’s critique ofsocial democracy in Germany.

7. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Max Weber and Bureaucracy andBureaucratization: Threat to Liberty and Instrument of Creative Action,”and “Rationalization and Myth in Weber’s Thought,” in Mommsen,The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1989), pp. 109–20, 133–44.

Introduction 9

2 Max Weber and International Relations

Richard Ned Lebow

What lies ahead of us is not the flowering of summer but a polar night oficy darkness and harness, no matter what group wins the outwardvictory now. – – – Max Weber (1919)

In this chapter, I explore Weber’s thoughts about the state, internationalrelations, tragedy, and ethics. I argue that his approach to the state andinternational relations is very much a product of his time; it is anchored inassumptions about economics and politics to which few twenty-first-century scholars would subscribe. Weber thinks Hegel’s influence perni-cious, but nevertheless adheres to aHegelian view of the state that endowsit with an ethical potential and makes citizens subservient to it.1 He isa Social Darwinist in his belief that peoples and states are engaged in anunremitting struggle for survival from which there is no surcease orsolution. He treats states as more or less autochthonous, oblivious tothe extent to which, already in his time, national economies and cultureswere increasingly interdependent. Darwinism and the hard shell of statesprovided the scaffolding for what would become the realist paradigm ininternational relations.

There is an unresolved tension between Weber’s nationalism andliberalism. The former was at odds with the latter in multiple ways,including the means Weber endorsed to advance national and liberalgoals. His liberalism is also hard to reconcile with our understanding ofdemocracy because he had nothing but scorn for everyday politicsthat sought to articulate and aggregate competing interests. His commit-ment to liberalism is nevertheless real, and he tried, not convincingly, toreconcile it with nationalism in his idealized image of plebiscitarydemocracy.

Weber’s politics are also at odds with his epistemology. The latter hasKant and historicism as its foundations. Kant inspired Weber to think ofways in which noumenal worlds might generate concepts like ideal typesthat did not describe any phenomenal world but were useful in organizingtheir study. Historicism taught him the culturally and historically specific

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nature of values and goals and any concepts used to analyze them. Henevertheless failed to recognize just how much his commitment to thestate as a political and ethical unit, and the German state in particular,was a product of his time and culture. So too was his understanding ofbureaucracy, democracy, nationalism, and international politics. Hestruggled to free himself of his priors, or at least to come to terms withthem. He made progress, but never realized how much further he wouldhave to go to attain his goal.

A Scholar in the Second Reich

Max Weber was born in 1864 into a politically active family. His fatherwas a politician and a member of the National Liberal Party, most ofwhose members had moved from opposition to support of Bismarckduring the three wars of German unification. His mother was deeplypious and estranged from her husband. Max Jr. was close to her, butrejected her religion and was secular from a young age. He contractedmeningitis at two and took several years to recover. In the aftermath, hewas keen to demonstrate his intelligence, as feeble-mindedness wasthought to be a long-term consequence of the disease.2

Weber studied law at Heidelberg University, but took courses in his-tory, economics, and philosophy and read widely on his own. He drankprodigious amounts of beer as a member of a student fraternity. He didhis military service in 1883–84. He then took up a legal internship,resumed his studies, and in 1889, published his Habilitationsschrift onRoman agrarian history. In 1892–93, he designed and ran a survey ofagrarian conditions in the East Elbian region of Prussia. This experienceturned him against the landowning aristocracy and encouraged, orrevealed, his hostility to Poles. He taught briefly in Berlin, and in 1894,at the age of thirty, was called to a full professorship in economics at theUniversity of Freiberg.3

The year before receiving his professorship, Weber married MarianneSchnitger, a distant relative. They had a close relationship, but seeminglyno sexual intimacy.4 Max was depressive and suffered a near nervousbreakdown between 1898 and 1902. Following his partial recovery – hewould suffer recurrent bouts of depression – he developed an abidinginterest in Protestant aestheticism. He came to regard Lutheranism asa German curse, although he insisted that it made Germans moresensuous and gemütlich than their Puritan-influenced Anglo-Americancounterparts. In 1904, he joined Edgar Jaffé and Werner Sombart aseditor of Archiv für Sozial Wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and wrote hisobjectivity essay for its opening issue. That year he also published the first

Max Weber and International Relations 11

part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and spent threemonths visiting the United States.

In 1905, he learned to read Russian and wrote a commentary on theRussian Revolution.5 Over the course of the next few years he founded theGerman Sociological Association, authored a series of studies on subjectsas diverse as religion, the economy, the city, and bureaucracy, all of whichwould see posthumous light in Economy and Society. When World War Ibroke out, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Germany and aided thewar effort by managing a military hospital in Heidelberg for a year.6 Hisstudy of Chinese religion was published in 1915, and he worked hard onwhat he envisaged as a multivolume study of the economic ethics of thegreat world religions.

Weber gradually became disenchanted with the German military andits foreign policy. He wrote essays for the Frankfurter Zeitung opposingterritorial annexation on moral and political grounds and unrestrictedsubmarine warfare for strategic reasons, and he voiced support for poli-tical reforms, including universal suffrage. In March 1916, he senta memo to the foreign office and twenty parliamentarians warning thatunrestricted submarine warfare would bring the United States into thewar.7 He favored a strong, popularly elected, American-style president tooffset parliamentary divisions and the state bureaucracy. He helped tofound the liberal German Democratic Party.

In 1918, Weber joined Heidelberg’s worker and social council. Heserved as an advisor to the Confidential Committee for ConstitutionalReform, which drafted the Weimar Republic’s constitution. He never-theless described socialist politicians as “grumpy old men [griesenhafteNörgler].”Hewas evenmore opposed to socialist revolutionaries like RosaLuxemburg, whose agitation he dismissed as a “bloody carnival.”8 Hewas not at all displeased by the assassination of Kurt Eisner, the organizerof the short-lived socialist revolution in Bavaria that overthrew theWittelsbach dynasty.9 In the spring of 1918, he strongly defended therapacious Brest-Litovsk Treaty that the German Supreme Commandimposed on Bolshevik Russia. He believed the Russians harboreda strong hatred of Germany and considered it in the national interest toweaken the country.10

Weber subsequently served on the German delegation to Paris andopposed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. He came close to beinga supporter of the stab-in-the-back legend propagated by right-wingGerman nationalists.11 Democratic Party officials rejected his nomina-tion as a candidate for the Reichstag. Frustrated with politics, he taughtfor a year at the University of Vienna and then in Munich, where hedirected the country’s first institute of sociology. InMunich, he wrote and

12 Richard Ned Lebow

presented his essays on science and politics as professions, and was thetarget of protests from students on the far right and far left. He died ofpneumonia in June 1920 at the age of fifty-six. His widow, Marianne,prepared Economy and Society for publication in 1921–22.

Weber inherited his liberalism and nationalism from his father. He wassix years old at the time of the Franco–PrussianWar, but it made a lastingimpression on him. According to Marianne Weber: “the naïve belief inthe justice of the German cause; the joyful seriousness of a belligerentnation willing to make sacrifices in order to gain the position of a greatpower; then the overwhelming victory celebrations and the proud exalta-tion over the finally achieved unity of the Reich – all this the childabsorbed alertly, and he was shaped by it for life.”12 In the post-unification decades, Weber experienced the intense nationalism of theGerman middle class and came to disapprove of its unhealthy worship ofthe Prussian military. When World War I broke out, he was pessimisticabout the outcome when England came in on the side of France andRussia, but happy to be alive and experience a conflict that would be“great and wonderful.”13

Weber became amore committed liberal as an adult, influenced in partby his reading of Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill. Hesubscribed to Mill’s conception of an open, agonistic, scholarly world,and intellectual community as essential to intellectual progress. Heopposed the consensus among his colleagues that professors should beabove politics but still champion the “national cause.”Weber believed theclaim of being apolitical a nefarious way of justifying German nationalismthat had a chilling effect on free thought and speech within the university.He reached out to anarchists and socialists, including Ernst Toller,Robert Michels, Ernst Bloch, and Georg Lukacs, men the academyrejected because of their political beliefs.14

Weber outgrew his Polish prejudice. At a 1910 meeting of the SocialPolicy Association, he protested against a colleague’s effort to definenations in racial terms. He strongly opposed anti-Semitism. He collabo-rated with Jewish colleagues, supervised Jewish students, and struggled tofind them good positions – unsuccessfully in the case of Georg Simmel,whom he very much wanted as a colleague in Heidelberg. Weber ima-gined what an intellectual joy it would be to teach a seminar composedentirely of Jewish, Polish, and Russian students.15 He was guilty of otherforms of racism. In April 1917, he fell hook, line, and sinker for thegeneral staff’s propaganda about the need to defend the country againstthe mongrel forces of the allies. In one of his Frankfurter Zeitung articles,he proclaimed that “Germany is fighting for its very life against an army inwhich there are negroes, Ghurkas and all manner of barbarians who have


come from their hiding places all over the world and who are nowgathered at the borders of Germany, ready to lay waste to our country.”16

German professors exploited World War I to reassert their culturalleadership by depicting the conflict as a struggle betweenGermanKulturand Western “civilization.” Although a supporter of the war effort,Weber refused to sign the October 1914 “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three” that defended the German invasion and occupation ofBelgium. He distanced himself from what he denigrated as “zoologicalnationalism.”He nevertheless thought that German participation in theWar served a higher purpose, that of upholding an alternative to “theautocracy of Russian officialdom on the one hand and the conventionsof Anglo-Saxon ‘society’ on the other.” Taking his cue from Herder, hewarned that a German defeat would reduce the cultural diversity ofhumankind.17

Weber’s nationalism was undeniably extreme. At the war’s end, ata student meeting in Heidelberg, he urged students to resort to the methodsof the 1905 Russian Revolution so “that the first Polish official who dares toenter Danzig is hit by a bullet.”18 He told another group of students, “Onlya scoundrel could still go around in his student colors at a time when Polesrule German cities in the east. Put your caps and bands away and give upthis feudal nonsense, which does not fit these times and is of no use toanyone. . .. He who is not willing to employ revolutionary methods in theregions where a German irredenta will emerge, and to risk scaffold andprison, will not deserve the name of nationalist in the future.”19

Weber was deeply committed to human rights, whose origins he tracedback to the struggle for freedom of religion waged by English dissentingsects.20 Although not a socialist, he maintained close ties to the socialistintellectuals of the SPD and rejected conservative efforts to cast thesocialists as enemies of the nation. His 1906 essay on Russia commentedfavorably on local governance and Russian liberals, whom he comparedto the members of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament.21 His efforts on behalfof the Weimar constitution sought to ensure a plurality of political viewsand impose some controls on the bureaucracy. Had he lived, Weberwould have remained a strong supporter of Weimar, unlike so manyGerman intellectuals who were disdainful and aloof or outright opposed.He almost certainly would have opposed Hitler and the Nazis in anoutspoken and courageous manner. Like so many Germans, he sharedtheir nationalism, imperialism, Darwinism, and racism – albeit in anattenuated form. Had Weber lived, one hopes that Hitler’s rise to powerand dictatorship would have compelled him to confront the contradic-tions between his nationalism and liberalism and to come down stronglyon the side of the latter.


Weber and the State

Nineteenth-century German historical, philosophical, and politicalthinking assumed the need for a modern and powerful state, to whichethical properties were imputed. Kant theorized that the “unsocial socia-bility” of people draws them together in societies, but also leads them toact in ways that threaten their survival. He considered this antagonisminnate to our species and an underlying cause of the state. Warfare drivespeople apart, but their need to defend themselves against others compelsthem to band together and submit to the rule of law. Each political unithas unrestricted freedom in the same way individuals did before thecreation of societies, and hence is in a constant state of war. The priceof order at home is conflict among societies. The “us” is maintained at theexpense of “others.”22

Hegel built on this formulation and argued that national cohesion doesnot rest so much on preexisting cultural, religious, or linguistic identitiesas it does on the citizen allegiance to authorities that provide for thecommon defense. Citizens develop a collective identity through theexternal conflicts of their state and the sacrifices it demands of them.“States,” he writes in the German Constitution, “stand to one another ina relation ofmight,” a relationship that “has been universally revealed andmade to prevail.” In contrast to Kant, who considers this situation tragic,Hegel rhapsodizes about the life of states as active and creative agents whoplay a critical role in the unfolding development of the spirit and human-kind. Conflict among states helps each to become aware of itself byencouraging self-knowledge among citizens. It can serve an ethical endby uniting subjectivity and objectivity and resolving the tension betweenparticularity and universality. After Hegel, peace came to be seen asa negotiated agreement between and among states, not the outcome ofsome civilizing process.23

German historians elaborated on this theme, praised the state, andsought to legitimize its authority. They conveniently ignored Kant andHegel’s understanding of the state as merely one stage of human develop-ment and their belief in the overall ethical nature of its mission. Heinrichvon Treitschke (1834–96), National Liberal member of the Reichstag anda professor of history at Berlin, described the state in pure Darwinist terms.On the eve of the wars of German unification, he wrote: “Every virilepeople has established colonial power . . . and those who fail to participatein this great rivalry will play a pitiable role in time to come.”24 In an 1862essay, Treitschke praised the “pitiless racial struggle” of Germans againstLithuanians, Poles, andOld Prussians.He claimed that “magic” grew from“eastern German soil” that had been “fertilized” by “noble German


blood.”25 Leopold vonRanke (1795–1886), a professor of history at Berlinfor nearly fifty years, emphasized source-based research and rejectedHegelianism in favor of historicism. He spurned liberal contract theory,insisting that the state was formed in the crucible of war.War was a catalystof progress, which revealed God’s plan for man. The conservative andnationalist Ranke held students spellbound with his lectures on Germanyand its mission.26

Weber was steeped in the German idealist tradition and framed hisunderstanding of the state and international relations on the basis of hisunderstanding of Kant and Hegel. He rejected the anti-Semitism ofTreitschke and the Christian teleology of Ranke. He neverthelessaccepted the state as the focus and facilitator of cultural developmentand its preservation and growth as a first-order concern. His idealizationof the state also responded to a deeply felt need to make value commit-ments, without which he regarded the exercise of power as pointless.Seeking and using power were only justified in the service of highervalues. The “mere” politician ends up accomplishing nothing of value,regardless of his effectiveness. His efforts are “devoid of meaning.”27

Weber insisted that the interests of the state – “the historical tasks of theGerman nation” –must take precedence over the economy and the formof government. He supported what Germans called the primacy of for-eign policy (Primat der Außenpolitik). His commitment to the state also ledhim to castigate German politicians of all parties for using narrow, self-interested, instrumental reason in lieu of adopting a national perspective.In contrast toWestern liberal theorists,Weber denied that the proper roleof parties was the representation of diverse and clashing interests.28

Following unification, according to Weber, the nation confronted “thefirst signs of positive political tasks, namely the idea of overseas expan-sion.” However, the lower middle classes lacked “even the most rudi-mentary economic understanding needed to grasp what it would mean forGermany’s trade if its flag were to be seen flying on far-off coasts.”29

Weber urges the German bourgeoisie to make up for lost time and comerapidly to political maturity, as the working class is even more immature.Germans of all classes need to rise to the responsibilities of being a greatpower with a world-historical mission. “We have to understand the factthat the unification of Germany was a youthful prank carried out by thenation in its old age, and that it would have been better, on the grounds ofexpense, to have left this undone if it was to have been the end rather thanthe beginning of Germany’s involvement in world politics.”30

Weber returns to this theme in his 1916 essay “Between Two Laws,” inwhich he insists that the tasks facing a great power like Germany are of analtogether different magnitude than those devolving on such nations as


Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, or Norway.31 Drawing on Swisshistorian Jacob Burckhardt, he argues that states that do not seek worldpower can devote their energies to “more intimate yet eternal values,including cultural ones.”32 Elsewhere he contends that because Prussiawas focused on conquest, art and literature did not develop in the politicalcenter of the “country.”33 This is a questionable understanding of therelationship between culture and power. It ignores the considerableevidence that in early modern and modern Europe, cultural explosions,like those of Renaissance Italy and Holland, Elizabethan and nineteenth-century England, and in France from Louis XIV to Weber’s day, wenthand in hand with economic growth and political expansion.

Great states, Weber insists, seek to impose their will on others.Germany must use its power “to determine the character of culture inthe future.” It has to carve out and defend a way of life “between theregulations of Russian officials on the one hand and the conventions ofEnglish-speaking ‘society’ on the other, with perhaps a dash of Latinraison thrown in.” Germans “have the accursed duty and obligation tohistory and to the future to resist the inundation of the entire world bythose two powers. If we were to refuse this duty, the German Reich wouldhave proved to be an expensive and vain luxury, injurious to culture,a luxury which we ought not to have allowed ourselves and which weshould get rid of as soon as possible by reshaping our state on the Swissmodel.”34

In the immediate aftermath of World War I and Versailles, Weber waseven more concerned about the German state. For comfort, he turned toMachiavelli, who also emphasized the importance of civic duty. Weberwanted Germans to be more like Florentines, who, Machiavelli wrote,“held the greatness of their native city to be of greater importance than thesalvation of their souls.” Weber offered an even starker contrast betweencivic and religious responsibilities in his condemnation of the ethics of theSermon on the Mount as incompatible with political action and therebylacking dignity.35 His commitment to nationalism lay at the root of hisrejection of what he called the ethic of conviction, a subject I address laterin this chapter.

Late in his life, Weber developed a more theoretical understanding ofthe state. In a 1918 essay, he defined power (Macht) as the ability to assertone’s will against that of others in some kind of social relationship.Authority (Herrschaft) is the ability to secure or compel the obedience ofothers. Politics at all levels of social aggregation consists of a struggle for“a share of power.” A ruling organization is one that makes othersobedient to it. It is political if it is territorially based and its legitimacyrests on the use of force. It is a state when it has an administrative


apparatus capable of imposing its unique monopoly over the use ofviolence on a given territory.36

In Economy and Society, his last word on the subject, Weber begins hisanalysis of the state with a discussion of violence, which he considerscentral to its development. He asserts that social violence is primordial;that every group, from the simple household to the political party, hasresorted to it to defend or advance the interests of its members. The stateis the chief form of political association in the modern world and the onlyone that can legitimately use violence. Weber describes the state and itsmonopolization of violence as the product of a long social-politicalevolution.37

A state is further characterized by its differentiated functions andpractices. They include the enactment of law, protection of safety andprovision of public order, protection of vested rights, fostering of hygiene,education, social welfare, and culture, and armed protection againstexternal attack. Each function is performed by one or more distinctbodies. This stands in sharp contrast to pre-state polities where suchfunctions were neither performed nor ordered in any rational way.Social violence initially found expression in acts of revenge carried outby kinship groups. It was not connected with legitimacy and often tookthe form of marauding parties, which Weber describes as a source of waramong early sedentary societies. Such raids were organized by leaders,chosen on the basis of their charisma. Ad hoc consociations graduallydeveloped permanent structures to cultivate military prowess and madewar into a vocation. Consociation required coercive mechanisms to com-pel obedience from warriors, those who supplied what they need to live,train, and fight, and peoples whom they conquered. Legitimacy becamenecessary when violence was directed against members of the tribe orsociety for having committed treason or displayed cowardice.38

Warriors feel superior to those who do not bear arms. Warrior con-sociations often reside apart and live on their booty or what they extractfrom members of their own community, especially women forced to doagricultural labor. Warriors steal or purchase young women and inventspirits and religious myths to justify their plunder. Political organizationsform only when warrior groups settle down in permanent territorialcommunities. Over time the community acquires “specific legitimationfor the use of violence.” This is facilitated by the decline of warriororganizations due to a long period of pacification or the emergence ofa larger political consociation. In the latter case, the larger community hasa strong interest in reining in warriors. If and when the coercive apparatusof the political community becomes powerful enough, it will activelysuppress what is now considered private violence. As evidence, Weber


describes the efforts of the French monarchy, beginning in the thirteenthcentury, to put an end to the feuds of royal vassals for the duration of warscarried on by kings.39

Central political control over violence gradually assumes the functionof protecting individuals and their rights. It secures powerful supportfrom the groups who benefit, most notably from religious authorities,burgers, and those who levy tolls on roads and bridges. These interestgroups expand with the money economy, enabled by pacification. Withfurther political and economic development the state emerges and ischaracterized by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force.40

ForWeber, the state and nation are largely coterminous. He rejects theBlut und Boden (blood and territory) conception of nationality common tomany German intellectuals and politicians. He advocates instead a liberalview of the nation. In Economy and Society, he argues that “persons whoconsider themselves members of the same nationality are often much lessrelated by common descent than are persons who belong to different andhostile nationalities.”While language is a common basis for nationality, itcan be misleading because people who speak the same language are, likeGerman speakers, sometimes divided into two or more nationalities.A nationality can also be composed of speakers of multiple languages,like the Swiss. Weber notes the case of German-speaking Alsatians whoconsider themselves part of the French nation. This is the result of their“common political experiences,” most notably those arising during theirparticipation in the French Revolution.41 Hans Kohn and Karl Deutschwould develop their theories of nationalism based in part on Weber’sinsights.42

Prestige

Weber’s understanding of international relations is complicated by hisinvocation of dual foreign policy motives – security and prestige – and hisfailure to discriminate effectively between them and their respectivecauses and consequences. Weber differs from contemporary realists inhis treatment of prestige as a goal in its own right. He understands poweras a means to this end, but also recognizes that prestige enhances statepower. He does not distinguish prestige from status, standing, and honor,and offers no deeper explanation for the quest for prestige beyond itstraditional association with the aristocracy – the same link Schumpeterinvoked to explain World War I.43 Weber considers prestige a goal of allstates, but notes that it is sought in different ways. Only great powers havethe potential to dominate other states; lesser powers must direct theirenergies to cultural achievements. Underlying this claim appears to be


a belief that governments and peoples conduct some form of cost-benefitanalysis and decide to invest their resources and exploit or develop path-ways to prestige most appropriate to their resources and situation.Neither Weber nor Burckhardt, on whom he draws, offers evidence insupport of this claim.

In Economy and Society, Weber distinguishes Stände (status groups)from classes. The latter are constructed on the basis of property, com-merce, and social relations. Social class refers to “the totality of those classsituations within which individual and generational mobility is easy andtypical.” He identifies five classes: the working class, petty bourgeoisie,intelligentsia, specialists (including civil servants and white-collar work-ers), and those privileged by property and education.44

Weber defines status (Ständische Lage) as “an effective claim to socialesteem in terms of positive or negative privileges.” It is based on a “style oflife” founded on some combination of formal education and hereditary oroccupational prestige. It finds expression in marriage, dining compa-nions, monopolistic appropriation of certainmodes of acquisition, abhor-rence of certain possessions or the means of acquiring them, and variousstatus conventions. Although an independent category, status generallycorrelates with class; Weber notes that money and entrepreneurship arenot themselves qualifications for status, but can lead to it. Conversely, thelack of property does not, of necessity, disqualify one from high status.Status can influence “if not completely determine” a class position “with-out being identical to it.”The class position of an officer or a civil servantmay vary considerably according to his wealth, but does not result indifferent statuses when upbringing and education promote a similarlifestyle.45

Status groups are collectivities that successfully claim special socialesteem and often certain kinds of monopolies. In premodern Europe,the latter encompassed the right to qualify for high office and professions,eat certain foods, and wear particular clothing – privileges enforced bysumptuary laws.46 Status groups form on the basis of a common style oflife, and in particular, their type of vocation; through “hereditary char-isma,” arising from high-ranking descent; and through monopolisticappropriation of political or hierocratic power. Every status group livesby a set of conventions that regulate its lifestyle and that often findexpression in “irrational consumption patterns.” These conventionstend to restrict the free market through monopolistic appropriation andlimitations on the employment and earning power of qualifiedindividuals.47

Weber analyzes status in the context of domestic societies and offers itas a preface to his discussion of their organization and practices. He does


not address status at the national level until the end of volume two ofEconomy and Society where he describes different kinds of political com-munities. Here too, most of the discussion is about domestic societies andan elaboration of his account in volume one. Weber clearly envisagesstates as members of a larger political community. He argues that “themodern position of political associations rests on the prestige bestowedupon them by the belief, held by their members, in a specific consecra-tion: the ‘legitimacy’ of that social action which is ordered and regulatedby them.” Such prestige is especially critical when the state resorts tocoercion and exercises power over life and death. In today’s world, “onlycertain communities, viz., the ‘states,’ are considered to be capable of‘legitimizing,’ by virtue of mandate or permission, the exercise of physicalcoercion by any other community.”48 In effect, states are legitimized byother states and their populations. Ideally, the two levels of legitimacy arereinforcing.

Nationalism, Weber insists, is not primarily economic in origin. “It isbased on sentiments of prestige, which often extend deep down to thepetty-bourgeois masses of states rich in the historical attainment ofpower-positions.” Those in power stimulate this sentiment and buildsolidarity and gain support through the acquisition of prestige.49

“The significance of the ‘nation’ is usually anchored in the superiority,or at least the irreplaceability, of the culture values that are to be preservedand developed only through the cultivation of the peculiarity of thegroup.”50 Intellectuals take a leading role in developing the discourse ofcultural uniqueness and superiority. It serves their status needs as a classand asmembers of a nation.51 In his marginal notes to this section,Weberobserves that “Cultural prestige and power prestige are closely associated.Every victorious war enhances the cultural prestige [of the victor],” as itcertainly did for Germany in 1871 and for Japan in 1905. Whether warfurthers the “development of culture,” he concedes, is anotherquestion.52

Once the state becomes a source of identification for its citizens, theyexpect it to satisfy emotional as well as physical needs. Citizens take pridein national accomplishments and their self-esteem rises and falls with thestatus of their nation. This is also true for state officials. Modern officersand bureaucrats, like feudal lords, are “the natural and primary exponentsof this desire for power-oriented prestige for one’s own political struc-ture.” Power and prestige for their community translate into power andprestige for themselves. It leads to more authority, promotion, andsinecures.

Prestige is gained in international politics by exercising power overother communities. According to Weber, “it means the expansion of


power, though not always by way of incorporation or subjection.” Heinsists that all political structures rely on violence, but they differ in howthey threaten or use force against other political associations. Some arecontent with the territory they have while others are expansionist,although these orientations are subject to change. He offers SwitzerlandandNorway as examples of quintessential status quo states and notes howthe former achieved a formal status as a neutral through the collectiveguarantees of the great powers. States that have become larger and morepowerful than others through expansion seek special privileges and “theirpretensions may influence the external conduct of the power structures.”This is because states compete for prestige within the regional or inter-national society to which they belong. This competition, he insists, hasalways been the major cause of war.53

The most powerful political communities are the greatest exponents ofmilitary prestige. The presence of several big political communities gen-erates acute conflict by means of “an unavoidable dynamic of power.”Claims to prestige by any one state provoke counterclaims and competi-tion from the others that infects various domains of activity. “The senti-ment of prestige is able to strengthen the ardent belief in the actualexistence of one’s own might, and this is important for positive self-assurance in case of conflict.” Those with a vested interest in the politicalstructure systematically “cultivate this prestige sentiment.”54 Domesticpolitics is an additional source of international conflict because territorialexpansion is an important means by which those in power can enhancetheir standing vis-à-vis domestic opponents.55 Instrumental and emo-tional motives are reinforcing and push powerful states into high-stakesconflicts in which compromise is difficult, if not impossible.

Much of international politics, Weber asserts, is driven by the desire ofstates to have their superior worth recognized. They acquire power overother states to gain power-prestige (Machtprestige), defined as “the gloryof power over other communities.” Competition for standing amongstates, but especially among the major powers, introduces an irrationalelement into international relations that exacerbates tensions, militarypreparations, and conflict. Weber offers Franco–German relations as anexample.

Self-assertion is appropriate to great powers, and for this reasonWebersupported German imperialism. He considered it intolerable thatGermany should be denied a place in the sun and was therefore fullyjustified in drawing the sword in 1914.56 In the immediate aftermath ofWorld War I, Weber justified Germany’s entry into the war with theobservation that “A nation will forgive damage to its interests, but notinjury to its honour, and certainly not when this is done in a spirit of


priggish self-righteousness.”57 In a January 1919 Heidelberg talk onGermany’s reconstruction, he told his audience: “The War was unavoid-able; it had to be fought to the end because honor demanded it.”58

For Weber, honor in international relations is an extension of itstraditional role in European society where it determined the relativestatus of groups (Ständische Lage). It dictates a “specific conduct of life”for the nobility that emphasizes “distance and exclusiveness.” Ever sincechivalry, he contends, honor was closely connected to the “ideal ofmanliness.” The way of life of the aristocracy, reinforced through educa-tion and social exclusiveness, including the choice of marriage partners,stood in direct contrast and opposition to “the pretensions of sheerproperty” and the idea of classes defined in terms of their respectivewealth.59

Marx and many liberals expected the bourgeoisie to develop a differentset of values and everywhere to regard the aristocracy as their adversary.Like Marx, Weber was surprised and disheartened that so many bour-geois – especially in Germany and Austria – put social over class interests,assimilated aristocratic ambitions, and accepted aristocratic leadership offoreign policy.60 This unexpected development, he reasoned, allowed thearistocracy to maintain its privileges, and in some countries, its politicalpower, in the face of the twin political and economic challenges ofworking-class democracy and finance capital allied to export-orientedindustry.61

Weber might have added that the partial “feudalization” of theEuropean middle classes was a primary impetus for imperialism.It encouraged the mittelstände to buttress their self-esteem through thecompetitive achievements of their respective nations. Given the precar-ious political structure of Wilhelminian Germany, government supportfor imperialism provided a means of rallying middle-class support, asunification had in an earlier period. As inmore traditional honor societies,the middle classes became angered when their nation was checked orchallenged and correspondingly willing to resort to force in its defense.Weber felt this way in the aftermath of German political and militarydefeats in 1905, 1911, and 1918.62

Survival of the Fittest

In the 1860s and 1870s, Ernst Haeckel became the great popularizer ofDarwin in Germany. He turned to evolution to attack the Prussiannobility and the Catholic Church and in support of liberal reforms.German Social Democrats and feminists also looked to evolutionarybiology for justifications of their political and social projects.


The linkage of Darwinism to militarism and aggression was also pro-nounced in late nineteenth-century Germany, more so than anywhereelse in Europe. Economic theorists, imperialists, and advocates ofLebensraum framed their arguments in Darwinian terms.63

Weber employed the language of Social Darwinism to convey hisbelief in the inevitability of conflict among individuals, classes, peoples,and their states. In his 1895 inaugural lecture, he characterizes politicsas an “eternal struggle” and warns his audience against any thoughts ofutopias as they are dangerous illusions. “You can change the means, thecircumstances, even the basic course of those who are responsible for it,but you cannot put the struggle itself aside.”Nationalities and states aresubject to a continuous and process of selection: “one group yields tothe other . . . [and] the victorious nationality is the one possessing thegreater ability to adapt itself to the given economic and social conditionsof life.”64

The particular conflict Weber had in mind was between Germansand Poles. Capitalism had undermined the traditional relationshipbetween Junker landlords and sharecroppers (Instmänner) in the east-ern parts of Prussia. Increasingly, landlords imported low-wage Polishworkers, driving out German farmers, many of whom emigrated to theUnited States. Weber conducted a lengthy study of this problem anddescribed it as a purely economic development, but nevertheless saw itas symptomatic of the “struggle” between Germans and Slavs. He wasso disturbed by demographic trends in East Elbian regions that hejoined the Pan-German League in 1893 in the hope of mobilizingwider support for his Polish policy despite the League’s espousal ofa crude form of völkisch (racial) nationalism. He left six years laterbecause of the League’s support for conservative agricultural interests,which he considered inimical to the national interest.65 Foreign policyand Darwinist-style competition remained the template against whichhe measured all policies, domestic and foreign. He later acknowledgedthat “I have viewed politics only in a national framework – not onlyforeign policy, but all politics.”66

Despite Weber’s hostility to Poles, there is nothing essentialist in hisunderstanding of nationalities and their respective levels of culture anddevelopment. He insisted that the Germans were culturally superior butrecognized that the Polish–German relationship “could perhaps shiftagain as a result of further generations of breeding of the kind whichmay have produced the difference in the first place.”67 To protect theGerman presence in the East, Weber demanded the expulsion of Polishresidents and the resettling of the region with German farmers from theWest.68 This is the very policy Hitler would attempt to implement, albeit


in a far more extensive and barbaric way. In fairness to Weber, he did notframe the problem in racial, but in cultural terms.

Weber also thought in Darwinian terms about the German people. Ourtask, he insisted, is not to breed happy people, but to encourage “thosecharacteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness andnobility of our nature. . .. Through our work and our nature we want to bethe forerunners of that future race.”69 Along with other Darwinists whocondemned humanitarian assistance as interfering with natural selection,Weber expressed impatience with those churches and left-leaning aca-demics (Kathedersozialisten) who called for government aid of those whohad lost out in the capitalist struggle and transformation.70

Weber considered economic growth and imperial expansion essentialto national survival. Germany was an industrial nation and requiredoverseas commerce. It was engaged in a struggle for markets with otherindustrial states, and colonies assured access to markets and rawmaterials.71 This was another reason why Germany was justified ingoing to war in 1914: to defend itself and Austria and to forestalla crippling Russian and Anglo-American hegemony.72 Weber lookedforward to victory and a German-dominated Mitteleuropa. He opposedterritorial annexations as degrading to the peoples swallowed up. Hefavored Polish cultural autonomy, but not Polish independence, anddeluded himself into believing that this would be acceptable to Poles.He differed in kind, but not in substance, from right-wing annexationistswho aspired to extend the Reich from the Belgian coalfields in the west tothe grain basket of Ukraine in the east. Weber envisaged a world in whichempires, formal and informal, would increasingly be the norm.To survive, Germany had to become a great empire – de facto inEurope and de jure overseas.73 He saw empires as the harbinger of thefuture at the very moment they were rushing toward the precipice.

Weber frames his approach to foreign policy and international relationsin terms of several not always compatible conceptions. First is the questfor prestige and status. He more or less equates the two, and considersthem social constructions, but ones that build on fundamental humanneeds. People want to be recognized as superior and to exercise powerover others. He does not tell us how the desires for prestige and power arerelated in either theory or practice, or how this connection has evolved inpractice over the course of time.

Weber portrays prestige as an instrumentality and an end in its ownright. Powerful states augment their power with prestige, which they gainthrough victorious wars. He ignores nonmilitary sources of prestige andinfluence, e.g., palaces and urban development, cultural and scientificachievements, wealth and well-being. They were always important, and


were becoming increasingly so in his era.74 He acknowledges a relation-ship between prestige and power, but does not analyze it at either thenational or international levels. He asserts that the intelligentsia is largelyresponsible for developing discourses that proclaim the superiority oftheir nationality and state. Like politicians and other citizens, they pre-sumably seek prestige as an end in itself. But they also benefit from itinstrumentally because it might enhance their wealth or influence. Heretoo, Weber makes no attempt to evaluate the relative importance of thesemotives or how they interact.

Weber roots his prestige explanation for international conflict at theindividual level and the human desires to dominate and gain recognition.At the system level, he offers a Darwinist account. The scarcity ofresources compels states to fight with one another to secure what theyneed to survive and prosper. Weber notes that political units have alwaysattempted to expand at the expense of others. Like Hobson and Lenin, heargues that capitalism has intensified the age-old struggle for territorybecause of the need for foreign markets and places to invest. He neverclarifies the relationship or relative importance of psychological (prestige)and material (markets) explanations for conflict.

Weber’s analysis is open to substantive criticism. His conception ofthe state is a late nineteenth-century German one and based more onhistorical myth than reality. His Darwinist account of internationalrelations is not intended as a metaphor but as an extension of evolu-tionary theory to international relations. Biological evolution works bymeans of natural selection, which does not occur in international rela-tions because most states do not die and none reproduce (offshootsettler colonies aside). Conscious adaptation rather than selection isarguably more appropriate to international relations because politicalunits can benefit from altering their behavior, or structure in the case ofstates, in response to changes in their environment.75 Natural selection,the mechanism of evolution, is inapplicable to international relationsbecause states do not reproduce and few states that fail to adapt areswallowed up by competitors.

Adaptations often have short shelf lives and, unlike genes responsiblefor them in living things, they are not passed along from one set ofnational leaders to another. Weber’s Germany is a case in point.Frederick the Great transformed Prussia from a backwater marsh intoa great power. His descendants recklessly challenged Napoleonic Franceand in 1806 lost most of the territory he had gained. Hardenberg,Gneisenau, and Scharnhorst reorganized the Prussian state and army,regaining their country’s status as a great power. Bismarck built on thisfoundation, unified Germany, and made it the dominant power in


Europe.Wilhelm II and his advisors gambled recklessly and needlessly onvictory in a European war, which led to Germany’s defeat, partial dis-memberment, costly reparations, and restrictions on rearmament and thesize of its armed forces. Gustav Stresemann made gradual but notableprogress in reintegrating Germany into the European political commu-nity. But then Hitler led Germany into an even more destructive war thatleft the country smaller in size and divided into two ideologically opposed,quasi-independent, rump states. Over the course of the next half-century,the leaders of the German Federal Republic pursued cautious policiesthat gained independence, respect, and trust for their country and, ulti-mately, reunification. Germany’s seesawing is more typical of interna-tional relations than of the more linear development internationalrelations scholars from Weber to Waltz associate with evolution.

Weber misuses the Darwinist analogy in another way. He speaks ofsurvival in terms of adaptability, but equates it with power. In the animalkingdom, the most powerful beasts – lions, tigers, rhinoceri, or beforethem, dinosaurs – do, or did, not have a noticeable survival advantage.A more compelling argument can be made for an inverse relationshipbetween size and survival. Smaller mammals outlived the dinosaurs, andmany small states (e.g., Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Andorra, Singapore)have successfully carved out secure and profitable niches for themselves.Power may help states adapt to changing environments, but it is only oneof many relevant attributes.

Weber emphasizes power because he believed survival in the twentiethcentury depended on formal or informal empire achieved by force. This isa projection of a late nineteenth-century view of the world that was widelyshared in central and Eastern Europe. It helped to set inmotion a chain ofevents that brought about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian, Russianand Ottoman empires. More fundamentally, empire was doomed, asdemonstrated by the subsequent collapse of the British, French,Portuguese and Spanish empires, and, more recently, the Soviet Union.None of us has crystal balls, but Weber’s predictions in this and otherpolitical questions – including his belief as late as the November 1918armistice that theWilhelminian dynasty would survive –were woefully farfrom themark. His failure inmany cases is attributable to the state-centricand Darwinist concepts that shaped his vision of international affairs.They blinded him to the degree to which national economies werebecoming more dependent, with trade and investment between thegreat powers far outstripping that between metropoles and colonies.Although alert to nationalism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, hefailed to see that it was a principal reason why empires could no longer besustained.


Tragedy

Weber’s turn to tragedy was a response to his analysis of politics andinternational affairs.76 It was a readily available trope given its centralityto German literature and philosophy from Hölderlin to Nietzsche.77

In sharp contrast to Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, Weber did not usetragedy as a foundation for ethics or German identity, but ratherdescribed it as a universal feature of the human condition. Like theGreek playwrights, he saw tragedy arising from the clash of irreconcilablevalues, the opacity and unpredictability of the social world, and the hubrisof powerful actors. Intensifying competition among the great powers forhonor, standing, and material gain increased the risk of tragedy as did thefailure of their leaders to recognize this risk.

Domestic political developments were another catalyst of tragedy.Weber feared that the modern world would be caught between theScylla of Jacobin dictatorship – most recently manifest in the SovietUnion and the Charybdis of unchecked bureaucracy. He struggled todefend liberalism as an alternative to both, but was increasingly pessimis-tic about its success in a world where self-confidence and independence ofthought and action – aristocratic values he thought foundational toa liberal outlook on life – were fast disappearing and being replaced bya single-minded focus on material acquisition.

Weber had no solution to either problem. He did his best to confrontthem in his famous Munich lecture of January 1919, later reworked andpublished as “Politik as Beruf [The Profession of Politics].” This essaymust be read against his May 1895 inaugural lecture, in which he criti-cized Bismarck for stifling the development of a political class that mighthave educated and led the German nation. In its absence, Germany wasa country lacking in political maturity, infused with “vulgar” nationalismand led by a monarch woefully ill equipped for the task.78 In 1919, helooked back with nostalgia on the prospect of a strong leader who couldimpose his will on the country and put an end to violent street politics.“The Profession of Politics” describes Germany as a leaderless democ-racy. Its professional politicians, Weber laments, lack the “inner, charis-matic qualities that make for a leader.” The only solution is the directelection of a passionate, responsible, and intelligent leader as president ofthe Republic. Lassman and Speirs see an unresolved contradictionbetween Weber’s commitments to democracy and charismaticleadership.79

WolfgangMommsen denies any contradiction, arguing thatWeber didnot really believe in democracy. He wanted an elected leader who ruled ina demagogic manner.80 Support comes from a 1919 conversation


between Weber and former de facto dictator General Erich vonLudendorff. After discussing the honor of the nation, the twomen turnedto politics andWeber criticized Ludendorff for the Supreme Command’sinterference in politics.

ludendorff (driven into a corner, and evading the issue). There you have yourhighly praised democracy! You and the Frankfurter Zeitung are to blame for it!What has improved now?

weber Do you think I regard the Schweinerei [unholy mess] that we now have asa democracy?

ludendorff If you talk that way, maybe we can have a meeting of the minds.weber But the Schweinerei that preceded it was not a monarchy either.ludendorff What is your idea of a democracy, then?weber In a democracy the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the

chosenman says, “Now shut yourmouths and obeyme.”The people and theparties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.

ludendorff I could like such a “democracy!”81

The postwar Bundesrepublik desperately wanted founding fathers for itsdemocracy and mobilized Max Weber toward this end. Mommsen’sassault on him provoked a strong reaction that reached its climax at the1964 German Sociological Congress in Heidelberg. Weber came underattack from Mommsen, but also from the New Left, led by HerbertMarcuse. To the dismay of Weber supporters, Jürgen Habermas arguedthat much of Carl Schmitt’s decisionism and theory of plebiscitary rulederived from Weber. Raymond Aron, who had been asked to adjudicatethe controversy, declined to do so on the grounds that the dispute wasmore about recent German politics than it was about Weber.82

The controversy surroundingWeber’s politics has not died. In his 2004intellectual biography of Weber, German-American sociologist FritzRinger rejects outright Mommsen’s characterization of Weber and espe-cially his attempt to portray his foreign and domestic politics as in linewith what would follow under Hitler and the Nazis. Ringer insists thatWeber wanted to model post-imperial Germany on the American politi-cal system. He recognized that American president relied on the power ofpersuasion, and often used his bully pulpit in a somewhat demagogic way.The president was nevertheless constrained by federalism and otherchecks and balances built into the national government.83

Weber made a sharp distinction in his writings between a Caesar-likeexecutive and a plebiscitary one – although he clearly failed do so in hisconversation with Ludendorff. Contrary to Ringer, Weber did not wantto impose American democracy on Germany, but he did want an activeGerman parliament that could play a constraining role on a president andan educational one vis-à-vis the German people.84 In effect, he refused to


face the incompatibility between an electoral democracy, in which politicsrevolved around the articulation and aggregation of interests, and a quasi-dictatorship where the leader had the freedom – although often littleincentive – to pursue the national interest.

Weber’s wartime experience should have made him more cautiousabout the feasibility and value of a plebiscitary democracy. Ludendorff’squasi-dictatorship rested on the respect the German people had for thevictors of Tannenberg. British PrimeMinister David LloydGeorge, whilenot a dictator, was no longer merely primus inter pares in the cabinet. Hisauthority was closer to that of an American president, and the authority ofboth leaders rested on their charismatic appeal to their respective publics.Their effective mastery of the media was central in this connection.Anglo-American leaders were nevertheless restrained by political culture,and American leaders confronted constitutional limitations. From thevantage point of 1919, the dangers of a German charismatic leader shouldhave been correspondingly more obvious to thoughtful German politicalanalysts. Weber did not live to see the dictatorships of Mussolini, Stalin,and Hitler, all of which lent substance to this fear.

Other tensions appear in Weber’s political thought. He distinguishesthe ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) from that of responsibility(Verantwortungsethik). The former requires people to act in accord withtheir principles regardless of the outcome. He describes this ethic as anunaffordable luxury in a world where force must sometimes be used forsurvival or important policy ends. “No ethics in the world,” he reasons,“can get round the fact that the achievement of ‘good’ ends is in manycases tied to the necessity of employing morally dangerous means, andthat one must reckon with the possibility or even likelihood of evil side-effects.”85 The ethic of responsibility, which directs attention to theconsequences of one’s behavior, is more appropriate to politics, andinternational relations especially. Anybody who fails to recognize thistruth “is indeed a child in political matters.”86

Weber’s ethic of responsibility is nevertheless problematic because, ashe reluctantly acknowledges, behavior so often has unforeseen and unde-sired consequences.87 This is arguably more likely still when violence isused in volatile domestic or foreign conflicts. Morally justifiable policiescan produce horrible outcomes, and so too can policies crafted to producegood ones. Responsible politicians, he suggests, make use of both ethicsto some degree and think through carefully the conditions in which eitheris appropriate and the outcomes – negative and positive – to which theymay lead. Awise leadermust “be conscious of these ethical paradoxes andof his responsibility for what may become of himself under pressure fromthem.”88 He must think with his head, but also listen with his heart,


because there are some occasions when ethical considerations should bedetermining. After distinguishing these ethics from each other, Weberconcludes that they “are complementary and only in combination do theyproduce the true human being who is capable of having a ‘vocation forpolitics.’”89 He does not identify the conditions that should govern thechoices between them on the grounds that they are situation specific.In the absence of clear criteria, leaders are dangerously free to makechoices of convenience.

Weber’s two ethics are not as distinct as he suggests. Without acknowl-edging it, he relies on the ethic of responsibility to critique that of convic-tion. Ethical behavior, he contends, can have damaging consequences forthe very values it is intended to uphold. This assertion depends onadvance knowledge of the outcome of specific choices or statistical evi-dence that decisions made on the basis of the ethic of conviction are moredamaging than those made on the basis of the ethic of responsibility.Weber has no such evidence to offer. He further alleges, also withoutevidence, that the ethic of responsibility is the appropriate ethic forpolitical decisions because it leads to better outcomes. The concept of“better” requires some underlying set of values in terms of which anoutcome can be assessed, and this brings us full circle back to the ethicof conviction. The only alternative, which he consistently opposes, is tosmuggle in values without acknowledging them as such, as the Austrianeconomists of his day and neoliberals in ours have done successfully withefficiency. There is no separation of fact from values.

Weber gave his famous “Politik als Beruf” lecture in January 1919 inMunich. It was at the height of the short-lived socialist republic estab-lished in Bavaria and led by Kurt Eisner. Weber loathed Eisner and theother pacifists who surrounded him. He accused them of “nauseatingexhibitionism.”90 A month earlier he wrote an article for theWiesbadenerZeitung in which he proclaimed, “Peace among nations is not achievedthrough the disgraceful behavior of someone like Eisner, who is conduct-ing a repugnant quest for the guilty ones.”91 His disparagement of theethics of conviction can be read as an attack on Eisner and the socialists.

Weber employs both ethics to evaluate German foreign policy and inways that further highlight the difficulty of choosing between them. Heconsiders the Franco–Prussian War a legitimate use of force becauseGermany had every right to become a great power. He describes theGerman decision for war in 1914 as necessary to uphold the country’shonor. He implies, although never directly states, that in affairs of honor,great powers, like knights of old, act without regard for the consequences.War justified the German invasion of Belgium and France in 1914, butWeber hoped – unreasonably, as the September Program of 1914


demonstrated – for a complete withdrawal of German forces after hosti-lities. In assessing German strategy during the war he turns to the strategyof responsibility. A notable example is the January 1917 decision in favorof unrestricted submarine warfare. Weber considered this an irrationalmove because it would not defeat Britain but would draw America intothe conflict, and its unlimited resources and manpower were likely tomake a critical difference.92 However, as noted, the ethic of responsibilityalso led him to support the draconian Treaty of Brest-Litovsk because ofthe need to safeguard Germany from the effects of Russian hostility.

Let us consider a contemporary invocation of the ethic of conviction.British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that he would never usenuclear weapons.93 His policy was unambiguously based on the ethic ofconviction. Corbyn was immediately excoriated by Tories – and manyLabourites – who countered with arguments based implicitly on the ethicof responsibility.94 They condemned Corbyn’s statement as the height ofirresponsibility on the grounds that it would seriously undercut deter-rence, and, some alleged, even invite attack. There is absolutely noevidence that nuclear declaratory policies have any policy consequences,or, for that matter, that nuclear deterrence reduces the likelihood ofpolitical or military challenges.95 Britain’s four submarines and theirTrident missiles are dear to the heart of the Tory Party. They are alsosupported by much of the Labour Party, presumably for fear of otherwiseappearing weak and inviting the same kind of scathing criticism Corbynhas received. Themissile program also provides jobs. The ethic of respon-sibility, in this case and others, is often an effective political weapon andjustification for policies supported for other reasons.

Weber condemnedRealpolitik but subscribed to amodified or soft formof it. States and their leaders should conform to accepted internationalnorms except when their honor or critical security interests are at stake.In these circumstances, they can act with relative impunity, but must beall themore aware of the likely consequences of their actions. In effect, theonly justification for the use of violence or other questions means is anethically beneficial outcome. This is a deeply problematic approach topower. Almost any problem can be framed as one in which the nation’shonor or vital interests are at stake, and politicians around the worldroutinely associate their policies with the national honor or interest.Weber’s plea for them to face up to and make difficult trade-offs betweenethics and convenience is destined to fall on deaf ears. It appears to havedone so in his case as well. His justifications for the Franco–PrussianWar,and even more for Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France in 1914,are unconvincing to present-day students of history and internationalrelations. We admittedly know more about the machinations of German


leaders in 1914 and the critical effect of their “blank check” to Austriafollowing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.Weber appearsto have been swept away by the very nationalist emotion he wants tobanish from decisions as critical as those concerning war and peace.However, these are precisely the situations in which feelings run highand careful and cautious risk assessments are least likely.96

A fundamental issue raised by Weber’s conception of power and ethicsconcerns themotives behind political initiatives.Weber acknowledges thesame three motives as Hobbes and Thucydides: fear (security), interest(material well-being), and honor (standing, status, revenge). LikeThucydides and Hobbes, Weber sees honor as the dominant motive inrelations among states, especially powerful ones. He invokes it to explainand justify German policy in 1870 and 1914. Honor is a value thatdemands and evokes strong emotional commitments and responses.Almost by definition, it prompts people and leaders to approach decisionsin terms of the ethic of conviction, and in the very circumstances whereWeber believes the ethic of responsibility to be most appropriate.Consider the counterfactual of how much more restrained Austrian andGerman policy might have been in 1914 if their leaders had framed theirresponses to the assassination in terms of strategic or material interests inlieu of honor.97

Weber is deeply conflicted about motives. He recognizes that honor isthe most dangerous motive in the modern world, but is committed to it inpolitics and in his personal and professional life. His academic and quasi-political career were characterized by one controversy after the other,many of them instigated by Weber’s refusal to refrain from criticism orlet pass without a strong reaction some behavior he considered unprofes-sional. Like so many nineteenth-century German intellectuals, he asso-ciated honor with grand, often collective projects that give meaning lifeand justify the German nation.98

The alternative to thumos, and the striving for honor and recognition, isappetite, which, in politics, generally finds expression in the quest foraffluence. Honor began to come under attack in the sixteenth century;Cervantes’ Don Quixote was a landmark publication in this regard. In theeighteenth century, Western Europe witnessed an upgrading of appetite.Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Smith’s Wealth of Nations argued thatthe individual quest for wealth, considered since classical times a sourceof individual and social disorder, benefited society as a whole.99

Influenced by Kant and the values of German Idealism, German intellec-tuals looked down on money making as an undeniably necessary activitybut still an unworthy one. In distinguishing themselves from Britain andFrance, they vaunted the allegedly more collective and idealist character


of German Kultur. Friedrich Schelling was horrified that his brotherbriefly considered a career in business.100 Nietzsche condemned “super-fluous people” whose life centered on markets and profit.101 DuringWorld War I, Werner Sombart praised “the ancient German hero’sspirit,”which was rescuing Germany from becoming just another corruptcapitalist nation.102 Hans Morgenthau wrote in a gymnasium essay thathe confronted a choice between a life in commerce where “men year inand year out, in eternally repetitive, monotonous rhythm, sow and har-vest, save and consume, and seek happiness by making more money thanothers.” The alternative, which he found much more appealing, was “towork indefatigably . . . in the service of a higher cause [Sache].”103

Like many of his contemporaries, Weber found parliamentarians thepolitical equivalent of appetite-driven businessmen. Not driven by anyhigher “passion” associated with a noble idea or cause, they barter withone another for small and selfish ends. He describes the mundane char-acter and limited focus of socialist politicians and conservative agrariansas threatening to the public good as revolutionaries. The only way out ofthis impasse is a charismatic leader who can appeal to people on groundsother than class interest. Weber’s hope is unrealistic because of thedangers inherent in this kind of leadership. The history of the twentiethcentury also suggests that charismatic leaders are even more likely to actin terms of self and parochial interests than their more plebiancounterparts.

Weber was adamant that the social world is the product of our concep-tions and practices. Our approach to knowledge is never independent ofour cultural setting. Our analytical interventions in turn help to shape thissetting. Good scholarship requires awareness and sensitivity to theseinteractions and recognition of the subjective nature of our research andfindings independent of the robustness of our methods. This is a high barto set and not one that Weber found easier to clear when studyingsocieties other than his own.

Notes

1. Paul Honigsheim, The Unknown Max Weber (London: Transaction, 1946),p. 12.

2. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (NewBrunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), pp. 32–33.

3. MaxWeber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy,” in Peter Lassman andRonald Speirs, Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), pp. 1–28.

4. JoachimRadkau,MaxWeber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge:Polity, 2011), passim, for Weber’s love life in and out of marriage.


5. Max Weber, “Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland,” initiallypublished in Archiv für Sozialpolitik, 22, no. 1 (1906). English translation,“On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia,” in Lassman andSpeirs, Weber, pp. 29–74.

6. On Weber during the war years, see Weber, Max Weber, chapter 16;Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, 2nded., trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,[1974] 1984), chapter 7.

7. Max Weber, “Der verschärfte U-Boot Krieg [Unrestricted SubmarineWarfare],” in Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,1958), pp. 115–25; Mommsen,MaxWeber and German Politics, pp. 146–54.

8. Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany under a New PoliticalOrder,” in Lassman and Speirs, pp. 130–271.

9. Radkau, Max Weber, pp. 506–10.10. MaxWeber,The Russian Revolutions, trans.GordonC.Wells and Peter Baehr

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 264.11. Weber, Max Weber, chapters 17–19; Mommsen, Max Weber and German

Politics, pp. 283–331; Radkau, Max Weber, pp. 504–05.12. Weber, Max Weber, p. 40.13. Ibid., pp. 412, 521–22; Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics,

pp. 190–282 on Weber and World War I.14. Toller did not pursue an academic career. Dittmar Dahlmann, “Max

Weber’s Relation to Anarchism and Anarchists: The Case of Ernst Toller,”inWolfgang J.Mommsen and JürgenOsterhammel, eds.,MaxWeber and HisContemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 367–81; Mommsen,The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, chapter 6, on Weber andMichels.

15. Radkau, Max Weber, pp. 432–36.16. Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political

Order”; Weber, Russian Revolutions, p. 225.17. Max Weber, “Zwischen zwei Gesetzen [Between Two Laws],” in Lassman

and Speirs, Weber, pp. 75–79. Also “Deutschland unter den EuropäischenWeltmachten,” speech in Munich, October 22, 1916, GAW, p. 30.

18. Weber, Weber, p. 631.19. Report of the Heidelberger Tageblatt, in Weber, Weber, pp. 631–32.20. Max Weber, “On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia,” in

Lassman and Speirs, Weber, pp. 29–74.21. Ibid. Weber acknowledged the influence in this regard of his friend political

scientist Georg Jellinek.22. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan

Purpose” and “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. and trans.Hans Reiss and H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991), pp. 41–53, 93–130.

23. G. W. F. Hegel, “The German Constitution,” in Laurence Dickey andH. B. Nisbet, eds., Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 6–101; Allen H. Wood, ed.,Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:


Cambridge University Press, 1991); and “The Philosophical History of theWorld,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) for the development of histhought on the state.

24. Andreas Dorpalen,Heinrich von Treitschke (NewHaven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1957), chapters 8–9.

25. Ibid., pp. 223–25.26. Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1977); Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 253–88.

27. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf [The Profession and Vocation of Politics],” inLassman and Speirs, Weber, pp. 130–271; Weber, “Parliament andGovernment in Germany under a New Political Order.”

28. Ibid.29. Weber, “Nation State and Economic Policy.”30. Ibid., pp. 25–26.31. Weber, “Between Two Laws.”32. The work in question is Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,

English version, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (New York:Pantheon, 1943).

33. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols.Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978), II, p. 926.

34. Ibid., pp. 75–76; “Deutschland unter den Europäischen Weltmächten[Germany under the European World Powers],” October 1916, in Weber,Politische Schriften, pp. 157–77.

35. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics”; Weber, Weber, p. 683.36. Max Weber, “Parlament und Regierung in neugeordneten Deutschland

[Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order],”in Lassman and Speirs, Weber, pp. 130–271.

37. Weber, Economy and Society, II, pp. 904–05.38. Ibid., II, pp. 905–07.39. Ibid., II, pp. 907–08.40. Ibid., II, pp. 908–09.41. Ibid., I, pp. 393–98.42. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background

(New York: Macmillan, 1944); Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and SocialCommunication (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1953).

43. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, trans. Heinz Norden(New York: Kelley, 1951 [1918 for the imperialism essay]).

44. Ibid., I, pp. 302–05.45. Ibid., I, pp. 305–07. See also II, p. 932.46. Ibid., II, p. 935; AlanHunt,Governance of the Consuming Passions: AHistory of

Sumptuary Law (London: St. Martin’s, 1996).47. Weber, Economy and Society, I, pp. 306–07.48. Ibid., II, pp. 901–04.49. Ibid., II, pp. 921–22.


50. Ibid., II, pp. 925–26.51. Ibid., II, p. 926.52. Ibid.53. Ibid., II, pp. 910–11.54. Ibid., II, pp. 911–12.55. Ibid., I, p. 911.56. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, chapters 4 and 7.57. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”58. Weber, Max Weber, p. 644.59. Weber, Economy and Society, II, 932–37, 1068–69.60. Karl Marx, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-revolution,” Neue Rheinische

Zeitung, 14 December 1848, in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 192–94.

61. Weber, Economy and Society, vol. II, pp. 920–21.62. On this point, see Lebow,Cultural Theory of International Relations, chapter 7.63. Paul Crook,Darwinism,War and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994), pp. 29–35.64. Weber, “Nation State and Economic Policy.”65. Ibid.; Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, p. 54.66. Max Weber, “Bismarck’s Aussenpolitik und die Gegenwart [Bismarck’s

Foreign Policy and the Present]” and “Deutschland unten den europäischenWeltmächten”; Mommsen,Max Weber and German Politics, p. 54.

67. Weber, “Nation State and Economic Policy.”68. Ibid.69. Ibid.70. Ibid.71. Ibid.; Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, chapter 4.72. Max Weber, “Zwischen zwei Gesetzen [Between Two Laws],” in Lassman

and Speirs, Weber, pp. 75–79.73. Max Weber, “Die Polen-Politik,” Frankfurter Zeitung, February 25, 1917, in

Politische Schriften, pp. 178–82; Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics,chapter 7.

74. Richard Ned Lebow, National Identities and International Relations(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chapter 4, for theevolution of markers of prestige.

75. Lebow, “Evolution and Adaptation in International Relations,” in WilliamP. Thompson, ed., Oxford Handbook of Empirical International Relations(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), for an elaboration.

76. On tragedy and international relations generally, see Toni Erskine andRichard Ned Lebow, eds., Tragedy and International Relations (London:Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012).

77. On Germans and tragedy, see Dennis J. Schmidt,On The Germans and OtherGreeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2001); Lebow, The Politics and Ethics of Identity (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2012), chapter 5; Tracy B. Strong, “Nietzsche andQuestions of Tragedy, Tyranny and International Relations,” in Erskineand Lebow, Tragedy and International Relations, pp. 144–58.


78. Weber, “Nation State and Economic Policy.”79. Lassman and Speirs, “Introduction” to Lassman and Speirs,Weber, pp. vii–xxv.80. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political

Sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), pp. 72–94;Anthony Giddens, Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber(London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 7–27; Sven Eliaeson, “ConstitutionalCeasarism: Weber’s Politics in Their German Context,” in StephenP. Turner, Cambridge Companion to Max Weber (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), pp. 131–48. Shalini Satkunanandan, “Max Weberand the Ethos of Politics,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 1(2014), pp. 169–81 for a discussion.

81. Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, p. 653.82. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Max Weber in Modern Social Thought,” in

Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 169–96.

83. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2004), pp. 68–69.

84. Max Weber, “Innere Lage und Aussenpolitik. I/III” (February 1918) and“Waffenstillstand und Frieden” (October 1918), in Weber, PolitischeSchriften, pp. 292–305, 447–48.

85. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”86. Ibid.87. Satkunanandan, “Max Weber and the Ethos of Politics,” for a thoughtful

discussion.88. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”89. Ibid.90. Eduard Baumgarten,MaxWeber: Werk und Person (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr

(Paul Siebeck), 1964).91. MaxWeber to Friedrich Crusius, November 24, 1918, inWeber,Gesammelte

politische Schriften, pp. 483–84.92. Weber, Max Weber, pp. 560–65, 576–77.93. Patrick Wintour, “Jeremy Corbyn: I would never use nuclear weapons if

I were PM,” Guardian, September 30, 2015, www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/30/corbyn-i-would-never-use-nuclear-weapons-if-i-was-pm(accessed November 21, 2015).

94. “Jeremy Corbyn row after ‘I’d not fire nuclear weapons’ comment,” BBCNews, September 30, 2015, www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/30/corbyn-i-would-never-use-nuclear-weapons-if-i-was-pm (accessed November21, 2015).

95. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chapters 13–14.

96. RichardNed Lebow,Between Peace andWar: The Nature of International Crisis(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Jervis,Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Lebow and Stein,We All Lost the Cold War; Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight: The Pastand Future of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).


97. Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations.98. Richard Ned Lebow, The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 178–82.99. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits,

ed. F. B. Kaye (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988); Adam Smith,An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations, in Edwin Canaan(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Albert O. Hirschman,The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before ItsTriumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Istvan Hont,Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in HistoricalPerspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

100. Schelling to his parents, February 4, 1797, quoted in George S., Williamson,The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture fromRomanticism toNietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 20.

101. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone andNo One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), pp. 65, 75, 127.

102. Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinningen (Munich:Duncker & Graefe, 1915), pp. 125 and 43.

103. Morgenthau, “Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography,” pp. 2–3.


3 Weber’s Search for Knowledge

Richard Ned Lebow

Die Fragen der Wissenschaft sindsehr häufig Fragen der Existenz.

[Questions of knowledge are veryoften questions about life.] – – – Goethe1

Most accounts of causation begin with Aristotle and jump to Hume andMill and then to the Vienna School and its successors. They tell a largelylinear story. An alternate version would begin with Kant and move for-ward through the German historicists, to Simmel and Weber, and on tocontemporary constructivists. The first narrative dominates accounts ofcausation and epistemology, and not surprisingly asmost American socialscientists work in what is commonly called the neo-positivist tradition.The second narrative, the constructivist one, has not been written. I offerthis chapter as a first step toward this goal. It will immediately becomeapparent that Weber’s epistemology rests on different foundations thanhis politics and is in tension with them.

Weber developed his approach to knowledge to justify and elaborate hisresearch questions and methods. His efforts must also be understood asa response to ongoing controversies in German history and social science.The principal conflict was between historicists and positivists.Weber devel-oped compelling critiques of both schools but acknowledged their distinc-tive contributions to the study of history, economics, and politics. Thesecond controversy, which receives little attention in the English-speakingworld, pitted neo-Kantians against historicists. Here too, Weber borrowedheavily from both traditions. The result is an approach to knowledge under-stood as causal inference about singular events that uses the individual as itsunit of analysis, rationality as an ideal type, and counterfactual thoughtexperiments to evaluate putative causes. It represents an imaginative andfruitful attempt to chart a more rewarding path toward knowledge in whatWeber, following Dilthey, called the “cultural sciences.”

I open with a short discussion of these two controversies and thephilosophical commitments of their protagonists. I then examine

40

Weber’s critiques and how he searched for a productive way out of thisdouble standoff. His approach is not without problems. The most sig-nificant of these is his acknowledgment of the subjective nature of thevalues and interests that motivate research, and belief that it can beconducted by objective means. Other tensions include Weber’s relianceon rationality but recognition of its contextual nature, and his emphasison causal analysis but recognition that all causal claims are rhetorical.I conclude by examining some of the lessons of Weber’s project forcontemporary international relations theory.

Methodenstreit

Weber wrote no overview of his epistemology and methods. Mostaccounts of Weber’s approach to knowledge accordingly takea piecemeal approach; they describe in sequence the arguments hemakes in a series of essays written between 1903 and 1907 and hisGrundbegriffe, published posthumously as the opening section ofEconomy and Society.2 The key methodological texts are “Roscher undKnies und die logischen Probleme der historischen Nationaleökonomie[Roscher and Knies and Logical Problems of Historical NationalEconomy],” “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial poli-tischer Erkenntnis [The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in the SocialSciences and Social Policy],” “Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet derkulturwissenschaftlichen Logik [Critical Studies in the Logic of theCultural Sciences],” and “Über einige Kategorien der verstehendenSoziologie [On Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology].”Additional insights can be gleaned from his substantive works andletters.

Sociologists and historians of political thought disagree among them-selves about the extent to which these writings offer a comprehensivestatement of Weber’s methodology. Weber himself disclaimed any inter-est in philosophy and did not write these essays as part of a preconceivedproject, but rather as responses to evolving circumstances. He wrote onmethodology because he was commissioned to and resented having towrite essays that took time away from his empirical research.3 He repeat-edly referred to his long “Roscher und Knies” piece as the “essay ofsighs.”4 His epistemological essays, like all his writings, lack parsimonyand polish. For all their brilliance, they are full of repetitions and unde-veloped ideas and give the appearance of being hastily written, even firstdrafts. The epistemological essays nevertheless tell us much about whatWeber thought about his colleagues and how they differed from his ownviews.5

Weber’s Search for Knowledge 41

The starting point for any analysis of German approaches to knowledgein the nineteenth century is the concept of Bildung. It describes a form oflifetime self-cultivation with the potential to promote personal andcultural transformation.6 Bildung assumed that educated readers couldrelive the experiences of a text and assimilate its values; knowledge wasaccordingly obtained via aesthetic intuition. This cardinal principle ofRomanticism was endorsed by Schelling, Schleiermacher, Novalis,Hölderlin, and the Schlegel brothers. Empathy became the key methodfor historians who sought to get inside the heads of other people tounderstand and portray them. Bildung incorporated other features ofRomanticism, including the uniqueness of individuals and their potentialfor personal fulfillment through self-discovery and development. Leopoldvon Ranke (1795–1886) based his scholarship on this worldview andbecame the doyen of German historians. He insisted that “the principleof individuality” is what distinguishes history from philosophy. Thehistorian’s task was not to divine general laws, but to discover what isunique about a person, event, or epoch. Of necessity, historians bringtheir own perspective to the problem, making the principle of individual-ity equally applicable to scholar and subject. Each generation accordinglywrites its own history.7

Weber’s friend and colleague, theologian and philosopher ErnstTroeltsch, defined historicism as “the fundamental historicization of allthinking about man, his culture, and his values.”8 He had inmind JohannGottfriedHerder,WilhelmHumboldt, andWilhelmDilthey, all of whommaintained that everything human is a product of history and must beunderstood in its proper context. Historians like Ranke, Johann Droysen,and FriedrichMeinecke denied the existence of any universals that trans-cend epochs.9 Historicists were on the whole antagonistic to abstractconcepts and sought to understand the past by means of empiricalresearch and a quasi-mystical intuitive form of empathy. Some histori-cists –most notably Hegel – nevertheless envisaged history as a vehicle foruniversal understanding that could find expression in laws.

To the extent that historicism received a theoretical statement, it was inthe writings of Wilhelm Dilthey. He conceived of the distinction betweenVerstehen (interpretive understanding) andErklären (law-like explanation).10

He described “immediate experience [Erlebnis]” as a potpourri of sensa-tions, feelings, memories, aspirations, and values. We impose order onthis experience (Erfahrung) and attempt to integrate it conceptually.Primitive forms of Verstehen were nevertheless at or near the unconsciouslevel. Like other historicists, Dilthey remained committed to what hecalled Nacherleben (empathetic reproduction of someone else’s immedi-ate experience).11


Historicism dominated the German intellectual tradition for much ofthe nineteenth century. Its appeal was as much institutional and politicalas it was intellectual. For historians, it was a strategy to improve thestanding of their profession by putting it on a scientific footing and freeingit from its subservient role to theology and law within the university.Historicism was also an expression of German nationalism and not coin-cidentally arose in the aftermath of the 1806 French occupation of theRhineland and Prussia. German historians opposed French universalismby depicting their glorious and superior national past. They emphasizedthe supposedly deeper ethical and collective values of German Kultur incontrast to the alleged shallowness of English democracy and commerci-alism, both interpreted as expressions of crude individual self-interest.

The cultural and political roots of historicism help to explain theemotional intensity of the historicist opposition to positivism. TheHume-Mill approach to causation made an appearance in the German-speakingworld via the Austrian school of economics. Carl Menger, its leader,helped to develop marginal utility theory. His approach to knowledge,and that of the Austrian school, was deductive, rationalist, and based ona search for correlations. Menger and his colleagues sought to developparsimonious models that could be used to make predictions. Theymodeled their approach on economics on the natural sciences. Marginalutility rested unambiguously on liberal-utilitarian political foundationsandwas widely resented inGermany as a British import. Some historicistsdenounced it as a pseudo-scientific justification for individual selfishnessand a threat to the German Sonderweg, or special road of cultural andpolitical development.

The conflict between German historians and Austrian economists,known as the Methodenstreit (struggle over method) began in 1883 inthe form of intemperate exchanges between Carl Menger and Germanhistorian Gustav Schmoller, head of the so-called younger historicalschool. Schmoller and his associates were deeply committed to theory,but conceived of it as the inductive product of many decades of empiricalwork. They believed that the end product of the labors would be anaccurate depiction of reality and characterized their project asWirklichkeitswissenschaft (reality science).12 Menger fired the openingsalvo in an attack on Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, and BennoHildebrand, all leaders of the “older” school of German economics.Menger rightly maintained that physical laws are never reflections ofreality but abstract creations. He dismissed the inductive approach ofthe historicists as unscientific.

Schmoller acknowledged that historicism had problems with theoryconstruction, but charged that the Austrian school confronted its own


difficulties. To build theories, researchers must choose what is importantto study and how it should be abstracted. Intelligent choices requiredempirical experience, not deductive flights of fancy. Schmoller alsorejected the universality of the economist’s theoretical project. Laws, heinsisted, would not be valid beyond the epoch in which they developed.

Schmoller and his supporters did not fare well in the exchange becauseof their endorsement of the inductive method and the seeming contra-diction between their goal of theory and assumption that all knowledgewas culturally specific. Menger in turn was subject to telling criticism forhis assertion that economists could deduce real-world behavior fromparsimonious, abstract models. If the German historicists were toosteeped in narrow empiricism, the Austrian economists were empiricallyimpoverished. The conflict could not by its nature be resolved andgradually trailed off, although not before decades of heated exchangesamong a widening circle of participants. Variants of it periodically resur-face and include the postwar American conflict between behavioralistsand their critics.

Neo-Kantians vs. Historicists

The second controversy was between neo-Kantians and historicists. Thekey protagonists were philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, leader of theBaden school of neo-Kantians, and historian Wilhelm Dilthey. Diltheywas an advocate of relativism – or his critics certainly saw him as such –

and the belief that all knowledge was historical in nature. Windelbandsupported efforts by historicists to establish the independence of historyas a discipline, but opposed relativism on the grounds that it wouldundercut morality and religion. He invoked a transcendental understand-ing to get outside of and beyond history to find a foundation for ethics.Dilthey insisted that all morality was culturally specific, and Windelbandthat it was universal.

Dilthey was the father of historical critique. He objected to Kant’sintellectualization of experience and treatment of it as a reflective activity.Dilthey insisted that experience was at least as much the product of affectand will. In an often-quoted sentence, he charged that “In the veins of theknowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant there runs noreal blood, merely the thinnest vapor of reason.” Kant posited a self-sufficient transcendental realm outside of human experience from whichpeople derived a priori perceptions and concepts. Dilthey rejectednoumena of any kind and insisted that all sciences and human activitieswere historical and could be understood only by empirical, emotional,and reflective means. The crisis of the age, in his view, was the growing


gap between thought and life, for which he held Kant and Humeresponsible.13

Dilthey was anti-Kant in the sense that he did not subscribe to thetranscendental subjectivity of the first Critique, but the later Kant is moreambiguous, and Dilthey’s stance more ambivalent. The Groundworkand second Critique emphasize will, and the third Critique considers atleast some aspects of affect. Kant, moreover, was an historicist, notwith-standing his universalizing teleology. It’s no wonder the neo-Kantian–historicist controversy is so scrambled.

Dilthey was passionate in his critique of naturalism – the belief that onlyscience provides authoritative standards of knowledge. He shareda widespread fear that the sciences were overtaking other disciplines instanding and compelling them to adopt its methods. He felt a specialanimus toward the emerging field of psychology and its efforts toconstruct itself as a science. Much of this hostility was attributable tohis belief that psychology was becoming a materialist and deterministicdiscipline that would make it more difficult to defend the notion offree will.

Dilthey sought to justify and preserve the human sciences(Geisteswissenschaften) by arguing that their subject was different fromthe other sciences. He insisted that they focus on “inner” experienceand that the natural sciences direct their attention to “outer” experience.These projects require different methods, and it is method more thananything else, he argued, that sets disciplines apart. The natural andhuman sciences nevertheless share a common task: the goal of both isgeneral knowledge in the form of laws to be constructed by the samemeans of induction and deduction.14

For Dilthey, the “inner experience” of the human sciences is based on“facts of consciousness (Tatsachen des Bewusstseins)” and the culturalsciences must accordingly be rooted in psychology. But it should not bethe “explanatory” psychology (erklärende Psychologie) that was so rapidlydeveloping in Germany. Dilthey advocated a “descriptive” or “analytic”alternative that he believed had the potential to become the masterscience of the human sciences just as mathematics had become for theirnatural counterparts.15 Dilthey’s distinction between these two kinds ofpsychology rested on a deeper philosophical premise common toGermanidealism. This was the distinction between two kinds of wholes: compo-sites that were the sum of their parts, and “organic wholes” that exist priorto any parts and make them possible. Dilthey charged that “explanatory”psychology was concernedwithmere composites, whilst his approachwasholistic in conception. Its starting point was “lived experience [Erlebnis],”which required an intimate identification with the subject or text of study.


It aspired to understand the unity of psychic life by treating equallycognition, volition, and feeling. “So in all understanding there is some-thing irrational, just as life itself is such; it cannot be represented throughany formula or logical activity.”16

Dilthey had numerous critics, and they accused him of subjectiveirrationalism. In response, he fleshed out his concept of Verstehen (under-standing). It went through several iterations, but he most commonlydescribed it as a “procedure from which we know something psychicfrom signs given externally to the senses.”17 These signs encompassgesture and actions as well as words. But we can understand them onlythrough a shared medium of understanding that has been communallyconstructed. In effect, hermeneutic understanding should apply to psy-chology and history, not only to religious texts. Dilthey and his followersmaintained that we must interpret to explain. We must place ourselves inthe context of others and relive (nacherleben) their experiences.

Dilthey was an unabashed relativist. He denied the possibility of uni-versal, trans-generational social, political, or ethical truths. At times, healso appeared to reject the possibility of any philosophical truth. He waswilling to concede that any so-called truths might be valid for a givensociety and its epoch, but insisted that questions of interest to us areproducts of cultural and temporal contexts. Each generation – andresearchers within each generation – will pose different questions andapproach them in different ways. Dilthey was more radical in hisrelativism than most other historicists. Ranke, for one, was a deeplyreligious man and willing to recognize that so-called facts were contextdependent, but insisted they had ultimate meaning through their connec-tion to God.18

Neo-Kantianism developed in the 1880s in the writings of WilhelmWindelband. One of its goals was to challenge simplistic notions ofobjectivity in natural and social sciences by emphasizing the role of theobserver in the process of knowledge production. The “South-Western”branch of this movement – there was also a Marburg offshoot that wasmore concerned with the physical sciences – would be developed furtherby his students Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask. Like historicists, theyopposed the system-buildingmetaphysics of Hegel and thematerialism ofMarxism. They sympathized with the desires of historicists to maintainthe autonomy of history. They shared Dilthey’s fear that materialismwould undercut the foundations of morality and religion. But here theyparted ways. Kantianism was a philosophy anchored in theEnlightenment that accepted the authority of reason. Kant sought touse reason to derive universal and “necessary” principles of law, morality,and aesthetics. Neo-Kantians wanted to distance themselves from the


most troubling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, but also to defenda transcendental perspective that allowed investigators to go beyondculture and history to universal truths.

For neo-Kantians, the principal challenge was to find a way ofovercoming Kant’s dualism, embodied in his distinction between phe-nomenal and noumenal worlds. Kant maintained that noumena couldeffect phenomena, but not vice versa. The moral will can shape behavior,but the empirical world cannot shape moral choice. Kant’s noumenalworld is beyond the reach of science. This formulation was unacceptableto neo-Kantians because it imposed limits on history and its search for theorigins of reason and rationality. Kant had invented his noumenal worldto address the cynicism associated with empirical science and to preservefreedom and morality. Neo-Kantians had the same goal, but wanted toaccomplish it without resorting to noumena.

Windelband redefined philosophy as a normative, evaluative activity.Unlike the other sciences, its goal is not to know what is but what ought tobe. What norms should govern our beliefs and behavior? He equatednorms with “rules of judgment,” and argued that they were applicableto the subjects of Kant’s three critiques: logic, ethics, and aesthetics.Philosophy’s task was to assess the first principles of all sciences thataddress these questions, and to become what Kant had conceived of asa “critical philosophy” and what Windelband described as aWeltanschauung. Bymaking this move, he sought to buttress the relevanceof philosophy to diverse modes of empirical inquiry.19

Windelband followed Kant in believing that the concepts and cate-gories we employ to understand the world are human inventions, butagreed with historicists that they are culturally and historically relativeand cannot be validated empirically. There was noDing an sich (the thingin itself) or essence of the world, at least any that was knowable. Someneo-Kantians rejected his position and thought concepts could lead to thediscovery of deeper truths. Most adopted the nominalist position thatknowledge is limited to observable phenomena.20

The big difference between Dilthey and Windelband was their degreeof relativism. Windelband drew the line when it came to reason.In Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (History and Natural Science), hedeveloped a critique of Dilthey’s approach to historical reason based onthe distinction he developed between critical and genetic methods.21

Windelband argued that the former assesses claims to knowledge, whilstthe latter seeks their origins. Dilthey embraced relativism by failing todistinguish between the two methods. The fact that Plato developed hisideas in fifth-century Athens and that Kant developed his at the height ofthe European Enlightenment does not, Windelband insisted, limit the


validity of their philosophical systems to these historical epochs. Diltheydenied that Kant had made the kind of distinction introduced byWindelband, and that the neo-Kantian effort to separate questions offact from those of value was belied by the workings of the mind. Valuesand norms are not distinct from life, existing in some realm of their own,but determine what we value and how we live. We do not derive normsfrom detached reason, but from lived experience and history.22

Windelband struggled to erect a barrier between facts and values, andDilthey wanted to tear it down.

Windelband divided up the sciences differently from Dilthey. Herejected the binary of Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften on the groundsthat it is not associated with distinct forms of knowing. In keeping withneo-Kantianism, he maintained that any distinctions should be based onmethod rather than subject. It followed that mathematics and philosophywere associated because of their use of an a priori method; they createsystems based on a few central assumptions. History, psychology, andphysics rely on the experimental method and study objects accessible tothe senses. Windelband introduced a further distinction between “nomo-thetic” sciences, which seek general laws, and “idiographic” ones, whichseek individual facts. Both, he insisted, were equally valid forms ofscience.23 Late in lifeWindelband attempted to reach an accommodationwith historicism and sought to reinterpret Kant in his historical context.Windelband nevertheless introduced his own teleology. He thought thegoal of philosophy, à la Fichte, was to describe and explain “the progres-sive realization of rational values.”24

Fellow Neo-Kantian and Windelband student Heinrich Rickert waseven more keen than hisDoktorvater to defend the integrity of reason andinsulate it from cultural values and religion and aesthetics. By the end ofthe century, Rickert was the leading member of the neo-Kantian schooland tried to steer a middle course in the struggle between historicism andneo-Kantianism.25 Emil Lask, Rickert’s student at Heidelberg, alsomadea notable contribution, and would have garnered a significant reputationas a philosopher had he not died young. The neo-Kantians as a groupwere interested in the relationship between knowledge and values, andtoward this end, Rickert developed a theory of historical knowledge.It starts with an account of the conceptualization of individual entitiesand attempts to finesse the problem of the hiatus irrationalis betweenconcepts and the reality they can never fully describe by virtue of theirabstract nature. Lask focused on concept formation and theorized theexistence and nature of the hiatus irrationalis and the conditions underwhich it is possible to generate knowledge about the historical individualor event.26


Weber and Knowledge

There are conflicting claims about Weber’s genealogy. H. H. Gerth andC. Wright Mills read him as a positivist.27 Frederick Beiser insists that heis a neo-Kantian and that the philosophy of Windelband, Rickert, andLask “found its ultimate fulfillment in Weber’s methodology.”28 GuyOakes singles out Rickert for attention, arguing that Weber’s conceptualvocabulary is largely drawn from his work.29 Fritz Ringer argues thatWeber was neither a positivist nor a neo-idealist, but what he callsa “causualist.” The major influences on him, he contends, were KarlMenger, Georg Simmel, Johannes von Kries, and Gustav Radbruch.30

I maintain that Weber drew on multiple scholars and traditions. Headopts many arguments of his predecessors, often without attribution.His approach to knowledge nevertheless represents a synthesis of differ-ent German traditions. This helps to explain why the scholars cited earlierin this chapter can point to so many influences on his thought.

Weber’s biggest break with the past was his unambiguous rejection ofthe traditional goal of Bildung on intellectual and political grounds.Within the university, he believed, it justified the dominance of thecultural sciences, and philosophy in particular, and denigrated thesciences. Weber waged a career-long struggle to recast the university asan institution that taught specialized knowledge. By doing so, he alsohoped to free it of a cultural orientation that limited independent inquiryand propagated conservative political values.

Weber was stimulated by the Methodenstreit and the conflict betweenneo-Kantians and historicists andworked out his position relative to thesecontending schools of thought. His approach to knowledge is in the firstinstance a reaction to them. It was also a response to his research agendaand the methodological challenges it posed. In his “Objectivity” essay, inwhich there are multiple references to Menger and Schmoller, he assertshis commitment to resolve the issues dividing them. He does not addressdirectly the conflict between neo-Kantians and historicists, perhapsbecause he was friendly with three of its protagonists. Here too he adoptsarguments from both sides.

Weber was critical and supportive in equal measure of historicism andnaturalism. The latter was the term routinely used to describe the episte-mology of Menger and the Austrian economists. Sven Eliaeson rightlyobserves that Weber “approved of what Menger and his colleagues weredoing but not what they thought they were doing.”31 Weber welcomedtheir search for regularities because he considered nomological knowl-edge valuable. He nevertheless rejected the possibility of universal laws orregularities because he followedDilthey in believing that all behavior took


shape and assumed meaning in cultural and historical context. Utilitytheory and the rational model were late nineteenth-century concepts and,he conceded, useful starting points for explaining the economic behaviorof contemporary Europeans. In “Roscher and Knies,” Weber rejectedoutright the claims of the Austrian economists that their science madethem superior to the German historical school. He strongly opposedComtean reductionism and any kind of hierarchy in the sciences.32

Most importantly, Weber insisted that science cannot provide ultimatevalues any more than philosophy can.33

Weber agreed with historicists that “empathy” or “interpretativeunderstanding” was “the specific characteristic of the ‘subjectivizing’sciences.”34 However, he criticized historicists for failing to confront themethodological difficulties associated with Verstehen. They portrayedempathetic understanding as the product of intuition made possible bythe innate gifts of the researcher and years of intimate study of a peopleand their epoch. Weber accepted the need to replicate the mindset ofactors and attempted to do so himself with Calvinists and otherProtestants he considered responsible for capitalism. However, in theabsence of any method for developing and justifying claims of empatheticstanding, themethod of empathy rested on a shaky and entirely subjectivefoundation. There were no grounds for privileging one scholar’s accountof motives over another’s.

Weber had a more fundamental objection to the historicist relianceon empathy. He argued that most scientific theories begin as intui-tions but gain acceptance only by other means. He developed idealtypes as a vehicle for harnessing his own intuitions about the politicaland economic world. He nevertheless wanted to separate intuitionsfrom “the logical structure of cognition” and devise appropriatemethods for making causal inferences. He coined the term rationaleEvidenz to signify something that has the appearance of being true orcorrect. He sought to distinguish himself and his method fromDilthey’s and to provide a more scientific basis for the Verstehenapproach by introducing logical and empirical tests for inference.He remained adamant that explanation generally involved empathyas well as reason.35

Weber’s approach to empathy is also different fromDilthey’s in that he isnot interested in getting into the “private mind” of an actor. His under-standing of a subjective perspective is not achieved by finding psychologicalmotives for individual behavior. He insists that a “subjective” point of viewis always an external attribution by observers of repertoires with which weare familiar. To that extent all wissenschaftliche Wahrheit (scientific knowl-edge) consists of causally adequate explanations; they are in principle


refutable, subject to new evidence or its evaluation.This is possible becausecausality does not adhere in “things,” but in the “minds” of observers.

Weber was equally critical of the historicist conception of theory.In “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” he agreeswith Dilthey that all social phenomena are culturally dependent andthat this rules out the possibility of universal laws. Following Rankeand Dilthey, Weber insists that the proper task of historians is toidentify critical actions and events, their causes and consequences.This does not entail a search for “law-like regularities,” as suggestedby Eduard Meyer, regarded by many Germans as the preeminentscientific historian of his era. In contrast to most historicists, Weberrecognizes the value of regularities, or at least some expectation thatparticular actions are likely to result in certain kinds of outcomes.Knowledge of this kind can be a useful, if not necessary startingpoint for causal analysis. However, he is insistent that nomologicalknowledge for historians and social scientists alike is a means, not anend, in contrast to the physical sciences where laws are the desiredand appropriate end product. This difference, we shall see, derivesfrom the former’s interest in the particular and the latter’s in thegeneral.

In his “Objectivity” essay, Weber goes back to Kant’s assertion thatconcepts are the only theoretical means for intellectual mastery of theempirical world.Weber also follows Kant in arguing that what we study isdictated by subjective choices. In contrast to Kant, and in accord withhistoricist thinking,Weber’s approach to knowledge is firmly anchored inthe study of singular events. He does not restrict singular to the indivi-dual, but includes the actions of individuals, groups, institutions, ornations and one-off developments like the emergence of capitalism. Hefurther acknowledges that understanding can refer to the averageintended meaning of sociologically mass phenomena.36 The explanationof such phenomena is the appropriate goal of the cultural sciences.

Drawing on the argument of his friend and colleague Georg Simmel,Weber endorsed the division of the law-like sciences (Gesetzeswissenschaften)from the sciences of “reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaften).”37 The formerseek regularities and laws, and the latter knowledge of particulars.The sciences of reality are the cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften), socalled by the Baden neo-Kantians. For Weber, they encompass history andthe social sciences, disciplines that share a common interest in the concreteaspects of the world.38 This is what Wilhelm Windelband calledEreigniswissenschaften, best rendered in English as idiographic knowledge ofsingular events and patterns.39 By this means Windelband sought to down-play the role of empathy and focus attention on the individuality of events.


Weber was dubious about the search for social laws and was convincedthat any that were found would be of limited utility. In “Roscher andKnies,” he reasons that “laws of nature” would, of necessity, be highlyabstract and exclude all “historically contingent” considerations.40

In “Objectivity,” he argues that rules at best offer only general insightsbecause real-world developments are shaped by context, agency, chance,or what appears to us as chance. In the social world, the more generala concept is, themore it “leads us away from the richness of reality, since itmust be as abstract as possible – that is contain a minimum of substance –to incorporate what is common to as many phenomena as possible.”41

The same problem exists at the level of singular events. In“Objectivity,”Weber follows Rickert and Simmel in describing the socialworld as composed of a “meaningless infinity” of events that are only“endowed with meaning and significance from a human perspective.”42

Once singled out, no event or development can be treated exhaustivelybecause it can be subdivided into an infinite number of components.The social world is a seamless web of human actions, interactions, andconsequences. To make sense of it, we impose meaning by inventingcategories of event types and imagining possible connections amongthem. Event types and events are objects of study and imagined connec-tions among them we frame in terms of cause. Only a finite part of thisreality can become the subject of scientific attention, and all the criteriawe use for selection are subjective. We cannot reduce reality to anyconceptual scheme or set of schemes. Pace Rickert, Weber acknowledgesa hiatus irrationalis between concepts and reality. The latter is alwaysconcrete, idiosyncratic, and qualitative. It follows that we cannot uselaws to organize reality but must be guided by our particular interests.43

Reality can be described only through our categories and the judgmentswe make about “causal necessity.” Such judgments restrict our attentionto certain features of an event or development. “These elements are theonly ones we consider” when “we ‘abstract’ from an infinite number ofothers, which have to be, and can be, left aside as ‘unimportant.’” Thereare no rules for making these choices. They reflect our cultural values,individual interests, and social and political commitments. The choicespeople make differ within and across generations. Researchers not onlyask different questions, but also use different concepts and event cate-gories to seek answers.44

Weber is untroubled by this diversity because the goal of social scienceis not to produce universal truths, but rather insights of practical value.He recognizes that all historical disciples – the social sciences amongthem – “are constantly confronted with new questions by the ever advan-cing flow of culture.”45 Categories and questions evolve with the result


that “reality” constantly changes. Our understanding of “reality” is alsoreshaped by our research questions, concepts, and findings. The historyof the social sciences is accordingly “in constant flux between the attemptto order facts intellectually by means of concept formations,” and the“breaking down” of these schemas – “because of the broadening anddisplacement of the scientific horizon – of the mental images that havebeen arrived at in this fashion” and the creation of “new conceptions onthis altered basis.” All social knowledge is “transient.”46

Weber became almost poetic when contemplating this situation. Heconcludes his “Objectivity” essay with the observation that conceptsgradually lose their appeal. “At some point, the coloring changes: thevalue of perspectives formerly applied unreflectively grows uncertain, theway forward fades in the twilight. The light emanating from the greatcultural problems has faded. Science searches for a new standpoint andconceptual framework to contemplate the course of events from thesummits of thought. Only those stars can impart meaning and directionto its work.”47 Intellectual evolution of this kind, while not necessarilyprogressive, is socially healthy because it keeps societies from becomingossified, as Weber believes had happened to China. Most importantly,change in scholarly understanding is “tied up with a shift in the practicalcultural problems and assumes the form of a cultural critique.”48 Critiquein turn has the potential to promote changes in beliefs and practices.

Weber does not share the expectation, common to many historicistsand positivists, that good research can lead to better – that is, moreaccurate – conceptualizations of “reality.” In “Objectivity,” he writes:“There is no absolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of cultural life . . .independent of special and ‘one-sided’ points of view.” These arise notonly from our particular research interests, but from how we select andorder what we call facts. The goal of social science is to acquire “knowl-edge of relationships that are significant from the individual point ofview.” We must “keep the limits of their validity in mind.”49

This limitation was all the more essential in light of the breakdown ofthe fundamental value consensus in Western society. Weber used theterm Eigengesetzlichkeit to characterize the distinctive compartmentaliza-tion that modernity had promoted. “We are put into different life-circles,each governed by different laws.”50 Religion, politics, art, science, sports,and sex have become increasingly independent activities governed bytheir own evolving norms. They provide no grounding for ethics, and,indeed, often generate clashing ethical imperatives. Conflicts within andacross these and other social domains are inevitable and there is nopossible logical resolution to them. A science of culture must rest onsome values, and they are a matter of choice for researchers.51


Weber’s ontological commitment is to the individual. He describesindividuals and their behavior as the units of sociology because it is theonly thing that is subjectively understandable. States are often personifiedas a matter of convenience, but their policies consist of the actions ofmultiple individuals and must be understood as such.52 Individual beha-vior is also determinative of long-term macro processes and develop-ments. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he explains therise of capitalism in terms of value and behavioral shifts in individuals.As it is individuals who hold beliefs and act as units,Weber did not believethat we can reduce our analysis to lower levels of analysis or extend it tohigher ones.

Weber’s epistemology is anchored in the belief that social knowledge isby its nature subjective, but can be constructed in a way to allow “empiri-cal reality to be ordered intellectually in a valid manner.” By order, Webermeans causal understandings. Pace Hume, he insists that the concept ofcause is what distinguishes history and social science from chronicles. Heenvisages causation as taking the form of narratives that select anddescribe phenomena on the basis of their connections, that is, how oneor more of them appear in part responsible for others.53

Tomake causal inference, wemust posit event types and identify eventsthat fit within them. The latter are what we want to explain, and theformer the categories we employ toward this end. Typologies of eventtypes enable comparative study and nomological understandings in theform of generally imperfect regularities. These associations are imperfectbecause events have many causes and we can identify and study onlysome of them. The context in which they unfold is also likely to differacross “cases,” making them far from fully comparable.

Weber is adamant that “cause” and “effect” are human creations, notfeatures of the world. They must be evaluated on the basis of logicalconsistency, empirical evidence, and the “rules of experience(Erfahrungsregeln).” Causal inference relies on reason to discover regula-rities, but also on emotions that allow empathetic understandings aboutactor motives. Causal inference is inescapably rhetorical in nature, andresearchers must convince others of their claims, which they often do byappealing to common sense. In effect, they are asking others to accepttheir inferences on the ground that they are based on assumptions abouthow the world works.54 Weber considers these three kinds of knowledgenomological as they are rule-based. In the case of common sense, theserules are implicit and rest on there being some consensus about the likelyoutcome of particular actions in particular contexts.55

Weber encourages us to construct narratives around imagined causalchains. He frequently uses the words Verlauf and Ablauf to describe what


is understood as a progression of seemingly related actions and events.These actions and events may be causally linked or manifestations of anunderlying process. Either way, the narrative form encourages us to thinkabout what connects actions and events, what we call mechanisms.

Causal narratives offer another advantage. They allow us to conceive ofdeeper levels of explanation. To provide the most compelling accounts ofcausation “we have to refer back to other, equally individual configura-tions” that might account for the phenomenon in question.Wemust thentry to explain these configurations.56 Ultimately, Weber believes, wereach underlying cultural explanations. He offers the example of markettransactions, which he considers significant and worthy of study becausethey are nearly ubiquitous. This was not always the case, so we want toknow what changed in the values of Western society to understand “thecultural significance of the money economy.” These changes enabled thegrowth of a money economy and gave it its “significant” and “distinctive”character.57

To address the problem of culture, Weber invented the concept of the“ideal type.” His use of ideal types evolved.58 He devised the conceptinitially to replace intuition as a means of understanding the behavior ofsocieties with different values and worldviews. Ideal types of this kindhave no external validity because they do not correspond to any historicalreality. He offered his typology of authority as an example.59 Webersubsequently reformulated ideal types to give them more of an empiricalconnection to the world. He now described them as an analytical accent-uation of aspects of one or more attributes of a phenomenon to createa mental construct that will never be encountered in practice but againstwhich real-world approximations can bemeasured. Such ideal types werenot intended as a basis for comparison, but a schema for understandinga specific culture or situation and by these means singular events.60

Both kinds of ideal types are “pure constructs of relationships.” Theyare neither hypotheses nor in any way accurate representations of reality.An ideal type is a “mental image that is not historical reality, and certainlynot ‘true’ reality; still less is it meant to serve as a schema into which itwould be possible to fit reality as a specimen.” Rather, it representsa synthesis of many phenomena that remove all variation to createa parsimonious and consistent “mental image.” Weber offers the exam-ples of individualism, imperialism, feudalism, mercantilism, and the so-called Marxist laws of capitalist development. Weber is clear that idealtypes can never be used to gain a holistic understanding of a subject orproblem. They are always perspectival.61

Weber considers ideal types a necessary tool for identifying key char-acteristics of cultures that can explain their distinctive patterns of


behavior. In causal narratives, ideal types can presumably function aseither starting or end points. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism, the ideal type of capitalism is Weber’s end point in the sensethat it is what he seeks to explain. He constructs Protestantism as anotherideal type, and uses it to account for what made capitalism possible. Heconnects the two with a causal narrative.

If Weber were alive today, he would react strongly against the way inwhich ideal types have been interpreted by positivists who assert thatonly “generalities” count as knowledge. The Weberian approach tosocial science regards generalizations as without merit unless they areexplicitly rooted in particular cultural understandings. They are inap-plicable elsewhere and will break down in societies where they arerelevant when these understandings change. Ideal types and the valuesthey incorporate nevertheless allow us to explain aspects of cultures ofinterest to us – for example, ancient Egypt or modern China – eventhough we have no direct historical relationship with them as we do withthe Romans and ancient Greeks. Ideal types are fundamental to socialscience because they allow us to formulate and investigate researchquestions that go beyond the actual chain of actions and values inwhich we might be entrenched.

Weber understands cause in terms of ends–means relationships. Heassumes that all social or political behavior is intended to serve particularends. He describes motives as reasons and explanations for behavior.We begin causal analysis by trying to ascertain the motives of actors.Weber defines a motive as “a complex of subjective meaning that appearsto the actor or observer as adequate ground for the conduct inquestion.”62 We can advance a claim for causal understanding “whenthe observable action and the motives have been correctly apprehendedand their relationship is made meaningfully comprehensible.”63 Weberidentifies four kinds of motives: “purposeful rational (zweckrational)” iscalculated behavior “adequate” to achieve an intended goal; “valuerational (wertrational)” arises from normative commitments; “tradi-tional” action is made with reference to accepted norms and practices;and “affective” action is prompted by the emotions.64

“Purposefully” rational action comes the closest to Weber’s ideal typeof “right rationality (Richtigkeitstypus).” It is “the a priori” of all reason-based and interpretative understanding.65 It is subjective because itdepends on what we think would have constituted rational behavior.This in turn hinges on what motives we think are in play, what ends actorssought, and what course of action had the best chance of producing them.All these judgments, even when evidence-based, require leaps ofinference.


The closer any action conforms to right rationality, the less need thereis to introduce “psychological considerations” to comprehend it.The identification of ‘irrational’ processes” [sinnfremd] and their analysisalso start with reason. We must “determine how the action would haveproceeded in the limiting case of purposive and right rationality” and thenaccount for the variation.66 The construction of a “purely rational courseof action” functions here as an ideal type that provides a clear andunambiguous – but a purely theoretical – account of a causal relationship.Weber repeatedly warns that it is nothing more than “a methodologicaldevice.” It does not require, nor is it intended to suggest, “a belief in theactual predominance of rational elements in human life.”67

To illustrate his method, Weber uses the examples of FrederickWilliam IV in the Seven Years’ War and generals Moltke and Benedekin the 1866 Austro–GermanWar. “To explain the campaign of 1866,” hewrites in his Grundbegriffe, “it is indispensable to construct imaginativelyhow each general, given fully adequate knowledge of his own situationand that of his opponent, would have acted.”We then compare this idealtype reconstruction with how the generals actually behaved and attributeany deviation “to such factors as misinformation, strategic errors, logicalfallacies, personal temperament, or considerations outside the realm ofstrategy.”68

Weber recognizes the difficulty of determining motives, let alone theirsource. They are often opaque, feigned, unconscious, and, we could add,intransitive and unrecognized by actors. Behavior can bemotiveless whenit is habitual and not in any way the result of reflection. “In the vastmajority of cases,” Weber concedes, “action takes place in dull semi-consciousness or unconsciousness.”

Although Weber is concerned with singular causation, he insists that itrequires comparative analysis. Even the most plausible motivationalaccount of a motive or behavior is never more than a hypothesis untilevaluated against a “progression” of external behaviors. We must makecausal inference in comparative context by studying an act against pre-vious actions by the same individual and others in similar circumstances.Weber further warns that not all rational behavior will appear rational tous, especially if is motivated by beliefs (e.g., placating the gods will bringrain) that we do not grasp or accept. He offers a six-step continuum fromright rationality to “wholly incomprehensible” behavior.69

Weber’s account still leaves us with the problem, if not a contradiction.In the Grundbegriffe, Weber insists that ideal types help us to understandthe motives of actors. This is difficult to reconcile with his insistence onunderstanding motivations from the actor’s point of view. Admittedly,some ideal types attempt to capture or build on commonly shared


motives, but many do not. Injudicious use of ideal types is no differentfrom “assuming” motives in the way present-day rationalists do.70

By definition, ends–means relationships attribute some rationality toactors. Weber comes close to equating rationality and cause as he definespurposeful rational behavior as that “that is exclusively oriented towardsmeans which are (subjectively) considered to be adequate for the attain-ment of purposeful goals which are (subjectively) unambiguously compre-hended.” Here, he refers only to instrumental reality because anymotive – regardless of whether it is realistic or ethically acceptable – canprovide an incentive for acting. Weber tries hard to exclude substantiverationality, which pertains to the ends actors seek, from his analysis.71

Weber defends his assumption of rationality on practical grounds.The more an individual’s deliberations “have not been obfuscated by‘external’ constraint[s] or irresistible ‘affects,’” the more readily theysubmit to an ends-means analysis. He recognizes that this condition israrely met in practice, but we must still try to use what evidence we haveabout actors, their goals, and their behavior to try to make the latter “fitinto a model of rational action.”72

In the absence of instrumental rationality, social behavior would beentirely unpredictable and societies could neither form nor function.As noted, Weber nevertheless warns us against attributing too muchrationality to actors. What is important is that the researcher function interms of rationality. We must assume rationality for purposes of analysis.It is a methodological ideal type and, like other ideal types, providesa benchmark for assessing actual behavior. The researcher has to besensitive to errors of judgment and common types of errors(Irrtumstypus) that routinely distinguish real-world from rational actors.Wearing his Kantian hat, Weber conceives of the world as one of logicalbehavior and causal “necessity,” but in which such necessity is nevermore than a guide. He was also willing to admit that there is moreunpredictability in human behavior than in the weather.73 This admissionis not easy to square with his Kantian belief in the world as somethingmade accessible by reason.

This brings us to the final step of causal analysis: making and evalu-ating inferences. As noted, Weber believes that there is a near infinity ofcauses for any event, so we need to identify what we consider to be themost promising antecedents of phenomena of interest to us. Towardthis end, we utilize available nomological knowledge and intuition,supplemented by our “common sense” understanding of how theworld works. Where a result was brought about by a complex of ante-cedent conditions that made it “objectively probable,” its “cause”should be considered “adequate” with respect to the “effect.”


A contributing factor that was not “adequate” Weber calls an “acci-dental cause.”74

To determine whether antecedent conditions were “objectively prob-able” and “adequate,” we turn to counterfactual thought experiments.Here Weber draws on the probability theory of Karl Knies and the legalanalysis of Gustav Radbruch.75 Radbruch sought to determine malfea-sance or criminal responsibility by asking what the likelihood was thatsome negative outcome would have occurred in the absence of theagents or conditions alleged to be responsible. In Weber’s reformula-tion, we are instructed to ask if “elimination . . . or alteration” of theputative cause could “according to general rules of experience” haveled to a different outcome.76 Social scientists, like judges, must workbackward from what they want to explain to possible causes.By removing one possible cause at a time and asking what might havehappened in it absence we can evaluate its relative importance for anoutcome.

Weber’s approach is based on the assumption that a phenomenon ofinterest is contingent and not overdetermined. If the latter, we are likely tofind multiple relevant causes and it will be difficult to determine theirrelative responsibility because the same outcome would appear to haveoccurred in their absence. Weber was most interested in the question ofresponsibility when considering possible forks in history. He uses theBattle of Marathon as an example because Eduard Meyer, whose workhe critiques in the “Objectivity” essay, maintains that it was a decisiveturning point in history. To assess Meyer’s claim, we need to conductcounterfactual experiments to get some idea of what courses of actionother probable actorsmight have pursued and the outcomes towhich theymight have led.77 Only if we think there is a real possibility of meaningfulvariation is it worth examining the possible consequences of alternativeoutcomes.78

Counterfactual thought experiments help us understand the kind ofcauses responsible for an outcome of interest by giving us some idea abouthow far the behavior in question departed from what we would expectunder conditions of perfect rationality. These deviations can be attributedto pressures and constraints on actors, lack of information, cognitivefailings, or emotional commitments. In this connection, I cited Weber’suse of this method to evaluate the strategies of Frederick William IVduring the Seven Years’ War and generals Moltke and Benedek duringthe Austro–Prussian War of 1866. In the absence of an ideal type tem-plate – in this instance, perfect instrumental rationality – we would find itmuchmore difficult to determine these possible causes andmake the casefor their relevance.


The two kinds of counterfactual exercises Weber advocates are usefulin identifying two kinds of cause. The first is rational in the sense of itbeing a logical and practical means of achieving a given end. It is theproduct of the kind of cost calculus made by intelligent and uncon-strained actors. The second is context- or agent-specific due to pressuresor constraints interfering with pure rationality. Presumably, most real-world actions need to be explained with reference to both kinds of causebecause actors are to varying degrees rational but also pressured andconstrained.

Weber recognizes that he has not solved the causal problem by anymeans. In his defense of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalismagainst the criticism of Felix Rachfal, he introduces the concept ofWahlverwandtschaft (elective affinities), which he never really defines.79

He asserts the existence of these affinities between Calvinism and capital-ism. At one point he uses the Adäquanzbeziehungen (adequate relations) –also left undefined – as an equivalent, but suggests that it implies some formof causal or constitutive relationship.80 Wahlverwandtschaft might be con-sidered his line of retreat when he was unable to show a causal connectionby other means but strongly believed such a connection to be present.81

Unlike Marx, Weber has no theory of history. He rejects outright thenotions of evolution and linear progress. He nevertheless attempts tounderstand history in terms of a progression from charismatic to tradi-tional to rational legal forms of rule and legitimacy. These conceptionsresemble Marx’s three modes of production in that the success of eachform of rule generates tensions that ultimately undermine it and promotethe emergence of its successor form. Weber did not regard one kind ofrule as superior to another, and saw the transformation from one toanother as a recursive process. The rational-legal form of rule was notan end to a history, but would generate its own contradictions – that is,undermine the value-rational principles that gave rise to it – and bringa return, at least in part, of charismatic authority. This understandingprovided the intellectual – as opposed to political – foundation forWeber’s support for plebiscitary democracy, which he envisaged as some-thing of a synthesis between rational-legal and charismatic forms ofauthority. He would have been appalled by Hitler, but would havedescribed his rise to power and dictatorship as a reaction to modernityand the soulless character of rational-legal authority.

Weber and International Relations Theory

Physics searches for general laws because they appear to be the mostsuccinct and coherent way of describing the universe, although some


physicists dissent from this strategy.82 Physics is not a practical science,but most physicists are pleased when their discoveries are found to havepractical applications – destructive ones aside. Social science can never bean end in itself; some practitioners, notably game theorists – appear toconceive of it this way. I followWeber in thinking that we seek knowledgeto cope with the world by making our personal and policy choices moreenlightened and effective. For this reason we are most often interested insingular events, even what we call single “cases.”

Ken Waltz’s theory of international politics unwittingly drives homethis truth.83 His proposition about the probability of war in differentsystems could be verified only by comparisons across a large number ofbi- and multipolar systems. By even the most generous counting rules,recorded history has produced only a few hierarchical and bipolarsystems. Nor is it apparent what possible utility Waltz’s propositionwould have if it could be tested and confirmed because statistical baserates tell us nothing about individual cases. By limiting his theory to thesystem level, Waltz makes it irrelevant to the real world. McGeorgeBundy, national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson,and later a professor of international relations at New York University,noted that the only bipolar system of interest to policy makers was theColdWar and a theory of international relations that offered no guidancewith regard to it was of no use to policy makers.84

Weber did not believe that the social world was amenable to law-likegeneralizations. Reflexivity and changing values make the social worlddifferent from its physical counterpart. His methodological essays con-stitute a powerful avant la lettre critique of Hempel’s Deductive-Nomological model and anything like it. “The question of causes,”Weber wrote, “is not a question of laws, but of concrete causalrelationships.”85 We do not look to laws to validate our understanding ofindividual events, but look to imperfect regularities and even the conven-tional wisdom for initial guidance about how we might begin to imputecause to singular events.

I believe this approach to have some traction in international relationsbecause it is a domain in which regularities are woefully imperfect andvery much tied to specific cultural and temporal practices. The balance ofpower is a case in point. ForMorgenthau, who was an attentive student ofWeber, it was an ideal type, a rational abstraction of a principal dynamicof international relations.86 It described the practice of internationalrelations only to degrees and under certain conditions. Seán Molloyshows that Hume and Morgenthau also understood the balance ofpower as a rhetorical device.87 Much of realist IR theory has ignoredthis Weberian caveat and treats the balance of power as if it were


something real. This is also true of anarchy and polarity, other ideal typesthat are consistently treated as descriptions of the real world.

As noted, ideal types can easily be misused, especially by theorists whotreat them as accurate representations of reality. Weber’s offers feudal-ism, capitalism, imperialism, and Marxist “laws” of capitalist develop-ment as misused ideal types, and this provides the basis for his critique ofMarxism.The same criticism can be leveled against the contemporary useof such concepts as anarchy, the balance of power, and democracy.The attempt to treat democracy as real, not just an ideal type, leads tothe kinds of problemsWeber expects. Chief among them is the inability ofresearchers to agree among themselves how to operationalize the conceptor apply it in individual cases, problems that plague the democratic peaceresearch program.88

Weber did not believe that theories or correlations could explain orpredict single events. His argument differs from the standard critique ofstatistical approaches that base rates tell us little to nothing about indivi-dual cases. For Weber, single events take place in a cultural context thatgives them meaning. That context is composed of agents, their values,beliefs, associations, and expectations, and their understanding of theirsurroundings conditioned by their history. Weber’s argument helps toaccount for the general failure of postwar quantitative research in inter-national relations. It has produced no laws or regularities beyond themostobvious ones (e.g., neighbors are more likely to fight neighbors thannoncontiguous states, arms races often precede wars, and most wars arefought over contested territory). These regularities are weak, allow manyexceptions, and have no predictive value. Some scholars assert that the so-called democratic peace – the seeming failure of democratic states tomake war against other democratic states – is an exception. However,the democratic peace is highly contested; critics argue that it is a merestatistical artifact, and there is no agreement about any of themechanismsthat could be responsible for it.

Weber did not spurn nomological knowledge. He thought evenimperfect associations were valuable as possible starting points fornarratives that would fold in context and help explain phenomena ofinterest. He was adamant that any analysis should focus on actors andtheir motives, and that these have to be understood in context. Hevalued the kind of nomological knowledge that marginal utility andother economic models might produce, but thought it entirely unwar-ranted to assume that people functioned in terms of ideal type rationalmodels. Ideal types are useful only when they accurately capture thevalues of actors. Even then, they establish benchmarks at best.Researchers must do careful empirical research to see how and why


actors depart from economic man or any other ideal type model.Weber would expand his argument to include game theoretic andrationalist models. He would strongly object to any notion of causalitythat reduces explanation to efficient causes.

Weber does not restrict causal narratives to individual actors, but wantsresearchers to use any understanding of their motives to work back tocultural configurations that help to explain them. All political behaviorconsists of the decisions and actions of individuals, but they are only thetips of analytical icebergs. Their behavior is embedded in a cultural andtemporal setting and can best be understood by means of multiple idealtypes that highlight and order key, recurrent features of these contexts.Weber is not a reductionist. He does not conceive of individuals asatomistic actors, but follows Simmel in taking a holistic view. Society ismore than the sum of its parts, and for analytical purposes we shouldassume that it constitutes and enables actors. They must accordingly beunderstood within their social context, not as autonomous actors max-imizing some researchers’ notion of utility.89

Although he does not use the word “mechanism,” Weber is very clearthat any compelling causal inferencemust tell uswhy something happens,not merely that it has or will occur.90 While not insensitive to materialcauses, Weber’s interest in individuals and their motives encouraged himto devise mechanisms that are ideational in nature. They can be related tomaterial causes, but Weber is careful never to subsume one kind of causeto the other. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism suggests thatideas can be responsible for material changes and that these changes inturn help to shape values and ideas. There is no hierarchy but a recurrentprocess of interaction. We can choose any starting and end point foranalytical purposes, but we must recognize it is arbitrary.91

Here too Weber offers a useful perspective on contemporary interna-tional relations theory. Realists and constructivists have framed the dividebetween their paradigms largely in terms of material versus ideationalcauses. For realists, material capabilities and their distribution shape thecharacter of international relations. For constructivists, it is intersubjec-tive understandings that give meaning to social interactions and alsodetermine the kinds of material capabilities that are valued and devel-oped. Weber is often pitted against Marx as the defender of ideas againstmaterialism, but this represents a misreading of his corpus. Weber lookedfor ways of studying the interaction between the material and culturalconfigurations, and realists and constructivists would be well advised todo the same.

Weber follows Kant in believing that reality is made meaningfulonly through concepts; there is no Welt an sich (world in itself), only


a Welt-ansicht (special or specific view of the world). Weber agrees withSimmel that our analytical concepts are subjective in nature andcannot be validated on the basis of any logical or empirical criterion.Rather, their justification is intellectual and political; research ques-tions and analytical categories should respond to our interests, values,and commitments. He comes close – and Simmel even closer – toAmerican pragmatists in believing that we should give priority tounderstandings that work for us, that is, that help advance our goals,whatever they are.

Weber was strongly committed to particular political and researchgoals, but sought to distinguish the motives for research from its ultimateuse. He famously argues in “The Profession of Politics” that our valuesinfluence, if not determine, our research agendas, and that our findingscannot be used to evaluate these values or anybody else’s.92 I believe hewould be shocked by the extent to which this most fundamental distinc-tion is routinely ignored. This transgression was encouraged by earlytranslations of Weber and references to his work that misrepresentedhim as a neo-positivist.93

The biggest contemporary offenders are economists and politicalscientists who employ rationality and efficiency as twin universal valuesand construct models based on them to evaluate a wide range ofdomains beyond economics. They make policy recommendations with-out acknowledging the subjective nature of their assumptions and theimportant value choices they encode. As I write, neoliberal economistsare using their so-called science not only to explain, but also to justifyincreasingly unequal distributions of wealth in the United States.94

In international relations theory, many realists and liberals do some-thing similar. Realists have for decades used their paradigm to insist thatefforts to overcome anarchy are doomed to failure. At the end of theCold War, John Mearsheimer urged Japan and Germany to acquirenuclear weapons on the grounds that they would need their own power-ful deterrents in a more conflict-prone multipolar world. Mearsheimerand fellow travelers now invoke power transition theory – for whichthere is no historical evidence – to predict conflict between China andthe United States.95 If realists are pessimists, liberals are optimists, andmany vaunt the benefits of globalization. Some support the impositionof policies known as “the Washington consensus” on the developingworld – with counterproductive results.

Values are embedded in our analysis and we can neither prove themscientifically nor free ourselves of them as primitive neo-positivists believe.The only way to deal with values is to make them explicit and chooseamong them. A social scientist interested in the objectivity of a social


science must not only make his or her values explicit, but also show howthey are shared within a culture and therefore “intersubjective.”

Weber’s fact–value distinction is reflected in his sharp but implicitdistinction between instrumental and substantive rationality. The formeris the key tool of researchers whilst the latter is actor and culture specific.Weber uses instrumental rationality to study values and goals and theirbehavioral consequences, but not to evaluate them. I follow his examplein A Cultural Theory of International Relations where I posit different valuehierarchies in different epochs and cultures, attempt to explain thesedifferences in terms of changes in material and social conditions, andexplore their consequences for foreign policy.96

Weber’s fact–value distinction demands a particular account of reason,and this was a major bone of contention between historicists and neo-Kantians. Historicists wanted to relativize reason and neo-Kantians toplace it outside of history. For Dilthey, reason was a subject of study, notan objective tool of research. For Windelband and more so for Rickert,the development of reason as a concept and tool could be studied, but stillhad universal applicability to the study of human behavior. Weber’sposition is closer to that of the neo-Kantians, but he nowhere makesthis important commitment explicit.

Weber relies on rationality for his analysis of human motives andbehavior, but acknowledges non-rational sources of behavior. He warnsagainst reading rationality into actions that are not rational and therebymissing the real motives of actors. He never explicitly condemns the tacticof inferring motives from outcomes, but never does this himself. Hefocuses on actor choices and uses them to impute motives. He insists onthe need to do this comparatively, for the actors in question, but also forothers in similar circumstances. Here too there is an important lesson forcontemporary international relations theory.

Psychology was another source of controversy between historicists andneo-Kantians. Dilthey spurned nominalist psychology that sought tomimic the physical sciences but thought “descriptive” psychology couldserve as a master science. Neo-Kantians rejected this project on twogrounds: it was metaphysical and threatened the status of philosophy.Weber sides with the neo-Kantians, and much of his emphasis on thepower of rationality is motivated by his desire to show that it is unneces-sary to turn to psychology to understandmost human behavior. Themorerational an action, he believes, the less the need for psychologicalexplanations.97 He follows Simmel on this point, citing his assertionthat you do not have to be Caesar to understand his behavior. He attacksKarl Knies for the “subjectivist fallacy” that explanation requires intuitiveidentification and experience (Erleben) of the actor.98


Weber differs from most of his contemporaries in his understanding ofthe relationship between individual freedom and predictability. The freerthe agents, the more predictable their behavior was likely to be becausethey were unconstrained by other considerations. Their choices would bedriven by the ends they sought and their choice of means more rational,although not necessarily any more successful. Weber rejects outright theRomantic notion that freedom consists of behavior at odds with reasonand that freedom can be demonstrated only by acting unpredictably. Thispremise, he argues, led to the conclusion that freedom is the “privilege . . .of the madman.”99

Freedom is not a central concern of international relations theory.However, great powers claim exceptional privileges, and weaker onesseek other ways of expressing and distinguishing themselves. Weberwrote about the sense of self-assertion that was appropriate to great powersand was a supporter of pre-1914 German imperialism for this reason. Hethought it intolerable thatGermany should be denied a place in the sun andthat it was fully justified in drawing the sword in 1914.100 More than laterinternational relations scholars,Weber was sensitive tomotives of standingand status, and only recently havemembers of our profession attempted tobuild on this insight.101 One of the interesting and not yet researchedquestions in this connection, and one to which Weber’s cultural under-standing of politics is relevant, is why, in any cultural epoch, great powersgenerally seek to express their autonomy in both similar and diverse ways.

Following Nietzsche and Weber, Morgenthau believed that the will topower– theanimusdominandi–wasuniversal and thedistinguishingdynamicof politics. Subordination is an unpleasant psychological state and increas-ingly unacceptable in an age in which equality and freedom have becomedominant political values. For this reason, Morgenthau insisted that powerhad to bemasked to be effective. Leadersmust be encouraged to pretend, orbetter yet, to convince themselves that they are acting in accord with theirown desires and interests. This illusion can be encouraged by those exertingpower throughmaking face-saving concessions, using language that appealstomutually shared values, and implementing policies through institutions inwhich other actors are represented and in theory able to influence policy.These tensions between power and subordination and authority and free-dom are central to international relations given its hierarchical nature. Theyremain undertheorized and under-researched.

Weber in Retrospect

Weber insists that there is no social science without causal analysis. Herejects non-causal approaches out of hand and has in mind descriptive


history, or history that smuggles in causal inference and for that reasondoes it badly. In international relations, as in other social sciences, neo-positivists are more interested in association than in cause. They char-acterize association as a first essential step in the search for cause, butrarely, if ever, progress beyond this stage.102 Formal modelers have littleuse for associations and largely finesse the question of cause. Simulationmakes even less use of cause for the patterns it generates. These latterapproaches were not available to Weber, and his concern for cause doesnot necessarily apply to them.

Adam Smith coined his “invisible hand” and Hegel the “cunning ofreason” to account for system-level outcomes that are the product, butnot the intention, of self-interested behavior by individual agents.103

Following the pioneering work of Friedrich Hayek, emergent propertieshas become an increasingly important field in economics and politicalscience.104 In sharp contrast tomuch research in the social sciences that isconfined to one level of analysis, emergent properties is interested inconnections across them. Outcomes at the system level are the result ofthe ways in which the consequences of behavior are mediated by rules atone or more levels of aggregation. These rules can be unknown, making itdifficult to compare systems in the absence of numerous iterations ofinteractions based on real interactions or simulations. But even if discov-ered, rules do not represent causes as that concept is understood byWeber or most contemporary philosophers.

Simulation and the assumptions on which it rests have emerged as analternative model to science. For most of the twentieth century, goodtheories were considered to be those that used linear equations to describethe evolution of continuous quantities. Information technology hasenabled a discrete on-off approach to phenomena that are rule-governed.It inspired a search for simple rules – algorithmic systems – which whenrepeatedly applied, generate complex, system-level patterns. Beginning inbiology, this approach spread to physics and then to the social sciences.It offers explanations of a non-causal kind.

Weber can be taken to task for his dismissive attitude to psychology.We should nevertheless recognize that the psychology he rejected was the“touchy-feely” kind Dilthey advocated. Psychology has made enormousstrides in the postwar era andmuch useful work has been done in using itsconcepts and experimental methods to understand foreign policy andinternational relations. Psychological research demonstrates severe limitsto rational decision making, especially in high-risk decisions associatedwith crisis management and the possible use of force.105Weber, I believe,would be receptive to this work because it employs a transparent logic ofargument and is subject to the same kind of evaluation as any research


rooted in rationality. On the whole, psychological research addresses thedeviation from rationality that Weber very much expected to characterizereal-world, as opposed to ideal type, politics.

Weber rejected any teleology and distanced himself from Hegel andMarx for this among other reasons. He would certainly look askance atthe teleology of some liberals and their belief that liberal democratic,laissez-faire capitalist states represent the end product of history or AlexWendt’s remarkable insistence that a world state is inevitable.106Weber’sends-means approach to causation does not work backward from ends tomeans, but forward from motives to possible means of satisfying them.It is the image of a possible outcome that shapes behavior. Nor doesWeber work backward in the construction of historical ideal types asbehavior provides the information about beliefs and goals that we needto construct them. However, attempts to explain singular outcomesshould always reason forward.

Weber’s ends-means approach to cause rests on rationality. It assumesthat actors to some degree exercise reason, but more importantly, thatresearchers can determine the kinds of choices that instrumentallyrational behavior would have produced in any given situation. Weber isnot at all clear about how we achieve reliable knowledge about whatwould be a rational response – beyond situations in which we can appealto common sense. Some years ago the New Yorker had a cartoon ofa couple on safari in Africa. They are driving along a track through highgrass and approach an intersection almost at the same time as anelephant. The couple exchange looks and one asks: “Who has the rightof way?” Rational behavior here is so obvious that we chuckle at thequestion. In complex, real-world decisions, it is rarely so obvious, andhistorians may long debate what would have been rational in the circum-stance. Cases in point are Gorbachev’s reforms, the invasion of Iraq, andBrazil’s strategy in the 2014World Cup. Counterfactual analysis can helpby revealing and probing the assumptions on which different argumentsrest, but cannot provide definitive answers in most instances because it isdifficult, and sometimes impossible, to know with any certainty howothers would have responded to an actor who behaved differently.107

I am not suggesting that we throw out this methodological baby withthe muddied bathwater. Rather, I want to encourage the belief that thesekinds of empirical uncertainties make causal analysis as much an art asa science. We accordingly need as much historical knowledge and empa-thetic ability as we do social science knowledge and qualitative andquantitative skills. Ultimately, causal arguments rest on our ability toconvince others, thus putting a premium on our rhetorical skills. I thinkWeber understood causation in this way and it is why he gives empathy


equal billing to reason in his causal nexus. It is certainly not the conven-tional wisdom in contemporary social science, which ignores empathy tofocus entirely on reason.

Max Weber first took up the question of method in his contribution toa Festschrift for Karl Knies, his predecessor in the chair of economics atHeidelberg. He subsequently wrote about method because it raised issuestoo important to be ignored. At the same time he maintained a jaundicedview about methodology as a field of study. “Methodology can never riseabove self-reflection about the means that have proven useful in practice;one does not need to be explicitly aware of those means in order toproduce useful work just as one does not need knowledge of anatomy towalk ‘correctly.’”108 This may have been a throwaway line. If intendedseriously, it only applies to fields where there is a consensus about whatconstitutes good practice. It does not hold where there are competingunderstandings of science, how it is conducted, and for what ends.The field of international relations has been in the throes of dissensussince its birth, coincidently the same year that Weber died. We mustfollow Weber’s example of engaging fundamental issues of epistemologyto make informed choices about our research.

The most important tension in Weber is between fact and value. Hebelieved that empirical science and value choices inhabit differentdomains. Our value commitmentsmotivate our research, but our findingsmust be evaluated on the basis of criteria independent of these values. Heacknowledged the subjectivity of scholarly interests, not just politicalones, and of the concepts and methods used to study human behavior.He regarded social knowledge as limited by time and place: “There is noabsolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of cultural life . . . independent ofspecial and ‘one-sided’ points of view.” These points of view reflect ourparticular research interests, but more fundamentally how we select andorder what we call facts. The goal of social science is to acquire “knowl-edge of relationships that are significant from the individual point ofview.” We must “keep the limits of their validity in mind.”109

The Vienna Circle tried and failed to solve this problem by derivinglogical warrants for assessing truth claims, and their project was of littleinterest to scientists in any case. We have come to realize that goodscience is what good scientists think it is at any given moment and thattheir understandings are field specific and labile.110 The social reality ofscience shifts the burden of validation away from procedures to thenormative commitments of practitioners. They must be open-minded,pluralist, and, above all, fair-minded. Science rests on ethical values, yetthese values are culturally dependent, open to interpretation, and recog-nized as constantly evolving.


Our values guide not only our choice of subjects and research methods,but also how we evaluate our findings and their significance. Weber wor-ried that these values were smuggled in rather than brought to bear ina transparent way. “One finds value judgments being made everywherewithout compunction. . .. But it is the exception rather than the rule for theperson making a judgment to clarify in his own mind, and for others, theultimate subjective core of his judgments, by which I mean the ideals onthe basis of which he proceeds to judge the events he is observing.”111

Weber warned that many social scientists, especially economists, assumenorms of economic efficiency and productivity, and fail to distinguishbetween “what is [das Seiende]” and “what ought to be [das Seinsollende].”112

Weber also has difficulty in distinguishing the “is” from the “ought.”He assumes that the state is the central political fact and that its preserva-tion and growth is a first-order concern. He accordingly supports whatGermans of his day called the primacy of foreign policy (Primat derAußenpolitik). His scientific study of politics is based on this assumptionand his belief that competition à outrance among classes, peoples, andstates is an unavoidable fact of life.113 Weber differed little from Marx inhis belief that states had to compete for markets. His commitment to thestate led him to castigate German politicians of all parties for usingnarrow, self-interested instrumental reason in lieu of the national interest.He considers their behavior irrational, but this is only evident from hispoint of view, not from theirs.114 Weber acknowledged his value commit-ments in his scholarship, but understood that this was not a solution to theproblem. If we start with different values and goals, we are likely to askdifferent questions, find different answers, and assess their meaning andsignificance in light of different metrics. Science can be objective only inthe narrow sense of research concepts, design and findings being consis-tent with and following the researcher’s value commitments.

Weber, I believe, was more interested in a different kind of consistency,one that hasmore to dowith our lives than with our research. Throughouthis life he was deeply concerned with the development and expression ofindividualism, especially his own. Liberalism’s emphasis on the value andsanctity of the individual was what attracted him to it as a worldview.To develop as an individual, one had to commit to consistent values andaspire to act in accord with them.Weber tried hard to do this in his privatelife, scholarship, university professorship, and politics.

Tracy Strong draws an interesting parallel between Weber andFreud.115 Both men considered the unmasking of illusions (enttäuschen)the fundamental goal of their science. Like Freud, Weber sought to stripaway personal illusions. He insists that scholars require “relentless hon-esty” to make proper use of ideal types, which are the vehicle for making


knowledge claims in the social sciences. Ideal types identify the “mean-ingful traits of a culture.”116 To fathom these traits, we must do morethan what Clifford Geertz described as “soak and poke.”117Wemust firstunderstand our culture, as it is the starting point of the analysis of anyother. This in turn demands honest self-reflection and understanding andthe recognition of the extent to which we are largely products of ourculture and our position in it. It requires something more difficult still.Marianne Weber reports that when her husband was asked what hisscholarship meant to him, he replied: “I want to see how much I canbear.”118 Strong interprets this as a reference to his belief that because ourworld is demystified, it no longer makes sense; all former certainties havelost their hold on us. We must accept that we cannot make sense of theworld and come to terms with its meaningless, as far as we can. This isunsettling and painful and we are always tempted to try to make the worldcohere. Only by resisting this temptation can we hope to create the kind ofideal types that can at least help us understand how the world became theway it did.

There is an interesting parallel between Weber’s conception of ethicsand his ideal types. From his “Objectivity” essay on, Weber is clear thatideals have always been and always will be in conflict. There is no way toresolve this conflict, nor to resolve the conflict between the ethics ofconviction and responsibility. At best, people can make choices amongcompeting values. To do this effectively, theymust be as candid as possiblewith themselves about the motives behind their behavior or policy choices.The two ethics can be considered vehicles for probing one’s intentions andthe values on which they rest. They are as much a starting point forintrospection as they are for policy analysis. The same can be said ofWeber’s approach to scholarship. Good scholarship depends on the ques-tions we ask, the methods we use to find answers, the way in which wecollect and evaluate evidence, and the inferences we make from it. This inturn depends on understanding our social and political commitments andour position in society, and indeed, the position of our society relative toothers. We must look inward before we can look outward.

For Weber, scholarship and life are closely intertwined. He seeksneither escape nor happiness, but identity through scholarly commit-ment. Here too, the ideal type is the key. As Strong notes, it providesthe analytical answer for the scholar the same way the phraseHier stehe ich(Here I stand) does for the Lutheran – a phraseWeber uses at the outset ofhis “Profession of Politics” essay. Ideal types make the world known to usand help us discern what can reasonably be done within it. It is a Kantianconception, but not inferred by reason. It is the product of historicalsociology.119


We come to the ironic realization that objectivity is available only toscholars who recognize their utter subjectivity and understand that wis-senschaftliche Wahrheit (scientific knowledge) is a product of a givenculture and their position within it, not a feature of the world. Theconnection between science and personal development is an intimateone. The value commitment Weber believes one must make to scholar-ship is remarkably similar to religious commitments demanded frompeople in terms of honesty, struggle, and humility. In his secular way,Weber is very Protestant after all.

Notes

1. Wilhelm Bode, ed., Goethe’s Gedanken aus seinem mündlichen Äusserungen(Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1907), Wolfgang Goethe toJohann Peter Eckermann, December 30, 1823, vol. I, p. 127.

2. Published in 1924. In this chapter, I will refer to a later edition: Max Weber,Gesammelte Aufsätze zurWissenschaftslehre, ed. JohannesWinckelmann, 3rd ed.(Tübingen: J. C. B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1968), cited henceforth asGAW. Alltranslations are mine unless I offer another source. All of the essays relevant tomethod are now available in English. In my opinion, the best translation is byHans Henrik Brunn in Hans Henrik Brunn and Sam Whimster, eds., MaxWeber: Collected Methodological Writings (London: Routledge, 2012).

3. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Wiley, 1974), pp. 265–66.

4. Marianne Weber to MaxWeber, January 5, 1903. Cited in Joachim Radkau,MaxWeber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2011),p. 251.

5. Sven Eliaeson,MaxWeber’s Methodologies (London: Polity, 2012), chapter 1.6. W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from

Humboldt to Thomas Mann (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).7. Leopold von Ranke,The Theory and Practice of History, trans.Wilma A. Iggers

and Konrad von Moltke (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1963); FrederickC. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2011), pp. 253–89.

8. Ernst Troeltsch, Die Historismus und seine Probleme, in Gesammelte Schriften(Tübingen: Mohr, 1922), vol. III, p. 102.

9. Beiser, German Historicist Tradition, pp. 2–23, for an overview of thedevelopment and diversity of historicist thinking.

10. Michael Ermarth,Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978), chapter 5, for a thoughtful discussion ofVerstehen.

11. WilhelmDilthey,Der Aufbau der geschichtlichenWelt in den Geisteswissenschaftenin Gesammelte Schriften (Construction of the Historical World in the HumanisticDisciplines) (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1958), vol. 7, pp. 79–220.

12. For a contemporary account, Werner Hasbach, “Zur Geschichte desMethodenstreites in der politischen Oekonomie,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 19


(1895), pp. 465–90, 751–808. Beiser,GermanHistoricist Tradition, pp. 521–28,for a short synopsis in English.

13. Wilhelm Dilthey, Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences, trans.Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2002), First Study, “The Psychic Structural Nexus,” pp. 23–27.

14. Ibid. On Dilthey, Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey; Theodore Platinga, HistoricalUnderstanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1980); Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of theHuman Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

15. Wilhelm Dilthey, Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology (1894),trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Donald Moore in Rudolf A. Makkreel andFrithjof Rodi, eds., Wilhelm Dilthey, Understanding the Human World(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 115–210.

16. Dilthey, Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences, Third Study,“The Delimitation of the Human Sciences” (Third Draft),“The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life,”pp. 226–40.

17. Dilthey, Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology; Ermarth, WilhelmDilthey, chapter 5.

18. Ermarth, Dilthey, p. 350; Beiser, German Historical Tradition, pp. 358–64.19. Wilhelm Windelband, “Über die gegenwärtige Lage und Aufgabe der

Philosophie,” in Prälaudein: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrerGeschichte, 2 vols., 9th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924), esp. II,pp. 1–23; Beiser, German Historicist Tradition, pp. 365–92.

20. Ibid.21. WilhelmWindelband,Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft, in Prälaudein. vol. 2,

pp. 136–60. English translation, “History and Natural Science,” byGuy Oakes, History and Theory 19 (1980), pp. 165–85.

22. Ibid.; GuyOakes,Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 42–49.

23. Ibid.24. Windelband, “Über die gegenwärtige Lage und Aufgabe der Philosophie.”25. Beiser, German Historicist Tradition, pp. 393–441.26. Oakes, Weber and Rickert, chapters 2–3.27. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1958), p. 44.28. Beiser, German Historicist Tradition, p. 511.29. Oakes, Weber and Rickert.30. Fritz Ringer, “Max Weber on Causal Analysis: Interpretation, and

Comparison,” History and Theory 41 (2002), pp. 163–78, and Max Weber:An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

31. Eliaeson, Max Weber’s Methodologies, p. 45. Also, Manfred Schön, “GustavSchmoller and Max Weber,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen andJürgen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London:Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 59–70.

32. Max Weber, “Roscher und Knies und die logischen Probleme derhistorischen Nationalökonomie,” GAW, pp. 1–145.


33. This commitment is most strongly expressed in his 1917 lecture at theUniversity of Munich: “Wissenschaft als Beruf [Science as a Vocation],”Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Stuttgart: UTV, [1922] 1988),pp. 524–55. It was given to the Freistudentischer Bund (Free StudentSociety), who were extremely displeased by his argument and his contemptfor anti-modern idealist solutions to modernity.

34. Ibid., GAW, pp. 88–89.35. Max Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” Economy and Society, edited by

Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press,1978), p. 5.

36. Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” p. 9. He alsomentions laws, but notes thatthey offer a purely theoretical understanding because people act in accordwith them “only in unusual cases.”

37. On Weber and Simmel, see David Frisby, “The Ambiguity of Modernity:Georg Simmel and Max Weber,” in Mommsen and Osterhammel, MaxWeber and His Contemporaries, pp. 422–33.

38. On Weber and the neo-Kantians, Oakes, Weber and Rickert.39. Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” in Prälaudien, 3rd ed.

(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1907), pp. 355–79.40. Max Weber, Roscher und Knies, GAW, pp. 4–5.41. Max Weber, “Die Objektivitätsozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer

Erkenntnis,” GAW, pp. 178–80.42. Ibid.; Heinrich Rickert,Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung

(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1902). Abridged English version, The Limits ofConcept Formation inNatural Science, GuyOakes ed. (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1986), pp. 102–19, 197–200; Georg Simmel, Über sozialeDifferenzierung. Sozialogische und psychologische Untersuchungen, inKarl Kehrbach, ed., Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt,1890), chapter 1.

43. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 170–72.44. Ibid.45. Ibid., GAW, p. 206.46. Ibid., GAW, pp. 181–83.47. Ibid., GAW, p. 214.48. Ibid.,GAW, pp. 170, 183–84. John StuartMill also contrasted theWest with

what he called “Chinese Stationariness.”49. Ibid., GAW, pp. 170, 181–82.50. Weber, “Politik als Beruf.”51. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 212–14.52. Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” p. 13.53. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 172–78.54. For a contemporary version of this approach to causation, see Richard

Ned Lebow, Constructing Cause in International Relations (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2014).

55. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 178–80.56. Lebow, Constructing Cause in International Relations for a fundamentally

similar approach.


57. Ibid., GAW, pp. 175–78.58. See Patrick Jackson’s chapter on ideal types in this volume; Wolfgang

J. Mommsen, “Ideal and Pure Type: Two Variants of Max Weber’s Ideal-Type Method,” in Mommsen, Political and Social Theory of Max Weber,pp. 121–32.

59. Ibid., and “Conceptual Exposition,” p. 20.60. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 190–95.61. Ibid., GAW, pp. 190–93, and “Conceptual Exposition,” pp. 19–20.62. Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” p. 12.63. Ibid.64. Weber, “Roscher und Knies,” GAW, pp. 67–69, 126–31.65. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 170–72, and “Kritische Studien auf dem

Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik,” pp. 276–80.66. Weber, “Kritische Studien,” pp. 276–80.67. Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” pp. 6–7.68. Weber, “Roscher and Knies,” GAW, p. 130, for Frederick William IV and

“Causal Exposition,” p. 21, for the Austro–Prussian War and quote.69. Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” pp. 9–21.70. Weber, Economy and Society, p. 22.71. Weber makes this argument most extensively in “The Profession and

Vocation of Politics,” in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, PoliticalWritings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 309–69.

72. Ibid., GAW, pp. 67–70.73. Weber, “Roscher and Knies,” GAW, pp. 127–31.74. Ibid., “Kritische Studien,” GAW, p. 286.75. Karl Knies, Die Statistik als selbständige Wissenschaft (Kassel: J. Luckhardt,

1850) andGustav Radbruch,Die Lehre von adäquaten Verursachung (Theory ofAdequate Causation) (Berlin: Abhandlungen des Kriminalistischen Seminarsan der Universität Berlin, NF vol. 1, 1902).

76. Weber, “Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichenLogik,” GAW, pp. 282–83.

77. Ibid., GAW, pp. 274–75.78. E.g., Victor David Hanson, “Themistocles at Salamis,” and Barry Strauss,

“Salamis without Themistocles, and the West without Greece,” in PhilipA. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Unmaking theWest: “What-If” Scenarios That Rewrite World History (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 47–89, 90–118.

79. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.Steven Kalberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 109. In 1904–05,H. Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfal wrote the firstmajor reviews ofThe ProtestantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalism in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft undSozialpolitik and the Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst undTechnik and provoked a choleric reply from Weber. For an abbreviatedEnglish version of Weber’s reply, “A Final Rebuttal to a Critic ofCapitalism,” in Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 256–71.

80. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), vol. 1, 1.7(pp. 11–13 in the English edition).


81. I am indebted to Jens Steffek for this point.82. E.g., Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999).83. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-

Wesley, 1979).84. Conversation with McGeorge Bundy, April 24, 1992, New York City.85. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 175–78.86. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf,

1978), p. 220.87. Seán Molloy, “‘Cautious Politics’: Morgenthau and Hume’s Critiques of

the Balance of Power,” International Politics, 50, no. 6 (2013), pp. 768–83.88. Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 93–96.89. Weber, “Objektivität”; Georg Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of

History: An Epistemological Essay, trans. and ed. Guy Oakes (New York:Free Press, 1977).

90. Weber, Roscher und Knies, GAW, pp. 69–70.91. Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, GAW, p. 528.92. Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics.”93. Talcott Parsons, ed. and trans., Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the

Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1952); H. H. Gerth andC. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

94. This is most evident in their reactions and reviews of Thomas Piketty,Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2014). Also, Diedre McCloskey, Bourgeois Inequality: How Ideas, NotCapital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2016).

95. John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After theCold War,” International Security 15, no. 1 (1990), pp. 5–56, “The FalsePromise of International Institutions,” International Security 19 (1994–95),pp. 5–49, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton,2001), p. 400, “China’s Unpeaceful Rise,” Current History, 105 (2006),pp. 160–62 and “Trouble Brewing in the ‘hood,” Sydney Morning Herald,3 August 2011, p. 11. Also, Aaron L. Freidberg, “The Future ofU.S.-ChinaRelations: Is Conflict Inevitable?” International Security, 30, no. 2 (Fall2005), pp. 7–45; Christopher Layne, “The Waning of U.S. Hegemony—Myth or Reality?” International Security, 34, no. 1 (2009), pp. 147–72.

96. Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations.97. Weber, “Conceptual Exposition,” p. 19.98. Weber, “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie [On Some

Categories of Interpretative Sociology],” GAW, p. 404.99. Weber, “Kritische Studien,” GAW, p. 226.

100. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans.Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1959] 1984),chapter 4 and 7.


101. Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations; T. V. Paul, DeborahW. Larson, and William C. Wohlforth, eds. (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2014); Tudor Onea, “Between Dominance and Decline:Status Anxiety and Great Power Rivalry,” Review of International Studies 40,no. 1 (2014), pp. 125–52.

102. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba,Designing Social Inquiry:Scientific Inference in Quantitative Research (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 7–8, for three scholars who assert that causalinference is the goal of social science and possible only by means ofquantitative analysis, but never go beyond the search for associations.

103. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations(New York: RandomHouse, 1937), IV.2.4 and 9; G. W. F. Hegel, Lectureson the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1975), II.(2).§37.

104. Robert M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: BasicBooks, 1984); Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics:How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997); Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell, GrowingArtificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Washington, DC:The Brookings Institution Press, 1996); Robert Jervis, System Effects:Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997).

105. Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of InternationalCrisis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), chapters4–6; Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychologyand Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984),chapters 3, 5, and 7.

106. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: FreePress, 1992); Alexander E. Wendt, “Why a World State Is Inevitable,”European Journal of International Relations 9 (2003), pp. 491–542.

107. For a discussion of this problem, George Breslauer and RichardNed Lebow, “Leadership and the End of the Cold War: A CounterfactualThought Experiment,” in Richard K. Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow,eds., Ending the Cold War (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003), pp.161–88.

108. Weber, “Kritische Studien.”109. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 170, 181–82.110. Karl Popper, “Epistemology without a Knowing Subject,” in Karl Popper,

Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), chapter 3;Friedrich V. Kratochwil, “Evidence, Inference, and Truth as Problems ofTheory Building in the Social Sciences,” in Richard Ned Lebow andMark Lichbach, eds., Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics andInternational Relations (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), pp. 25–54.

111. Weber, “Nation and Economic Policy,” pp. 18–19.112. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 149–55.113. Lebow, “Wissenschaftliche Wahrheit” in this volume for an elaboration.114. Ibid.


115. Tracy B. Strong, “Entitlement and Legitimacy: Weber and Lenin on theProblems of Leadership,” in Fred Eidlin, ed., Constitutional Democracy:A Festschrift in Honour of Henry W. Erdmann (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983),pp. 153–80, and “Weber and Freud: Vocation and Self-Acknowledgment,” inMommsen andOsterhammel,MaxWeber andHis Contemporaries, pp. 468–82.

116. Weber, “Objektivität,” GAW, pp. 190–95.117. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).118. Weber, Weber, p. 678. See also Karl Jaspers to Hannah Arendt, Basel,

November 16, 1966, in Karl Jaspers, On Max Weber, trans. RobertJ. Whelan (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 189.

119. Strong, “Entitlement and Legitimacy” and “Weber and Freud.”


4 The Production of Facts: Ideal-Typificationand the Preservation of Politics

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson

As is to perhaps be expected from any profound thinker,Weber’s views onperennial topics of concern to the social sciences evolved over the courseof his life. His views on the proper relationship between scholarship(Wissenschaft) and practical politics (Politik) are no exception. In part,Weber’s expressed views varied with the contexts within which they werepronounced, something that he not only noticed, but positively advo-cated: “if you speak at a public meeting about democracy you do notmake a secret of your personal position,” he famously declared in hislecture “Scholarship as a Vocation.”1 “On the contrary, you have to takea side explicitly; that is your damned duty.”2 Audience matters, and oneshould bear that in mind when trying to make sense of any piece ofwriting; the problem-situation out of which a particular formulation arisesand into which it is intended to speak are critical aspects of the process.In Weber’s case, that problem-situation is generally concerned withtamping down the excesses either of passion or of reason, whether he iscautioning the agitated youth against the revolutionary politics they thinkwill save them, or whether he is cautioning the “overgrown children” inthe natural sciences who think that knowledge of and in their specializeddisciplines “could teach us anything at all about the meaning of theworld.”3

Despite the multiple audiences to which Weber wrote, there is thusa consistent theme in much of his thinking: a rejection of utopian pro-mises of ultimate liberation from any source. Although one might focusprofitably onWeber’s specific writings about politics in order to show thisthread in his engagements with all manner of political movements pro-mising radical transformation, in this essay, I am going to focus on theother side of the ledger, on Weber’s efforts to dispel the notion thatsystematic scholarship could dispense with the necessity for commit-ments and decisions in politics. The “ethic of responsibility” – Weber’sproposed alternative at the end of his lecture “Politics as a Vocation” bothto the “ethic of conviction” in which every possible action is justified bythe transcendent correctness of the goal sought, and to the purely

79

instrumental pursuit of political power for its own sake – leavesa politician existentially suspended between knowledge of the morallycorrect thing to do and the necessity to use immoral and ultimately violentmeans to pursue it.

The opposition Weber draws here juxtaposes ethical knowledge withpractical necessities as a way of pointing out that neither can save us. ButI will argue that given Weber’s understanding of social-scientific knowl-edge as inextricably intertwined with ideal-types, there is no salvation tobe found there, either. The task of social-scientific scholarship is not toenable the politician to make the correct choice in combining ends andmeans, and it is not to enable the politician to correctly foresee theconsequences of her or his actions. Rather than a world of calculablerisk in which scholars and scholarship can neutrally proclaim an optimalsolution – the pipe dream of Enlightenment liberals and what HansMorgenthau might have called “scientific men,”4 and, as I will suggest,the constitutive framework of the social sciences in the United States –Weber’s project aims to disclose a far more fundamentally uncertainworld where value commitments still have a role to play in political life.The condition of possibility for such a world,Weber perceptively noticed,is that scholarship be understood asmore of a realm of self-limiting reasonthan as a source of putatively neutral policy prescriptions. Weber’s pro-gram for accomplishing this change was to work out the consequences ofthe ideal-typical character of scholarly knowledge, so as to prevent logi-cally general abstractions from being mistaken for either reliable predic-tions or transcendental certainties.

If this project sounds philosophically familiar, that is because – as NedLebow discusses in greater detail in his chapter in this volume – Weberwas thoroughly immersed in the neo-Kantian intellectual atmosphere oflate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. Kant’s criticalquest to determine the limits of knowledge “to make room for faith”5

suggested that knowledge was possible only because reason constitutedobjects of knowledge as objects and thus made them available for inves-tigation; hence it was not possible to know anything outside of these mostbasic operations of reason. This in turn gave rise to an important differ-ence between factual knowledge of the physical world and ethical knowl-edge of the moral world, inasmuch as the former depended on the puresensible intuitions of space and time, whereas the latter depended only onreason; that distinction is reflected throughout Kant’s magisterialcritiques of pure reason, practical reason, and judgment.

But neo-Kantian thinkers largely rejected this dichotomy, because theyrejected the notion of “an independent faculty of pure intuition,” prefer-ring instead to derive the “formal structures in virtue of which the object

80 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson

of knowledge becomes possible . . . from the logical faculty of the under-standing and from this faculty alone.”6 Instead of constitutively separateforms of factual and ethical knowledge, neo-Kantians of whatever stripehad to draw any distinction between factual and ethical knowledgeinternally, i.e., within the same knowledge-producing processes. This inturn meant that any attempt to limit knowledge of the social world tomake room for practical political action could not rely on any allegedlyfundamental sensible intuitions about the social world, but must insteadwork through a logical analysis of how knowledge was produced – howboth facts and judgments about the social world came to be, and how theywere related to one another. This is what the notion of an ideal-type doesin Weber’s thinking.

The Logical Structure of Ideal-Types7

Although most of us have seen this before, it is worth quoting at somelength Weber’s definition of an ideal-type, since a lot of subtle epistemicwork is done in that definition.8 Rather than “a ‘presuppositionless’ copyof ‘objective’ facts,” ideal-types are

formed through a one-sided accentuation of one ormore points of view and throughbringing together a great many diffuse and discrete, more or less present andoccasionally absent concrete individual events, which are arranged according tothese emphatically one-sided points of view in order to construct a unified analy-tical construct [Gedanken]. In its conceptual purity, this analytical construct[Gedankenbild] is found nowhere in empirical reality; it is a utopia.9

Weber goes on to point out that “whoever accepts the standpoint thatknowledge of historical reality should or could be a ‘presuppositionless’copy of ‘objective’ facts will deny any value to ideal-types.”10 He himselfclearly does not accept the notion of a presuppositionless copy, insteadplacing the human “capacity and the will to deliberately take up a stancetowards theworld and to lend it ameaning” at the center of his reflections.11

In this case, the human capacity in question is a capacity of the researchersrather than of the subjects under study: “The quality of a process asa ‘socio-economic’ event is not something that inheres ‘objectively’ in theprocess as such,”Weber argues. “It is farmore conditioned by the directionof our [i.e., the researchers’] knowledge interest [Erkenntnisinteresse] as itarises from the specific cultural significance that we attribute pertaining tothe process in an individual case.”12 In this way, the social sciences areproductive of the world of facts, beholden not to some externally existing setof objects or their essential dispositional properties, but rather to thecultural values that define and orient the investigation from the outset.13

Production of Facts 81

Indeed, the whole procedure of creating and deploying an ideal-type isall about the transmutation of cultural values into useful explanatoryinstruments.Weber’s overall procedure can be summarized in the follow-ing diagram, in which three distinct intellectual moves link four elements:

A I B II C III D

Sphere ofvalues

Stand-taking

Valuecommitment(s)

Formalization Analyticaldepiction

Application Facts

The Weberian Procedure of Ideal-Typification

Reading from left to right, the procedure begins in (A) the concretesphere of values and purposes in which the researcher is concretely located.Ideal-typification begins with that researcher (I) taking a value-laden ethicalstand, by which she or he locates him- or herself with respect to the valuesand norms in circulation in her or his social context. The (B) valuecommitment(s) contained in this stance are then (II) formalized and idea-lized, in part by blending them with empirical observations in order tocreate limiting-case representations, thus producing an analytical depictionconsisting of one or several ideal-types (C). Then that analytic is (III)consistently applied to specific empirical cases – more about just how thisworks in a moment – in order to produce (D) facts: what David Eastonrefers to as “particular ordering[s] of reality in terms of a theoreticalinterest.”14 These facts are both dependent on and distinct from the valuecommitments that ground the ideal-typical analytic in the first place:“dependent on” because particular factual knowledge claims are generatedby a conceptual apparatus with its roots in specific value commitments, but“distinct from” because it is possible to evaluate a given piece of research,and the facts it produces, from a scholarly point of view by focusing ourattention on intellectual moves II and III, and essentially ignoring intellec-tual move I and remaining neutral about the specific contents of elementB. When speaking as a scholar, we can say that someone hasn’t adequatelyformalized their value commitments or applied the resulting ideal-typeproperly, but we can’t say that their value commitments are wrong.15

Several things are noteworthy in this reconstruction of the process. First,ideal-types are nothing like pictorial representations of objects or processes;they are more like deliberate caricatures or partial sketches, or perhapsspecialized conceptual filters that focus our scholarly attention on particularaspects of actually existing things to the detriment of other aspects of thosesame things.16 The value commitments at the core of an ideal-type ensurethat any ideal-type, whether “charismatic authority” or “liberal democracy”


or even “public opinion,” necessarily functions as a way of expressing valueseven as it calls attention to specific features of the actual world and gathersthem together under one conceptual heading. Second, this deliberate slant isdue less to any putatively dispositional characteristics of the object understudy, and more to the “emphatic points of view” – what I have labeled“value commitment(s)” (B) in the diagram – which, in a sense, direct us tofocus on particular aspects andnot others. In thatway, an ideal-type is alwaysa way ofmediating between ourselves and the objects of our analysis, and is ina sense more like a formalized intuition than it is like a well-supportedconclusion or a hypothetical conjecture.17 Ideal-types are always and inevi-tably an instrumental means to an explanatory end, never the terminus of anexplanation; they are also always and inevitably our instruments.

From this it follows, third, that a different researcher, formalizing differ-ent value commitments into a different analytical depiction – or even thesame value commitments into a different analytical depiction – might wellfocus on different aspects of the same entity or object, and he or she wouldnot in any simple sense be “wrong” for doing so.18 In this way, ideal-typesmust be regarded as provisional abstract articulations of our value commit-ments; they are not simply pure types, but remain inextricably wrapped upwith cultural and moral commitments.19 But it does not inevitably followthat all researchers inhabiting the same culture or tradition of scientificinquiry will generate or be compelled to use the same set of ideal-typicalinstruments. Our actual cultures and living traditions are ambiguous andflexible enough to be idealized and formalized in different ways, unless anduntil homogeneity is imposed on them, either fromwithin or fromwithout.20

It is the act of selecting and formalizing one’s value commitments in theprocess of forging one’s ideal-typical tools that affords the construction ofvalid scholarly knowledge,whichmeans that it is always appropriate both toinquire after the value commitments encoded into any given ideal-type andto question the way in which a scholar has idealized her declared valuecommitments – to ask about the content of element B and the dynamics ofmove II in the diagram. But it is not appropriate in a scholarly discussion toquestion the specific values a researcher holds, although it is of courseethically and even politically appropriate to do so. Recognizing and fore-grounding value commitments, and critiquing the way in which they areidealized into pieces of conceptual equipment, are logically distinct activ-ities from the enterprise of criticizing someone’s values.

Finally, since ideal-types cannot be falsified as one would falsifya hypothesis – comparing an ideal-type to the actual existence of theobject(s) the ideal-type was derived from would invariably “prove” thatthe ideal-type was descriptively deficient in some respect – the onlymeaningful way to evaluate whether an ideal-type is a good one or not is


pragmatically: i.e., to examine whether, once applied, the ideal-type isefficacious in revealing intriguing and useful things about the objects towhich it is applied. “Intriguing” in this context catches up the extent towhich the ideal-type expresses a weakly shared cultural value in a way thatthe relevant research community finds compelling; as there is fora philosopher of science like Pierre Duhem, there is for Weber an irredu-cibly conventional element to social science.21 “Useful”might be thoughtof as the Weberian equivalent of what John Dewey called “the pragmaticrule” – “in order to discover the meaning of the idea ask for its conse-quences” – translated into the sphere of social-scientific inquiry.22 A goodideal-type is a useful ideal-type, an appropriate means to the analyticalend that animates the scholar’s activity; it captures and summarizes therelevant features of a set of cases, and highlights the typical aspects of thecategory. But this is all it does. It is quite literally nonsensical to speak ofan ideal-type itself as being “valid” or “invalid,” because in the sphere ofscholarly analysis these terms cannot be applied to analytical constructs –only to applications, and then only in a technical sense.23

This last point is especially important because of a conceptual slippagethat happens all too often in contemporary methodological discussions, inwhich a logically general notion is confused with an empirically general claim.It is a purely grammatical feature of ideal-types that they are phrased ina logically general manner, i.e., without proper names and case-specificdetails attached to them; we talk about the ideal-types of “charismaticauthority” or “informal hierarchy,” rather than specific charismatic autho-rities or informal hierarchies (and parenthetically, in order to talk aboutthose specific instances, we are already implicitly drawing on a logicallygeneral concept).24 And when we are illustrating the dynamics of suchideal-types, for example, by spelling out how charismatic authority oper-ates or what informal hierarchy constrains, we are similarly operating in thelogically general realm. An abstract sketch of brokerage as a mechanismlinking two nodes through a third, and a discussion of the kinds of flows ofinfluence or information that such an arrangement affords,25 is not in theleast empirical, because we aren’t talking about actual links between actualentities; we are instead constructing an abstract model that can usefullyorder actuality. Whether it is reflected in the world in empirically generalways is quite beside the point, despite the fact that because of the metho-dological dominance of neo-positivism in thefield and in the social sciences(excepting anthropology) as a whole,26 researchers often feel compelled to“substantiate” or “test” their logically general claims against empiricalevidence instead of demonstrating the explanatory productivity of theirmodels by simply putting them to work. But that latter, I suggest, is preciselywhat Weber would have us do.


The Practical Procedure of Ideal-Typification

Everything that I have been discussing about ideal-types to this point hasremained in the realm of logical structure, not the messier realm of howone actually produces and uses an ideal-type of anything in particular.Although Weber is clear that scholars are not “required to select theirideal-types from a fixed list,” in his own work, he presents a number ofdifferent ideal-types, and nowhere in his writings are there detailedinstructions for the reader to use in constructing her or his own ideal-types.27 Indeed, in Weber’s work, we see two rather distinct styles ofderiving and presenting ideal-types, which further contributes to theambiguity on this point. In many of his empirical studies, ideal-typesappear to be derived from a careful comparison of different instances orinstantiations of some phenomenon, like “charismatic authority” or “theassociation.” But this merely begs the question of how those instanceswere identified as such in the first place in the absence of the ideal-typethat is supposedly derived from looking across them. On the other hand,in some places in his writings (especially the material placed at the begin-ning of Economy and Society by his widow after his death),28 Weber givesthe reader a set of ahistorical basic notions, such as his distinctions amongvarious forms of rationality, that can be later combined into broaderforms. But it is unclear where these notions come from and why thereader should accept them as definitive.

An example might help. As near as I can tell, Weber’s own procedurefor generating his famous ideal-types of authority was a combination of“read everything ever written about the history of human social organiza-tion” and “reflect hard on the challenges of political authority froma location in late 19th and early 20th-century Germany.”29 Or, to putthis more schematically:

immersion in data consult otherliterature

redescribecases as

configurations

identifyvalues

disclosed

categories /typology

IDEAL-TYPIFICATION


We begin in the upper left-hand corner, trying to make sense of a set ofobservations. We consult other contemporary theoretical literature look-ing for inspiration. At a certain point it comes together, and wemake/find30 a categorization that appears to order the data in a usefulway and allows us – lower right-hand corner now – to re-describe whatwas a moment before a disconnected set of observations as being orderedby logically general principles.31And then, once we have done that, we canstep back from the resulting edifice and perhaps perceive what valuecommitments we have implicitly built into the ideal-type(s) we aredeploying. Value commitments on the part of the researcher are tacitlyor implicitly implicated in the research, and the effort to formalize ideal-types in this way can “surface” those value commitments and make themmore apparent both to the researcher and to her or his readership.

The point is that an ideal-type is very different from a testable hypoth-esis, precisely in virtue of emerging from and then being explicitlygrounded in a set of value commitments. The fact that a particularresearcher notices certain commonalities across a set of instances saysnothing about whether those commonalities “accurately” describe rea-lity, even though the researcher herself, when formulating an ideal-type,might understand herself as simply trying to get a “clear view” of thephenomenon in question. The difference here is one of the logical statusof a particular depiction, which has implications for how one deals withthat depiction and its inevitable departure from the actual nuances ofreality. If the conventional neo-positivist approach to concepts treatsthem as provisional and falsifiable sketches of something out there inthe world that are intended to be replaced by more detailed pictureslater on, the ideal-typical approach regards them more as tools for think-ing about things in the world, and accordingly, as more or less formalrepresentations of our accumulated thoughts about things.Weber’s ideal-types of authority outline a helpful way of conceptualizing authority,much more than they depict separate and separable kinds of actuallyexisting organizations or patterns of authority in history.

It is also important to keep in mind that everything I have said thus farconsists of instructions for researchers and not for the subjects of the study.Despite the fact that in Weber’s substantive theory of human action heemphasizes that a good explanation has to be both causally adequate andadequate on the level of meaning, in his methodological writings he makesno such claim.32 Ideal-types do not have to be in any way a depiction ofthe beliefs or subjective mental processes of individuals, because they donot function in an explanation by being believed, but by serving as anabstract yardstick against which to measure and organized lived actuality.It is just as possible to ideal-typify a macro-historical sequence like “the


civilizing process”33 or a set of social mechanisms34 as it is to ideal-typifya set of soteriological doctrines,35 although the latter deals with beliefsheld (albeit collectively/intersubjectively, not necessarily personally orindividually) by the subjects under investigation while the former twodo not. All of these kinds of ideal-types instantiate value commitments onthe part of the researcher, and all serve to establish a baseline set ofexpectations against which the causal impact of specific events and occur-rences can be judged.Methodologically speaking, those are the importantpoints.

Using Ideal-Types

In addition to their “value-clarification” function, and of more directrelevance to the production of worldly knowing, is the application ofideal-types to concrete, actual cases to generate explanations. Since anideal-type is by definition “falsified” if compared to the details andnuances of an actual empirical instance, the application of an ideal-typecan never be about validating or verifying the accuracy of the depiction;instead, it is about isolating those portions of a case or event that do notcorrespond to the ideal-type and helping us to appreciate their signifi-cance. Weber distinguishes, albeit in a somewhat muddled way, between“adequate” and “contingent” causation: an adequately causal factor isone without which we cannot imagine the outcome having occurred andwhich is part of a systematic ideal-type, while a contingent causal factor isone without which we cannot imagine the outcome having occurred – butwhich is not part of a systematic ideal-type, and is instead a relativelyunique part of the situation at hand.36 Ideal-types can thus figure intocausal claims, but not as independent causal factors; they serve instead toset a baseline against which an actual course of events can be assessed.

So, to use a familiar IR example, consider Ken Waltz’s model of statesin anarchy.37 If states balance in a particular situation, the anarchicstructure of the international system might be adequately causal, andthe particular reading of “threat” by state leaders might be contingentlycausal. Alternatively – and here is where ideal-typical analysis becomesparticularly powerful and insightful – both the anarchic structure and theways in which threat is read/construed might be adequately causalbecause we come to the analysis equipped with ideal-types of bothelements,38 and what is contingently causal in the situation is how con-crete human beings located between these elements struggle to reconcilethe tensions between them in practice. Arguably this is how Weberanalyzes, say, the Catholic Church’s development as a bureaucracy: thepressures of the routinization of charisma (because popes die, or


sometimes – rarely – resign from office), explicable as a tension betweencharismatic and rational-legal modes of authority, generate opportunitiesfor concrete human beings to (contingently and causally) mediate thosetensions and produce rituals like the voting in the College of Cardinalswith its attendant ritualistic elements and the denial that any politickinggoes on when a new pope is selected.39 The whole point of using ideal-types to analyze a specific and concrete case is to distinguish betweenadequately and contingently causal factors (and an implicit third categoryof incidental, or non-causal, factors) by disciplining our counterfactualimaginations; it is this disciplined imagination that generates worldlyknowing about what happened in a specific case and why it happenedthe way that it happened. Precisely what one does not do is to compareactual situations to the ideal-type and then reject the ideal-type as some-how misleading or false; the question is not whether the internationalsystem “is” or “is not” anarchic, but whether the notion of anarchycaptures anything important about the dynamics of that system.

The overall point here is that what makes an ideal-typical analysis,methodologically speaking, is how the scholar uses the ideal-type(s) inquestion. Because they are rooted in value commitments, this is howideal-types should be used, even if neo-positivists insist on turning modelsinto engines for generating testable hypotheses; but by the same token,the results of a statistical study could be ideal-typified and used as expla-natory instruments in precisely the way that I have sketched here, andthere would be no problem whatsoever as long as everyone concernedacknowledged that there were two different epistemic interests at playhere, and hence two different kinds of scholarly knowing being produced.The point is not to get the methodology “right”; the point is to beconsistent in the execution of a methodology, and not to mistake merequestions of technique or form for the more important questions ofepistemic status. An ideal-type is simply not a candidate for a determina-tion of valid/invalid or true/false; the appropriate scholarly verdict isinsightful/not insightful or explanatorily useful/explanatorily useless inthis instance. While there is a broader ethical verdict we might renderabout those ideal-types that we find morally unacceptable because wedo not share the value commitments involved, this is a verdict that takesplace outside of the domain of scholarly debate. Which is not to say thatthe moral judgment is less important, only to say that it is different.

Misreading Weber

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of his academic writing,40 Weber’snotion of the ideal-type was invented to resolve certain problems of


knowledge that emerged in the neo-Kantian debates of the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries in German academic circles.Instead of grounding knowledge of the social world on a purely logicalset of distinctions, or on a foundational grasp of any set of basic socialfacts or essential elements,41 Weber grounds his accounts in the kind of“radicalized subjectivity”42 produced by logically elaborating one’s cul-turally specific value commitments into ideal-types. Concrete socialobjects and entities are made available for analysis by being apprehendedthrough and contrasted with various ideal-types; this reveals the historicalspecificity of each individual instance at the same time as it contributes tothe existing stock of ideal-types that have proven useful. The ideal-typicalcharacter of scholarly knowledge also ensures that no one will mistakea scholarly claim for anything other than what it is: an effort tomake senseof a situation in light of a contemporary set of value commitments, and toanswer the question of what things might look like from a certain point ofview. If there is a specific contribution to political and social life thatscholarship can make, it is in making explicit what various value commit-ments point to and imply, and thus advancing a general debate aboutthose value commitments. Scholarship, understood in this way, providesno final answers, only better questions.

Unfortunately, most Anglophone scholars do not share this view ofWeber’s position. Instead, Weber is invoked to justify something verydifferent: a kind of “value neutrality” that underpins the claim of scholarsand scholarship to possess a knowledge superior to that of the practicalpolitician. This is in many ways the polar opposite of Weber’s project,since superior scholarly knowledge would seek not to leave room forpolitical decision and commitment, but instead to replace politics withscholarly calculation. How did this view of Weber become so entrenched?

The answer involves the distinctively liberal context of scholarship, andof social-scientific scholarship in particular, in the United States.43 Thisliberal context was and is less about any specifically partisan stance oncontentious issues, andmore about the idea that a scientific approach canput political controversies to rest. Such a commitment was especiallyprominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when thediscipline – along with other social-scientific disciplines like economics –was first being organized in the United States as a way to comment onsocial problems without getting wrapped up in political controversies.“Social scientists could offer counsel not in the guise of wise, interestedelites but as mere mouthpieces for a disembodied science. They coulddisarm suspicions that their advice was self-interested by intoning thephrase scientific method.”44 The commitment to “science” served as a wayto separate social scientists from their object of study, but somewhat


ironically, did so in order to promote political change through the appli-cation of scientific principles to social life.

Social science in many of its dimensions began as a reform movement. Lackingpolitical authority, it sought purchase in the authority of knowledge which in turnled to specialization, differentiation, and gravitation toward the university toensure its claim to science.45

This is a distinctly liberal position, wherein the proper application ofscientific reason can claim political authority by separating itself frompolitics per se. Reason, not power-laden struggle, was to be the arbiter ofpolitical decisions, and the arbitrariness of actual social and political lifecould be brought to order in a scientific manner.46 This commitment isubiquitous in calls to update the study of politics in the early part of thetwentieth century, including calls for a “positive” approach to interna-tional law that could ground progressive reforms, and virtually everypresidential address of the American Political Science Association(APSA) (organized in 1903).47 As Woodrow Wilson – who was presi-dent of the APSA before he went on to become president of the UnitedStates – put it in his presidential address of 1910, the task of politicalscience was to articulate the common rational interest that underlayparticular controversies, “not a mere task of compromise and makeshiftaccommodation, but a task of genuine and lasting adjustment, synth-esis, coordination, harmony, and union of parts.”48 According to thisconception, science and reason could contribute to political reform byputting politics to rest, in favor of progressive and technocraticcertainties.

In this context, and given the many other issues with early Webertranslations into English,49 it is not surprising that Weber was misreadas supporting this position. His claims about the autonomy of scholar-ship from politics, although intended in the original to prevent politicalactors from claiming the mantle and legitimation of scholarly knowl-edge for their own projects, thus became added into a campaign toelevate properly “scientific” scholarship over the knowledge andexperience of practical politicians. The politician doing the bidding of“scientific” scholarship would be quite far from someone actingaccording to Weber’s “ethic of responsibility,” since any consequencesthat her or his actions produced could be explained away as “scientifi-cally” justified. And that in turn would result in the exact opposite ofWeber’s goal of limiting scholarly knowledge so as to make room forpractical politics. Restoring ideal-typification to its properly centralplace in Weber’s thinking is the first step toward a recovery ofWeber’s actual project.


Notes

1. Wissenschaft als Beruf, usually translated “Science as a Vocation.” But theGerman term Wissenschaft has a much wider sphere of application than theEnglish term “science” does, such that Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences ofthe spirit,” a.k.a. the “human sciences”) is a perfectly ordinary Germanterm that avoids much of the debate about whether the “humanities” arereally “sciences.” Since distinctions between forms of science are not myconcern in this essay, here I choose the more expansive term “scholarship” asa translation of Wissenschaft. Other purposes may necessitate other choices.

2. Weber, Wissenschaft Als Beruf • Politik Als Beruf, 14. All translations fromWeber’s writings are my own unless otherwise noted.

3. Ibid., 12.4. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Sexism in original.5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, xxx.6. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, 27–28.7. This section of this chapter draws on Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in

International Relations, chapter 5, and on Jackson, “Critical Humanism:Theory, Methodology, and Battlestar Galactica.”

8. Aronovitch, “Interpreting Weber’s Ideal-Types,” 356–57.9. Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ Sozialwissenschaftlicher Und Sozialpolitischer

Erkenntnis,” 191.10. Ibid., 192–93.11. Ibid., 180.12. Ibid., 161.13. Compare Wittgenstein: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

Tractatus 1.1.14. The Political System, 53.15. As Klimova (“Weber’s Interpretive Project and the Practical Failure of

Meaningful Action”) correctly points out, especially if there is disagreementabout just what value commitments are or should be (a practical-moraldisagreement) or how we ought to formalize them (a scholarlydisagreement), we can’t use ideal-types to argue that an actor ought to haveacted differently in a given situation in order to have correctly enacted her orhis value commitments. “You’re doing it wrong” is a statement that onlymakes sense in the context of relatively settled value commitments and theirrelatively formalized instantiations. Hence the critical potential of an ideal-type is sharply limited, precisely inasmuch as an ideal-type gives up the“otherworldly” basis on which it might be useful for a normative critique ofexisting arrangements.

16. Drysdale, “Weber on Objectivity: Advocate or Critic?,” 43–44; Gunnell,“The Paradox of Social Science: Weber, Winch, and Wittgenstein,” 67–68.

17. In this sense, ideal-types function much like Kantian “intuitions” do, sincethey serve subsequent empirical investigation in an a priori way, and makeavailable particular apprehensions of empirical actuality. But the fact thatideal-types vary over time as cultural values change makes them, in someways, more like the “historical a priori” Foucault discusses in The Archaeologyof Knowledge.


18. Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ Sozialwissenschaftlicher Und SozialpolitischerErkenntnis,” 192.

19. Duvall, “Ideal Types.”20. Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life, 156–59; Joas, The Creativity of

Action, 162–63.21. On Duhem’s conventionalism as a way of making sense of consensus on the

social sciences, see Chernoff, Explanation and Progress in Security Studies,253–54.

22. Reconstruction in Philosophy, 163.23. Among other things, this point is what differentiates an ideal-type from a real-

but-undetectable causal power or tendency/disposition – and also clarifies whyan ideal-type need not be independently vetted in a lab orwith a transcendentalargument. A purely instrumental construct is just that – purely instrumental –so we can’t actually know anything about it. Instead, we use it to improve ourknowing about something else, something actual in the world.

24. But Plato – and Aquinas –were wrong that this necessarily suggests somethingabout the transcendent reality of those general concepts (Abbott,“Transcending General Linear Reality”). There need not be an ideal Formof a chair for us to identify actual chairs; instead, the identification of chairsrelies on the “family resemblances” between different objects, with the crispboundaries between “chair” and “not-chair” largely a matter of socialconvention (Ben-Menahem, “Explanation and Description”; Shotter, “‘NowI Can Go On’”).

25. As in Tilly, “International Communities, Secure or Otherwise.”26. Steinmetz, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences.27. Derman, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought, 144.28. Weber did not live long enough to produce a final, definitive version of

Economy and Society. It is unclear whether he intended to revise theremainder of the book along the lines of the parts he started to rework in1919; those revisions removed “much of the historical material that informedthe construction of his [ideal-typical] models” and presented them “in amoreabstract fashion,” Ibid., 154–55.

29. Shilliam, “Morgenthau in Context” nicely shows howWeber conceptualizedpolitical authority in light of a notion of the “backwardness” of Germany atthe time. But Shilliam further suggests that this is a problem because ituniversalizes the liberal standard against which Germany is implicitlycompared, which I think is a misreading of Weber’s ideal-types as thoughthey were normative ideals.

30. The ambiguity is important: Shotter,Cultural Politics of Everyday Life, 24–26.31. It matters not one iota how we arrive at those logically general principles.

There are relatively formal and statistical techniques, like QCA or factoranalysis or the inventory of linguistic/argumentative moves, that cangenerate a typology; there are also less formal operations and procedureslike “textual ethnography” (as in Jackson, “Making Sense of Making Sense”)that can do the same. It doesn’t matter, because the worth of an ideal-type hasnothing whatsoever to do with how it was generated and whether it has anyempirical generality to it.


32. Contra Aronovitch, “Interpreting Weber’s Ideal-Types,” 365.33. Elias, The Civilizing Process.34. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.35. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.36. InWeber, “Kritische Studien AufDemGebiet DerKulturwissenschaftlichen

Logik.”37. Theory of International Politics. Not everyone reads Waltz this way, of course;

in fact, most people in the field seem to think of Waltz as a hypothesis testermaking empirically general falsifiable claims about balancing behavior, as inVasquez, The Power of Power Politics. To the contrary, I would argue thatWaltz’s own “theory of theory” aligns himmore closely withWeber than withPopper (Wæver, “Waltz’s Theory of Theory”; Goddard and Nexon,“Paradigm Lost?”).

38. Think here of Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics as anideal-type of threat perception.

39. Or the ritualistic way that new popes traditionally deal with the entrenchedbureaucracy of the Curia, upended by Francis I’s (contingently-causal)declaration that members of the Curia would stay in their posts“provisionally” instead of being reappointed as a matter of course (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/the-pope/9936409/Pope-Francis-tells-Vatican-to-prepare-for-change.html). Agency – in this case, the new pope’s agency –arises in the gaps and tensions between causal factors that we analysts identifyideal-typically.

40. Derman, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought, 140.41. On this specific point, see my debate in Qualitative & Multi-method Research

with Ned Lebow about the relative priority of philosophical ontology(methodology) and scientific ontology (theory) when it comes toelucidating the concept of causation. Lebow argues that “[r]easoningbackwards from subject to method . . . is not only justifiable, but the onlyreasonable way to proceed” (“Reply to My Critics,” 16). I argue that onecannot ground knowledge on a grasp of the subject, precisely because thatleaves the epistemic status of that initial grasping unclear. We each readWeber as supporting our position.

42. Hennis, Max Weber, 124.43. I make this argument in greater detail in Jackson, “Rationalizing Realpolitik:

U.S. International Relations as a Liberal Field.”44. Porter, “The Death of the Object: Fin de Siècle Philosophy of Physics,” 148.45. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, 23.46. Ross, “Modernist Social Science in the Land of the New/Old,” 181.47. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy, 104–07.48. Wilson, “The Law and the Facts,” 6.49. Weber’s early translators, especially Talcott Parsons, produced translations

of Weber’s writings that often made him appear to be arguing positionsdirectly opposed to the positions he was actually arguing. Thus we haveversions of Weber’s “Objectivity” essay that make Weber out to be anadvocate of the very kind of classical objectivity that he is questioning andreplacing in the piece, and versions of Weber’s account of social action that


remove the individual from the centerpiece of the analysis, or that treat theindividual as a pre-social anchor for the analysis – directly contrary toWeber’s position. On these creative misunderstandings and appropriations,see Erdelyi, Max Weber in Amerika and Derman, Max Weber in Politics andSocial Thought, 167–75.

References

Abbott, Andrew. “Transcending General Linear Reality.” Sociological Theory 6,Fall (1988): 169–86.

Aronovitch, Hilliard. “Interpreting Weber’s Ideal-Types.” Philosophy of the SocialSciences 42, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 356–69. doi:10.1177/0048393111408779.

Ben-Menahem, Yemima. “Explanation and Description: Wittgenstein onConvention.” Synthese 115, no. 1 (April 1, 1998): 99–130. doi:10.1023/A:1005016201213.

Derman, Joshua. Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma toCanonization. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Dewey, John.Reconstruction in Philosophy. NewYork: Kessinger Publishing, LLC,1920.

Drysdale, John. “Weber on Objectivity: Advocate or Critic?” In Max Weber’s“Objectivity” Reconsidered, edited by Laurence H. McFalls, 31–57.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Duvall, Raymond. “Ideal Types.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of International PoliticalEconomy, edited by R. J. Barry Jones, 703–04. London: Routledge, 2001.

Easton, David. The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science.New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. 2nd edi-tion. Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

Erdelyi, A. Max Weber in Amerika. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1992.Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger.

Chicago: Open Court, 2000.Goddard, Stacie E. and Daniel H. Nexon. “Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory

of International Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1(2005): 9–61.

Gunnell, John G. The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an AmericanVocation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

“The Paradox of Social Science: Weber, Winch, and Wittgenstein.” In MaxWeber’s “Objectivity” Reconsidered, edited by Laurence H. McFalls, 58–88.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Hennis,W.MaxWeber: Essays in Reconstruction. London: Allen andUnwin, 1988.Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations.

London: Routledge, 2011.“Critical Humanism: Theory, Methodology, and Battlestar Galactica.”In Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, edited by NicholasJ. Kiersey and Iver B. Neumann, 18–36. Routledge, 2013.


“Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the DoubleHermeneutic.” In Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods andthe Interpretive Turn, edited by Dvora Yanow and Peri Schwartz-Shea,264–80. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006.

“Rationalizing Realpolitik: U.S. International Relations as a Liberal Field.”In Professors and Their Politics, edited by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons,267–90. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Jervis, Robert. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1976.

Joas, Hans. The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen

W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.Klimova, Sveta. “Weber’s Interpretive Project and the Practical Failure of

Meaningful Action.” European Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 2 (May 1,2012): 261–78. doi:10.1177/1368431011423599.

Lebow, Richard Ned. “Reply to My Critics.” Qualitative and Multi-methodResearch 12, no. 2 (2014): 16–19.

McAdam, Douglas, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. Dynamics of Contention.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Morgenthau, Hans J. Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1946.

Porter, Theodore M. “The Death of the Object: Fin de Siècle Philosophy ofPhysics.” In Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930, edited byDorothy Ross, 128–51. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1994.

Ross, Dorothy, ed. “Modernist Social Science in the Land of the New/Old.”In Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930, 171–89.Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Schmidt, Brian C. The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History ofInternational Relations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Shilliam, Robbie. “Morgenthau in Context: German Backwardness, GermanIntellectuals and the Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project.” European Journal ofInternational Relations 13, no. 3 (September 1, 2007): 299–327. doi:10.1177/1354066107080124.

Shotter, John. Cultural Politics of Everyday Life. Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 1993.

“‘Now I Can Go On’: Wittgenstein and Our Embodied Embeddedness in the‘Hurly-Burly’ of Life.” Human Studies 19, no. 4 (1996): 385–407.

Steinmetz, George, ed. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism andIts Epistemological Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Tilly, Charles. “International Communities, Secure or Otherwise.” In SecurityCommunities, edited by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, 397–412.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Vasquez, John A. The Power of Power Politics: From Classical Realism toNeotraditionalism. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Wæver, Ole. “Waltz’s Theory of Theory.” International Relations 23, no. 2 (2009):201–22.


Waltz, Kenneth N. Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill,1979.

Weber, Max. “Die ‘Objektivität’ Sozialwissenschaftlicher Und SozialpolitischerErkenntnis.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze Zur Wissenschaftslehre, edited byElizabeth Flitner, 146–214. Potsdam: Internet-Ausgabe, www.uni-potsdam.de/u/paed/Flitner/Flitner/Weber/, 1999.

“Kritische Studien Auf Dem Gebiet Der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik.”In Gesammelte Aufsätze Zur Wissenschaftslehre, edited by Elizabeth Flitner,215–90. Potsdam: Internet-Ausgabe, www.uni-potsdam.de/u/paed/Flitner/Flitner/Weber/, 1999.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by S. Kalberg. LosAngeles, CA: Roxbury, 2002.

Wissenschaft Als Beruf • Politik Als Beruf. Edited by W. J. Mommsen andW. Schluchter. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1994.

Wilson, Woodrow. “The Law and the Facts: Presidential Address, SeventhAnnual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.”The American Political Science Review 5, no. 1 (February 1911): 1–11.


5 Max Weber’s Power

Stefano Guzzini

In his famous studyOn Power, Bertrand de Jouvenel analysed the increas-ing scope of power inWestern societies. In a liberal vein close to BenjaminConstant, he traced how government has widened and encroached intospheres of the polity/society previously outside its reach.1 In this account,the very phenomenon of power is intrinsically linked to the definition ofa modern polity, its social order. Power stands for the sphere of govern-ment, not just its executive or the political system, while the politicalenterprise is the fight both for “taking power” and for defining its limits.Others, pushing this position further, state that the fight for power isubiquitous and such ubiquity, in turn, derives either from human natureor, in a more Hobbesian vision, from fear and scarcity. In other words, inmodern political theory, and in varying versions, the concept of power isconnected to our very understanding of many things political: the humanas a political being, the origins of political action, the political aim of orderand security from fear, and the sphere of government. With this in mind,it is not too far-fetched to state that power is at the heart of, or evendefines, much of modern political theory, at least in the tradition fromMachiavelli to Foucault.

And yet at the same time, Robert Dahl could write and claim that littlesystematic work on power had been done before the 1950s.2 Granted, thebehavioural moment was not exactly immune to grandiose statementsabout its scientific superiority. One could look back and see this as justanother embarrassing hyperbole, by now graciously forgotten. However,there is a sense in which Dahl was justified. Dahl defines power as gettingan actor to do something which he/she would not have otherwise done.It is an explicitly causal concept in which power becomes the centralvariable for understanding outcomes of social interaction. This concep-tion of power is surely connected to the aforementioned facets of power inpolitical theory. It derives from the question, as Dahl’s famous book putsit: Who Governs? Yet, in typical behaviouralist vein, it tries to assess thatlocus of power by a carefully conceived analysis of something that isempirically accessible. Power is understood through the study of the

97

outcome of (government) decisions, that is, by analysing which (public)actors prevailed in different policy domains. By aggregating the winners inthese decisions, we would finally be able to address the conundrum of“who governs.” As so often with such operational choices, however, thisrestricted focus guaranteed a better controlled empirical analysis only atthe price of increasingly passing over why modern political theory wasinterested in power in the first place (although more by Dahl’s followersthan by himself). In a sense, it works by taking for granted what needs tobe explained: the role of government in producing social order, or, moregenerally, the origins of order. Power becomes reduced to a technicalissue for institutional engineering.

Hence, despite being about “government” and about power for under-standing the nature of our polities, the two approaches do not share thesame domain: whereas Jouvenel looked for the role of power as a proxy forunderstanding order in our society, Dahl used power in an individualist(and causal) theory of action to which the understanding of ‘who governs’was reduced. While Jouvenel saw power as the explanandum of politicalanalysis in the domain of political theory, Dahl starts from there but endsup using it as its central variable in the domain of explanatory theory.The logic of power analysis in the domain of political theory, asI understand it here, is to think about the nature of the polity in whichquestions of the organisation of (organised) violence and of the commongood, as well as questions of freedom, are paramount. It is where powerstands for government or governance and political order, as well aspersonal autonomy. The aim of knowledge is theoretical/philosophicaland constitutive. In contrast, the logic in the domain of explanatorytheory is to think power in terms of a theory of action mainly anda theory of domination subsequently: “power to” encompasses “powerover.” Here, power is investigated for the explanation of behaviour andthe outcomes of social action. It refers to agency, influence, or prevalence,if not cause. The aim of knowledge is explanatory and instrumental.

The present chapter will look at Max Weber, one of the foundingfathers of contemporary power analysis, because he has played a pivotalrole in this story. He comes at the end of a time when the domains werenot yet so clearly distinguished, when the different logics had not yetdeveloped to such an advanced degree. Indeed, he is a motor behind theseparation and specialisation, being the inspiration of many power defini-tions afterwards, Dahl’s not the least. Hence, it sometimes seems as if thepractitioners of the two domains could still meet in Weber, as it were.

This chapter will take a stance in the reception ofWeber that tries to seehim mainly as a forerunner of an empirical social science and a causalconception of power as in the Dahlian tradition just mentioned. It will

98 Stefano Guzzini

argue and confirm Raymond Aron’s take that, to the contrary, his socialscience is profoundly imbued with philosophical aims: “This interpreta-tion of the relation between science and politics leads to a certain philo-sophy which at the time was not yet called ‘existential[ist],’ but whichbelongs to this current so named today.”3 Hence, rather than only seeinghis sociology as a way to demarcate the specificity of the social investiga-tion from both normative theory and positivism – which it certainly did –

the following chapter follows those who see his methodological andsociological decisions as part of a political and ethical endeavour,4

althoughmy take will be less critical than, for instance, RaymondAron’s.5

The following will disentangle the most important components for theunderstanding of power and domination/rule/authority. I see at least fouraxes in his theory in which power plays a crucial role. First, Weber’spolitical ontology ultimately ties power to the very definition of politicsand a struggle for existence. Then, his political sociology concentrates ona subcategory of power,Herrschaft, in its attempt to catch the specificity ofa hierarchical order in modern bureaucratic societies. Third, the inevita-ble struggle for power in politics also means that his practical ethics(praxeology) must at least include a form of Machiavellism, Weber’s bynow famous “ethic of responsibility.” Finally, his theory of world historyderives from the unchangeable “polytheism” of value systems and theinevitability of (great) power politics in international affairs, in whichorder is precarious in the ever returning “struggle of the gods.” At thisstage, andwith its almost existentialist vein, it becomes clearer thatWebernever left the domain of political theory from which we started. As such,the main aim of this chapter is to invite power analysis to return to a stagein which the two domains have been thought in parallel and not to reduceit to either side.6

Power and Weber’s Political Ontology ofExistential Struggle

Classical political theory is concerned with the definition of the “good”polity and “good” statesmanship. Until now, neo-Aristotelian politicaltheory (and not only) is organised around the idea of a common good thatneeds to be defined and institutionally anchored. Besides this lineage, themodern conception of politics also includes a Machiavellian traditionbased on the reason of state. Indeed, the eighteenth century experiencedan increasing reduction towards politics as Machtkunst (approx. the art/craft of power/governing).7 Weber is in this latter lineage. In his view,sociology has to be empirical, as opposed to legal or normative.Therefore, for him, it makes no sense to define the content of politics or

Max Weber’s Power 99

define the state through its purpose. Empirically, it can have an unlimitednumber of purposes, be a predatory state (Raubstaat), a welfare state,Rechtsstaat, or a culture state, for instance.8 Instead, their means alonecan define the state and politics.9

Defining politics through its organisation and in terms of its specificmeans is very consequential for his theory. This innocent-looking move,justified by a scientific necessity to provide a non-normative science andto cut out distinctive concepts for analysis, generates his theory’s focus onviolence, therefore struggle and selection or stratification in social orders.Whatever his personal or philosophical preferences, whatever his personalvision of a better government (and his political writings are filled withreform proposals), his sociological analysis will look for the defining andhence specific features of his central concepts, and this moves the possi-bility of physical violence (Gewaltsamkeit) into the centre of politics. Forthe threat or actual use of violence is that phenomenon which sets politicsaside from economics, law, or other spheres of social relations.10 In hislecture “Politics as a Vocation,” he varies this theme by saying that thespecific means of politics is power (which seems not to work with thedefinition that follows), behind which stands the possibility of physicalviolence. In a further escalation of this argument (also not found in hisopus magnum), he even writes that politics has specific tasks which canultimately be resolved only through violence (Gewalt).11

On the basis of the central role of the possibility of physical violence,Weber ties a conceptual package, indeed circle, around struggle-power-politics where one definition leads into the other. Power (Macht) isdefined as “any chance within a social relation to impose one’s will alsoagainst the resistance of others, independently of what gives rise to thischance.”12 Struggle (Kampf) is defined in a very similar manner to power:“A social relation should be called struggle, if action is pursued with thepurpose to impose one’s own will against the resistance of social partneror partners.” He distinguishes between violent and peaceful struggles(without physical violence), then called “competition.” Struggles aboutlife (or survival) chances, which are not conscious or intentionally con-ducted, are called selection (Auslese), either social (people) or biological(survival of genes).13 Now, if power and violence are connected to thevery definition of politics, then politics is fundamentally defined by strug-gle, be it conscious fight (and violence as ultima ratio) or the perennial andinevitable selective differentiation of life chances: “Politik ist: Kampf.”14

The concept of power functions as the crucial link between these two.The little definitional move to understand politics in terms of means

hence leads to remarkable consequences: nothing less than an ontology ofpolitics as an existential struggle. This raises the question whether it is the

100 Stefano Guzzini

little definitional move that is the driving part, or whether Weber hasa political ontology which requires him to make these definitional moves.In his approach to concepts, the two are connected. It is true that Weberhas a relatively nominalist take in his choice of concepts. To some extent,concepts, or indeed “ideal types,” are but heuristic devices whose useful-ness can only be judged in their use itself within the analysis thusconceived.15 If they work, we carry on; if not, we change. This taxonomicapproach is also a standard procedure within positivism. At the sametime, however, such concepts are themselves a result of this inductive-deductive analysis, and hence cannot be purely devised in pragmaticterms. The social theory itself and the empirical analyses it informsprovide the meaning-context within which concept formation can takeplace. SinceWeber has an approach deeply rooted in historical sociology,where interpretation is based on the change in historical phenomena,concept formation, in turn, must be informed by those results.Concepts are not just there to catch or give meaning; in a sense, humanhistory gives meaning to them.

It is hence not so surprising when the otherwise very WeberianRaymond Aron is highly sceptical of what he perceives as a strong anda priori metaphysical commitment – partly Social Darwinian, partlyNietzschean – in this emphasis on existential struggle, a commitmentthat Aron would find not sufficiently empirically grounded in his ownreading of history.16 As we will see later, there are some good reasons forsharing this suspicion.

Causality and Herrschaft: Weber’s Political Sociology

The concept of power and specifically the sub-concept of domination/rule (Herrschaft) is crucial for Weber in his assessment of the modernstate. In return, the modern state provides the background against whichpower and domination/rule are defined. More specifically, power is partof a long definitional move which starts from conceptualising (1) socialaction as human relation, then (2) the origins of patterned social actions(customs, habit, convention, and norms), (3) the inevitable struggle(Kampf) and hierarchical differentiation in the competition for lifechances in social relations, (4) the emergence of society versus commu-nity (Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft) within which (5) power and domina-tion/rule are crucial for defining the specifically political moment: (6) inamodern state, politics is defined by its relationship to physical constraintor violence as ultima ratio, a violence which, to the extent it is consented to(is legitimate), has become increasingly monopolised by the rationallylegitimised political system.17 As mentioned before, in Weber’s scheme,


power is intrinsically related to the definition of “politics,” where theinevitable differentiation of life chances (or: “selection,” Auslese) in anysocial order is ultimately connected to the threat or use of physicalviolence and the competition to take control of it.

Yet, Weber is not much interested in “power” itself when he moves tohis social theory. It is not distinctive enough as an analytical category forempirical research. He calls it amorphous, since all imaginable qualities ofa human action and all possible situational constellations can provide thischance to impose one’s will.18Weber prefers to look only at a subcategoryof the concept of power, domination/rule/authority (Herrschaft), which hedefines as the fact that “an expressed will (‘order/command’) of thedominating actors intends to influence the action of the subordinatesand actually influences them in a way such that the latter act . . . as ifthey had turned the content of the command, for its own sake, intoa maxim of their action (‘obedience’).”19

As we will see in this section, this move from power to Herrschaft isinformed by the attempt to turn a political theory of power into a theory ofaction, where domination plays an important role as cause. The logic ofthe domain of explanatory theory takes over. Yet, or so I will argue,Weberrecognises the arbitrariness of his conceptual decisions. His move tradeson normative assumptions coming from elsewhere and eventually makessense only in a theory of domination that is informed by a structural viewof society and aims at a macro-historical theory. Therefore, delimiting hisapproach just to a causal theory of action, as Dahl and the communitypower debate did, ultimately amounts to a theoretical reduction.

The Turn to Causality and a Theory of Action in the Definitionof Herrschaft

Weber is aware and wary of the ubiquitous nature of power andHerrschaft. As so often in his sociology (e.g., in his ideal types), he there-fore decides to highlight one particular factor which, according to him,summarises the main facet of the phenomenon. For him, this is autoritäreBefehlsgewalt (authoritarian competence and effect of command). But theintellectual road to this core is quite tortuous.

He thinks aboutHerrschaft in a clear “causal chain” (Kausalkette) fromA affecting B. But that chain is only a necessary and not a sufficientcondition to constitute an incident of Herrschaft. Weber spends sometime distinguishing between two forms of Herrschaft, one resulting froma specific constellation of interests (as in an oligopolistic or monopolisticmarket) and another generated by authority (the competency to imposeorder accompanied by a duty to obey).20 And although he gives a series of

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examples of how power permeates exchange relations of all sorts, heargues for excluding this from his final and narrower definition ofHerrschaft. The crucial difference between these two types, so he insists,is that whatever power there is in a relation of exchange, this is done on thebasis of interest and hence is voluntary (freiwillig). Instead, authorityrelations are such where the change of behaviour is ultimately related toa command obeyed for its own sake, independent of any concern withinterests on either side of the power relation.

Obviously, Weber concedes, market relations can turn into relations ofauthority, but they are a form of Herrschaft only when there isa command–obedience relation, preferably one which is formalised andinstitutionalised (which, given his understanding of the market, seemsalmost a contradiction in terms). Obviously, as he says, such Herrschaftbased on exchange can be experienced as far more oppressing, preciselyfor its irregular character (and its horizontal and diffuse character, onecould add). Nevertheless, for reasons of conceptual clarity, Weber dis-cards this in the actual analysis of Herrschaft. He retains only those socialrelations where the command can count on being obeyed.Dahl’s researchprogramme has been set on track here.

The Underlying Assumptions of Weber’s Definition of Herrschaft

It is a truly remarkable move for a sociologist to consciously neglect thoseparts of power relations that are more diffuse and more horizontalbecause they are connected to exchange relations whose asymmetriesderive from constellations of interests. Insisting that exchange relationsbe removed from these concerns has a distinct liberal, almost libertariantouch to it which itself remains, however, unreflected on. For even if wethink of interest formation as something always including a component of“free will,” surely we must be interested in how much that is or, to speakwith the more radical approaches, how it comes about: autonomy isformal only if social exchange relations are not embedded into the under-standing of rule.

Not only is the theoretical reflection neglected, Weber’s assump-tions might appear today “un-sociological,” as it were. Weber pro-poses a strict demarcation between a sphere of exchange (mainly theeconomy) and a sphere of domination (politics), surely ideal-typical ashe would say (and he does allow for many mixed cases or rathermutual spill overs). Typical for his time, a sociology interested inmodernisation looks at the rationalising processes, including the emer-gence of a series of autonomous sub-systems in society, such as law,politics, and economics. And yet, for someone who insists that the


actual empirical and not the formal legal aspects are decisive, it seemsalmost odd to analyse the social order only by decomposing it and notby focusing on the links, or trying to piece the spheres together againinto a “society.” Or, at least, his conceptualisation excludes that it isthe idea of power or Herrschaft which provides the overarching ele-ment for such a general theory of society. For his conceptualisationintrinsically connects politics not just to power, but more specificallyto relations of domination (Herrschaftsverhältnisse), thereby “extract-ing” power from the other social spheres and cementing this concep-tual division of social spheres.21

Again, it seems as if the (anti-Marxist) lawyer took the upper hand inthis conceptualisation. It is not unusual that lawyers who turn social andpolitical theorists are particularly sensitive to the idea of violence beingconnected to power.Moving from law as a normative system to the actualapplication of law, they approach politics in a negative way, as that whichis not law and yet necessary to it. And then, consequently, power getsconnected to the subsystem of politics only (as the base of, and concomi-tantly possible exception to, the rule of law), as Carl Schmitt or NiklasLuhmann show.22 Still, at least today, it may no longer be so self-evidentto proceed this way, when many sociological observers see social spheresmerging and redefining, not least in “political economy,” which Weberpurported to defend at his time.

Herrschaft in Weber’s Wider Social Theory and Macro-History

After the first section on his ontological assumptions, we have seen howthe logic of the explanatory social science domain intrudes into Weber’sanalysis of Herrschaft. The need to cut concepts to operationalisable sizeand the shift towards a causal theory are well present, precursor to Dahl’sand most of the mainstream approaches today. Here, the logic of theexplanatory domain takes over. The analytical choices are driven from hispolitical ontology, but remain implicit. Consequently the underlyingliberal political theory is not sufficiently acknowledged and reflected onor justified. Similarly, it trades on a pre-given understanding of a societydivided into different social spheres, where power becomes attached toone and one only, the political one – again an assumption that is notnecessary for the mere sake of conceptual pragmatism and value-neutralempirical analysis. The present subsection will go a step further. It willargue thatWeber’s theory of action, although individualistic and causal ina way which fits the pluralist power conception, cannot be divorced froma wider social theory and macro-history, which sits more uneasily with it.Again, its aim is to show that Weber’s concept of Macht may be akin to

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causal analysis and to a Dahlian path, which his theory of Herrschafthowever eludes.

The need to embed Weber’s definition of power and domination intosuch wider contexts appears already in his early definitional moves aboutHerrschaft. Weber wants to make sure that purely formal entitlements arenot necessarily misread as power or Herrschaft. In other words, even if,formally speaking, one actor has the means to make the other changeaction, and hence has power in some sense, this does not necessarily implyHerrschaft. Hementions an example of workers who could be seen to holdpower over their employers, since they are entitled to a paycheque, orindeed to legal support against the employers should they not pay. Butthen, rather than seeing this as an asymmetric power relation, Weberdefines this as an asymmetric social exchange, not Herrschaft.23

The same move, which oddly excludes relations of exchange fromHerrschaft, also excludes a vision where contracts or legal norms are tobe checked for their actual status in social hierarchy. He explicitly rejectsa definition of Herrschaft that would allow including just any form ofinfluence, and whose concentration on the interaction obscures themore general social setting in which it occurs.

This wider social context appears in all its force when wemove towardshis basic explanatory puzzle, which is not to be found in the explanation ofindividual outcomes, as most present-day theories of action would haveit, but in a macro-history of social order. This contextualises his analysisof power and Herrschaft into the wider general purposes of his wholetheory, namely, his understanding of legitimacy and historical change.The starting point for his specification of power asHerrschaft is, as alwaysin Weber, the individual understanding of actors and how this feeds intothe subjectively driven reproduction (or change) of social order. Hedistinguishes famously between four types of social action: instrumental-rational, value rational, affectional, and traditional. From there derive thedifferent causes for accepting Herrschaft: personal advantage and fear,duty and conviction, or habit.24 Yet such motives for acceptingHerrschaftare not enough to ensure a stable social order. This is provided by thebelief in its legitimacy (Legitimitätsglaube). Referring back to his typologyof social action, legitimacy can then derive from rationality (legal dom-ination), tradition (traditional domination), or charisma, which providethe three pure types of legitimate domination. The corresponding super-ordinate persons are the bureaucratic superior, the master (Herr), and theleader (Führer).25 Clearly, the moment legitimacy becomes central in theanalysis, and habit is acknowledged for inducing norm-following beha-viour, the focus shifts from the micro-sociological dyadic A–B relation-ship to a macro-sociological study of social practices and order.


Moreover, when he declares “power” not to be such a useful concept,it is not only for its almost ubiquitous (and hence trivial) status, but alsofor the role it plays in its wider theory. Coming back to his approach toconcept formation: concepts are “useful” within the theory in whichthey are embedded, and those theories, in turn, are driven by cognitiveinterests that cannot be justified through the theories themselves.26 So,one needs to start from that cognitive interest. Weber’s overarchingcognitive interest is to retrace the specificity and yet potential univers-ality of Western modernisation, which he sees not just as a mere ques-tion for sociology, but as the all-encompassing puzzle for the socialsciences. He retraces the changes such modernisation makes to eachand every sphere, indeed to their very genesis. Crucial in this respect isthe historical shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (see also its earlyplace in the logical chain, mentioned earlier) which sets the stage for theanalysis of all social spheres. In turn, those social spheres are investi-gated for their significance in that particular shift. When he studiesreligions, for instance, he does not intend to elucidate their “nature,”but looks at religions as conditions and consequences of certain types ofcollective action (Gemeinschaftshandeln).27

And so he does for Herrschaft. Since the differentiation of life chancesand the struggle for power are historically perennial (and hence trivial foran empirical sociology), the study of Herrschaft must be about the differ-ent types of command–consent relations which keep a political unittogether in the first place. Despite his insistence on the importance ofthe possibility of physical violence for defining politics, social order isusually not based on their actual use: custom, habit, convention, andindeed the legitimacy of rule are not only more frequent, but often alsomuch more efficient for ensuring order.28 Understanding why people“obey commands for the sake of it,” and not for some interest calculusis thus fundamentally significant.29

Hence, despite his methodological stance to understand societythrough the meaning given to social action by individuals, this sub-jective factor is but a means to the end of understanding macro-history. Weber is primarily interested in the changing forms of socialorder in world history, not individual autonomy, otherwise so impor-tant for the liberal political theorist. It is somewhat ironic that hisdefinition of power, which prominently features questions of personalwill and resistance, has become the very fundament in the communitypower debate, strongly focusing on the policy process, when thetheory of action was a merely preliminary component for Weber’sown macro-sociology in which Herrschaft plays an altogether differentand far more important role.

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Power, Political Action, and the Ethic of Responsibility:Weber’s Praxeology

Although in principle concentrating only on the means and not thecontent of government, Weber does have a substantial normative com-ponent in his analysis after all. It creeps in when he discusses successfulstatesmanship in the context of bureaucraticmodernisation. According tohim, such good statesmanship is threatened on two fronts. On the onehand, the very bureaucratic organisation, which makes government moreefficient and incomparablymore powerful, that verymodernisationwhichis part of the Western domination over the world, also selects leadershippersonnel according to criteria unsuitable for the political and not just theadministrative component of government. On the other hand, illusionaryconceptions about what politics is all about allow value-rational attitudesto intrude and engender perverse effects. It is those passages about thecentral role of the struggle for power and the need for an instrumentalrationality primarily based on the calculus of consequences which haveestablished Weber as a realist thinker within the IR community.

Weber is known for his hate-love relationship with modern bureau-cratic organisation, be it public administration or the modern capitalistfirm. There is no doubt that he believes rational organisation to be a mostcrucial component for understanding the way modern societies developand for understanding the political superiority of theWestern world in anage of imperialism. Yet this unprecedented power is only more dangerousif left in the wrong hands. For Weber clearly believes that technicalknowledge is insufficient for modern government.

Weber distinguishes between two types of agents in the modern firm orgovernment. One is the rank and file. Here, specialisation is an advantageand the low profile of the bureaucrat or accountant is necessary fora successful functioning of the organisation. Rank-and-file employeesare not supposed to contradict. If they disagree, they voicea disagreement, but ultimately it is their duty, indeed a question ofhonour, to obey the superior.30 This duty does not apply to the leadersof those organisations. There, this type of behaviour would be at bestuseless, and, with the existing concentration of power, harbour disaster.

Weber defines the politician as a person who has to access powerthrough the competition for power, not because of some special knowl-edge alone. Whereas the public servant (Beamte) has to stay outside ofpolitics, politicians have to face politics as a struggle for power in whichthey want to win, and if they do, be responsible for themselves and theiracts. Hiding behind the bureaucratic procedure only produces irrespon-sible and ultimately politically inappropriate behaviour. It allows


politicians to stay glued to their chairs: Weber is fond of quotingBismarck’s expression of Kleber, “glue(r)” for such people. More byimplication than explicit in Weber, it also divorces risk from personalresponsibility and hence also undermines a sense of moderation andprudence so crucial in much diplomacy (an argumentWeber uses againstmonarchs at another place).

It is the “specific means of the legitimate possibility of physical violence[legitime Gewaltsamkeit] in the hands of human associations [Verbände] inand for itself, which causes the particularities of all the ethical problems inpolitics.”31 If power is the inevitable means of politics and the ambition forpower the driving force of politics, if physical violence is the ultima ratio ofpolitics, then politicians cannot be judged according to the same criteriawe would judgemoral persons in their daily actions. The instinct for poweris necessarily part and parcel of the good politician.32 Weber stronglydefends an “ethic of responsibility” based on compromise and prudenceto an “ethic of pure convictions” which cannot really compromise and ishappy to fault the world for unwarranted consequences instead of theirown actions (or so he depicts this opposition). A pure reduction to eitherethic is a luxury domestic and world politics cannot afford.

It is perhaps worth noticing that Weber’s distinction takes place ina discussion of political practice and not in a section on anthropologicalassumptions or human nature. The ethic of responsibility is nota necessity for human relations when they are “at their purest.”The picture is more positive in its double sense. As we have seen earlier,power as related to violence is by his definition tied to political actiononly. Weber has many other types of social spheres, and respective socialactions, where physical violence plays a minor or no role. Only if thesocial aspects of human nature can be defined such that (1) all socialbehaviour can be reduced to politics and/or (2) the social unit reduced toits political component only, only then can one derive an anthropologicalassumption fromWeber’s position. Whatever Weber’s formulations hereand there in his scattered political writings, this simply does not fit hissociology.33 His praxeology stays hence quite closely related to thedomain of explanatory theory.

Power Politics and World History

But then where does Weber’s pessimism come from? Is he not known forhaving written about the “struggle of the gods”? Why would an observeras sympathetic as Aron be concerned about his Nietzschean and SocialDarwinian lineage?34 Their interest in international affairs is part of theanswer.

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Weber’s Theory of International Politics

One of the most interesting components of Weber’s analysis of power liesin his vision of international relations. That should come as a surprise. Fordisheartening it is again to see a famous thinker waiting until the end of hislife to write about international relations and missing the moment. In thedensely printed almost 950 pages of Economy and Society, the closest weget to a section on IR is the fragment on the evolution of the nation-state,sixteen pages long, the only section, which cuts off in the middle ofa sentence.35

His international analysis is nevertheless interesting for being lessstraightforward than his sociology would lead us to expect. After all,Weber’s definition of themodern state has been the demarcation criterionof the entire contemporary discipline of international relations. If themodern state holds the monopoly of legitimate means of violence, nosuch thing can exist above it, and hence politics inside and politics outsidecannot be the same. International relations remain stuck in a state ofnature, and a theory of international relations would cease to exist if thatdifference were overcome.36 Having defined the criterion for settinginternational relations apart, Aron is not convinced by Weber’s socialtheory, which seems to make so little out of it and hence imports unne-cessarily grim pictures of IR into domestic politics. Indeed, even Weber’svision of international relations, his “theory of power politics,” as Arondubs it, is ultimately a failure.37 What kind of a theory is it?

An IR-taught scholar would expect to haveWeber develop his theory of“power politics” simply out of the particular setting of the internationalwithout overarching authority, the opposite to themonopoly of legitimateviolence within the state. One just needs a bit of Hobbes, or so the storygoes, and then political “struggle” will inevitably lead to the permanentstate of (potential) war. Weber’s picture is, however, far more compli-cated. It includes by necessity an analysis of social classes and their link togovernment and a series of subjective understandings those leadingclasses may share. Those understandings are related, but not reducible,to power positions and perceptions. His vision is “inside-out” and clearlydoes not see international politics as different in kind from domesticpolitics.

Weber does not move to international relations from anarchy, theabsence of world government. Weber tends to see wars as an ultimaratio, but their actual outbreak as a consequence of the “structure ofsociety.”38 This society is not only defined in what we would callKantian terms, namely, through its domestic institutions, because thoseinstitutions, in turn, have been shaped by the possibility of war. In the


words of Charles Tilly, war makes states and states make wars.39 ForWeber, there is a clear link between the need to defend political units, theincreasingmonopolisation ofmeans of violence, and the rationalisation ofboth organisations and their legitimacy.With the parallel expansion of themarket, classical class structures are undermined, their competition in thelegitimacy for keeping means of violence reduced, the state reinforced.War and capitalismmake states, and then the power competition of statesallows the expansion of capitalism.40 It is the focus on the evolution ofstates which keeps domestic politics and IR together.

Weber’s approach to IR is hence a mercantilist historical sociology.The maximisation of power (internal or external) does not necessarilyfollow, however. There are several steps in his approach which a statemust go through before it ends up as a Machtstaat, and then beforesuch a Machtstaat is expansionist, and before that expansion thenheightens the risk of war. Power does not lead by necessity to powerpolitics.

Although Weber starts his section by saying that all political units areunits of violence, he immediately adds that such violence does not need tobecome expansionist and could stay “autonomistic.” Factors which caninfluence the actual behaviour are partly structural, such as a country’ssize, its geographic location, and its historical fortune (he mentionsSwitzerland’s road to neutrality, for instance). But among those, clearlymore important are social factors: much depends on whether the inher-ently expansionist forces of capitalism which give rise to imperialism areembedded in a social structure where no peaceful economic counter-forces exist. He argues that the more state-owned the internal productionis, the more those social groups will be empowered that could profit fromterritorial expansion.41

Besides these more objective factors (although not God-given orunchangeable), there are a series of more subjective factors which ulti-mately decide state behaviour, i.e., in the most important case, decidewhen a country, which is large enough, becomes aMachtstaat.42 For this,a state first needs to think of itself as aGrossmacht.Only if states think thatthey have a special responsibility and interest in worldwide political andeconomic affairs, only if they have a sense of vocation, of having aresponsibility and honour before history, do they become a Grossmacht.Even then, despite the necessary dynamics of power competition inpolitics, a Machtstaat does not necessarily follow.43

This first subjective element might be surprising, and yet it is quitecoherently introduced in a sociology built on meaning-giving socialactions. Still, it needs to be empirically grounded: who is it who “thinksof itself” as having a vocation? Weber cannot just anthropomorphise the

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state – and yet the state is a collective actor, not an individual whosemeaning-giving we try to understand.

Weber builds the conceptual bridge by introducing two other inter-subjective phenomena, “prestige” and “the nation,” which are, in turn,attached to particular classes within a society. Prestige is connected to thepolitically ruling social group, or, put differently, to that social group thatmakes its living from holding political power. Being proud of one’scountry is not enough. Prestige means that power is used within a codeof honour. In a certain sense, the ruling classes simply transfer aristocraticrules of behaviour to the relations between states.44 The second elementis the nation, or more precisely, “the idea of a nation.” For Weber,a nation is not a physical category, but is based on a feeling of solidaritywithin a group.45 The social group carrying this type of subjective condi-tion towards war-proneness are the intellectuals whom Weber sees aspredestined to propagate the national idea (this is the passage just beforethe fragment stops). It is here that he mentions explicitly the concept ofa “providential mission” which consists of the superiority or at least theirreplaceable character of (national) cultural goods which can only thrivewhen their individuality is preserved.46

Existential Philosophy

Now we have a reached point where we can close the circle. The analysisstarted with the ontology of politics as an existential struggle for powerwhich disappears from view themore we followedWeber’s sociology. Buthere, at the level of international relations, it does reappear, at least in hisshorter political writings. It does, however, not appear in the classical set-up of political theory; it appears in the logic of the reason of state, that is,the historically evolved (aristocratic) practices of the European interna-tional society. This combination of political ontology and politicalpractice produces an odd interference into the analysis. The reappearanceof the existential struggle is the effect of combining two underlying ideas.One has to do with the “struggle of the gods” or the irreducible “poly-theism” of modernity (as applied to world politics). The other one is theevergreen about the origins of “the rise and fall of Empires/states,” that is,long-term power dynamics in world history. It is in this combination thatAron finds and criticises Weber’s Social Darwinism.

Weber’s definition of polytheism is ambivalent. In one famous passage,polytheism results from modernisation, i.e., the differentiation of societyin social spheres, which follow different laws.47 This passage is closelyconnected to his critique of applying a pure ethics of conviction to thepolitical sphere and hence to his praxeology. In another passage, and


certainly in a related manner, Weber implicitly derives it from the differ-ent kinds of spheres of human action. Referring to Nietzsche andBaudelaire, he writes that it is “common wisdom that something can betrue, despite or indeed because it is neither beautiful, nor holy, norgood.”48 Here, the four categories are reminiscent of the four types ofsocial action where truth is related to instrumental rationality, the good tovalue rationality, the holy to traditional social action, and beauty, albeitonly with some good conceptual will, to affectional social action. Thismeans that it is not just the historical evolution of a more differentiatedsociety which is causing polytheism, but rather the irreducible differencein the types of social action themselves (which, true, are also an effect ofhistorical modernisation). From here, the discussionmight easily connectto liberal theory, such as John Rawls’, which starts from the incommen-surability of different conceptions of the good (polytheism) for basing histheory of justice.49 Yet that is basically “harmless,” no link to a kind ofworld clash of the gods. Indeed, Weber wishes to use this argument fora policy of moderation, which any choice in favour of one of the godswould undermine. But this is not the entire story.

The struggle of the gods on the world historical stage happens with theidentification of nations with gods. There is already a slippery passagewhere Weber declares that he does not know how one could possiblyjudge the value of German culture as compared to the French. This issimply to show the category mistake of applying truth claims to culturalgoods. And yet it acquires a different sense when it is put into the contextof a passage whereWeber talks about the “value orders of the world whichstand in an unresolvable struggle with each other,” since this sentence,which would possibly make sense for general Weltanschauungen not geo-graphically delimited (say, between communism, his-day conservatism,and liberalism), becomes something different if such value systems areattached to nations themselves. Only then canworld history be reduced toan “eternal struggle for the preservation and breeding of our nationalcharacter (Art)” and foreign policy be guided by the so-given permanentpower political interests that require it to master all domestic economicefforts and expand – all statements that his approach in Economy andSociety denies, as seen earlier.50

To be fair to Weber, this slippage happens only in his early writings.This passage is from his inaugural lecture in 1895, at the time he hadcompleted his habilitation on the topic of the “social origins of the declineof antique culture.” In his later writings, and in particular in his Economyand Society, Weber is aware of the fact that intellectuals who makethemselves servants of nations and their culture, who propagatea specific national mission, may be doing something quite common to

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all intellectuals, but not something inevitable. Moreover, he even saysthat organising itself into a Machtstaat can undermine a nation’s ownculture.51 This is his sobering and actually profoundly realist finding thatmissionary zeal is unjustified by its consequences and that thereforepolitics does have a responsibility to avoid it. War is not a necessity.And even if struggle is perennial, how struggle is conducted makesa huge difference, as Aron rightly insists. Only by combining theDarwinism of some early writings and the idea of polytheism in hispost-1918 writings can Aron reach a Weberian theory of Machtpolitik.Weber is mainly a realist in political theory, not in IR explanatory theory.

Conclusion

This chapter started with the two domains in which power analysis hasbeen pursued in Western intellectual history. On the one hand, power isrelated to ideas of order, of good government and personal autonomy, asexemplified by de Jouvenel. On the other hand, power has become anindicator of effect and influence in an explanatory theory of action, asproposed by Dahl. Looking at Weber’s analysis of power was meant tocatch that moment in the development of power analysis where thedomains of political and explanatory theory split. Through the discussionof power, in its different concepts and in his theory ofHerrschaft, so closelyconnected to the theories of state and politics, this chapter attempted toshow that power analysis today would be well advised to reconnect thetwo domains again (albeit not with Weber’s content). A reduction ofpower analysis to some sort of causal explanatory setup, however wellintended, will not actually tell us “who governs,” having somuch reducedthe analysis of what government entails. And yet, by having proposeda purely formal, not substantial, understanding of continuous forms ofhuman organisation, such as the state, and by insisting on the empiricalcomparison of historically different forms of value systems across theworld that undergirds them, Weber allows no way back to package“power” into the sole tradition of political theory. In fact, the twodomains are not to be confused with the distinction between positive orempirical and normative theory. Political theory can be surely normative,but it does not need to. When asking ontological questions like “What isthe state?”Weber used extensive empirical findings, indeedworld history.His aim was neither value judgement nor ethical theory. Just because it isnot explanatory empirical theory does not mean it is automatically nor-mative. Inversely, to build his framework of analysis and hismethodology,he needed to rely on ontological assumptions derived from his underlyingexistential philosophy.52 With the rise of Foucauldian analyses and the


renewed interest in political theory, power analysis is perhaps again readyto take on its double heritage, which Weber personifies, sometimesmalgré lui.

Notes

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the SGIR sixth pan-Europeanconference on international relations in Turin, September, 12–15 2007, whichappeared as StefanoGuzzini (2007) “Re-readingWeber, or: The Three Fields forthe Analysis of Power in International Relations,”DIISWorking Papers 2007/29(Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies). Parts of this paper hadbeen presented at the common DIIS-NUPI workshop as “Back to Weber?The Legacy of Weberian Power Analysis for IR Theorising” (NUPI,Oslo, November, 7–8 2006). For helpful comments, I wish to thank JensBartelson, Benjamin de Carvalho, Svend Aage Christensen, Nina Graeger,Pertti Joenniemi, Dietrich Jung, Halvard Leira, Iver B. Neumann, and inparticular my discussant in Turin, Nicholas Onuf. The usual disclaimers apply.I also gratefully acknowledge the support of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond thatallowed me a sabbatical year during which I made the final revisions.1. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du pouvoir. Histoire naturelle de sa croissance (Paris:

Hachette, 1972).2. This claim can be found in different versions in Robert A. Dahl, “A Critique

of the Ruling Elite Model,” American Political Science Review, vol. 52, no. 2(1958), pp. 463–69; Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power inan American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); RobertA. Dahl, “Power,” in David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of theSocial Sciences, vol. 12 (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 405–15.

3. Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967),p. 500.

4. Sheldon S. Wolin, “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics ofTheory,” Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 3 (1981), pp. 401–24.

5. Raymond Aron, “MaxWeber et la politique de puissance,” in Les étapes de lapensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 642–56.

6. For a more detailed account of the domains of power analysis, seeStefano Guzzini, Power, Realism and Constructivism (London, New York:Routledge, 2013), pp. 8–11.

7. Volker Sellin, “Politik,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, andReinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikonzur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Band 4 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,1978), pp. 789–874.

8. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, [1921–22] 1980), p. 514.

9. For a good discussion, see Norberto Bobbio, “La teoria dello stato e delpotere,” in Pietro Rossi (ed.), Max Weber e l’analisi del mondo (Torino:Einaudi, 1981), pp. 215–46.

10. Weber is not very precise here. He mentions first three such social sphereswhich define the social order: the sphere of law, of economics, and one he

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calls the social sphere, defined by rank and prestige. Yet, only a couple ofpages later, we get the “sphere of power” added to the list, presumably thesphere of politics. Whereas power imbued all three initial spheres (economicpower having an effect of prestige, etc.), seen in a relatively horizontal way,a specific sphere of power seems to imply a hierarchy of spheres. See Weber,Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, pp. 531, 539.A similar tension can be found in the post-Weberian Bourdieu when he has tothink about the “political field” which appears both ways (see also his use ofthe “field of power”). See in particular Pierre Bourdieu, Noblesse d’État.Grandes écoles et esprit de corps (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1989).

11. MaxWeber, “Politik als Beruf,” inGesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen:J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, [1919] 1988), pp. 505–60, at pp. 550, 557,respectively.

12. Weber,Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, p. 28.13. Ibid.14. MaxWeber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” in

Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck,[1918] 1988), pp. 306–443, at p. 329.

15. E.g., for such a defence of defining the three types of legitimate domination interms of the way obedience/consent is obtained, see Weber, Wirtschaft undGesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, p. 123.

16. Aron, “Max Weber et la politique de puissance,” p. 650.17. For this conceptual chain, see the dense account and sequential logic of

fundamental sociological concepts in Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, pp. 11–30.

18. Ibid.19. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,

p. 544. The translation of Weber’s concept of Herrschaft is notoriouslydifficult. For its hierarchical element connected to the underlying idea offorce/violence, “domination” seems most appropriate; “rule” captures betterhis interest in regularised command competence; and finally, “authority”renders perhaps best his insistence on legitimacy mechanisms which areattached to Herrschaft. For this reason, I keep the concept in its Germanoriginal.

20. He calls itHerrschaft kraft Interessenkonstellation andHerrschaft kraft Autorität.For the following discussion, see ibid.

21. Ibid.22. For the analysis of Luhmann’s concept of power with a by now almost

anachronistic division of social spheres (and the central role of physicalviolence), see Stefano Guzzini, “Constructivism and InternationalRelations: An Analysis of Niklas Luhmann’s Conceptualisation of Power,”in Mathias Albert and Lena Hilkermeier (eds.), Observing InternationalRelations: Niklas Luhmann and World Politics (London, New York:Routledge, 2004), pp. 208–22. Morgenthau is a more mixed case.

23. Weber,Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, p. 123.24. Ibid.25. Ibid.


26. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zurWissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, [1919] 1988),pp. 582–613.

27. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,p. 245.

28. Ibid.29. For Weber, ideas and interests are connected, i.e., the sheer reference to

interests is analytically vacuous since they are not exogenously given. For thisargument, see also Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique, p. 540.

30. Weber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” p. 335.31. Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” p. 556.32. Ibid.33. For some sobering examples of early Darwinism and actually also racism (later

revoked), seeMaxWeber, “DerNationalstaat unddieVolkswirtschaftspolitik,”in Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck,[1895] 1988), pp. 1–25, at pp. 12–14, and Max Weber, “Zur Gründungeiner national-sozialen Partei,” in Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen:J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, [1896] 1988), pp. 26–29, at pp. 28–29.

34. For IR, see, e.g., R. B. J. Walker, “Violence, Modernity, Silence: FromWeber to International Relations,” in David Campbell and Michael Dillon(eds.), The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 1993), pp. 137–60.

35. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,pp. 514–30.

36. Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962),p. 19.

37. Aron, “Max Weber et la politique de puissance,” p. 656.38. Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” p. 549.39. This thesis might have been first expounded by Otto Hintze, a German

historian from the same period. For a critique of this thesis in today’sinternational political context, see Anna Leander, “War and the Un-makingof States: Taking Tilly Seriously in the Contemporary World,” inStefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung (eds.), Contemporary Security Analysis andCopenhagen Peace Research (London, NewYork: Routledge, 2004), pp. 69–80.

40. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,pp. 517–19, and 211 respectively.

41. Ibid.42. Max Weber, “Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten,” in

Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck,[1916] 1988), pp. 157–77, at p. 177.

43. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,pp. 520–21. For statements about the almost inevitable vocational characterof larger states, see Max Weber, “Bismarcks Außenpolitik und dieGegenwart,” in Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/PaulSiebeck, [1915] 1988), pp. 112–29, at 116f. defending the German fleetexpansion; Weber, “Zwischen zwei Gesetzen,” pp. 142–43; Weber,“Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten,” pp. 175–77. It nicely

116 Stefano Guzzini

serves as a “neutral” explanation for German diplomacy and rearmamentbefore the war.

44. For an explicit argument relating war making and state formation to thebehavioural patterns of a certain elite, see Ekkehart Krippendorff, Staat undKrieg. Die historische Logik politischer Unvernunft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,1985).

45. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,p. 528.

46. When Weber writes political pamphlets, he himself perfectly fitted thisdescription where the struggle for the preservation if not imposition of the“character of the culture of the future” becomes an almost self-evidentmission for Germany. See, e.g., Weber, “Zwischen zwei Gesetzen,” p. 143.

47. Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” pp. 554–55.48. Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” p. 604.49. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political NotMetaphysical,” Philosophy and

Public Affairs, vol. 14, no. 3 (1985), pp. 223–51.50. Weber, “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik,” p. 14 (quote)

and then ff.51. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie,

pp. 530, fn. 3.52. Wolin, “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory.”

References

Aron, Raymond (1962) Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calmann-Lévy).(1967) Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard).(1967) “Max Weber et la politique de puissance,” in Les étapes de la penséesociologique (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 642–56.

Bobbio, Norberto (1981) “La teoria dello stato e del potere,” in Pietro Rossi(ed.), Max Weber e l’analisi del mondo (Torino: Einaudi), pp. 215–46.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1989)Noblesse d’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps (Paris: LesÉditions de Minuit).

Dahl, Robert A. (1958) “ACritique of the Ruling EliteModel,”American PoliticalScience Review, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 463–69.

(1961) Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press).

(1968) “Power,” in David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the SocialSciences, vol. 12 (New York: Free Press), pp. 405–15.

Guzzini, Stefano (2004) “Constructivism and International Relations: An Analysisof Niklas Luhmann’s Conceptualisation of Power,” in Mathias Albert andLenaHilkermeier (eds.),Observing International Relations: Niklas LuhmannandWorld Politics (London, New York: Routledge), pp. 208–22.

(2007) “Re-reading Weber, or: The Three Fields for the Analysis of Power inInternational Relations,” DIIS Working Papers 2007/29 (Copenhagen:Danish Institute for International Studies).

(2013) Power, Realism and Constructivism (London, New York: Routledge).


Jouvenel, Bertrand de (1972) Du pouvoir. Histoire naturelle de sa croissance (Paris:Hachette).

Krippendorff, Ekkehart (1985) Staat und Krieg. Die historische Logik politischerUnvernunft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp).

Leander, Anna (2004) “War and the Un-making of States: Taking Tilly Seriouslyin the Contemporary World,” in Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung (eds.),Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research (London,New York: Routledge), pp. 69–80.

Rawls, John (1985) “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophyand Public Affairs, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 223–51.

Sellin, Volker (1978) “Politik,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and ReinhartKoselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Band 4 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), pp. 789–874.

Walker, R. B. J. (1993) “Violence, Modernity, Silence: From Weber toInternational Relations,” in David Campbell and Michael Dillon (eds.),The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press),pp. 137–60.

Weber, Max ([1895] 1988) “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik,”in Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck),pp. 1–25.

([1896] 1988) “Zur Gründung einer national-sozialen Partei,” in GesammeltePolitische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck), pp. 26–29.

([1915] 1988) “Bismarcks Außenpolitik und die Gegenwart,” in GesammeltePolitische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck), pp. 112–29.

([1916] 1988) “Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten,” inGesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck),pp. 157–77.

([1916] 1988) “Zwischen zwei Gesetzen,” in Gesammelte Politische Schriften(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck), pp. 142–45.

([1918] 1988) “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” inGesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck),pp. 306–443.

([1919] 1988) “Politik als Beruf,” inGesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen:J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck), pp. 505–60.

([1919] 1988) “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zurWissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck), pp. 582–613.

([1921–22] 1980) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehendenSoziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck).

Wolin, Sheldon S. (1981) “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politicsof Theory,” Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 401–24.

118 Stefano Guzzini

6 International Organizations andBureaucratic Modernity

Jens Steffek

“To Understand Modernity Is to Understand Weber.”1

With his studies on the emergence of Western rationalism, Max Weberranks among the most important theorists of modernity. Yet only sincethe constructivist turn of their discipline have scholars of internationalrelations (IR) begun to discover the pertinence ofWeber’s classic accountof modernity to their own field of study. In particular, students of inter-national organizations (IOs) have turned to Weber’s seminal writings onmodern bureaucracy and the concomitant form of “rational-legal” legiti-macy. This reception of Weber’s sociology of law and domination hastaken place in a somewhat piecemeal fashion, however. Scholars havesingled out some canonical statements on bureaucracy and legitimacy,widely disregarding the modernization-theoretical context in which theystand. I will argue in this chapter that we should take this context seriouslybecause it can make us see the emergence of IOs in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries in a different light – not only as a peace project andanswer to IR’s notorious anarchy problematic, but as part of a universalprocess of “rationalizing” government and society. The emergence of IOsas an organizational form is associated with the expansion and professio-nalization of public administration that has taken place in the countries ofthe Occident and that Weber analyzed.

The phenomenon of bureaucracy enjoys pride of place in Weber’swritings. It is a central topic in his sociology of domination, becausepublic administration is the everyday face of state power, themechanismthat transforms public authority into concrete and visible social action.2

Weber pointed out that all forms of political domination, modern andpremodern alike, necessitated some form of bureaucratic administrationif they were to endure. Unique to the modern age, however, was the riseof large-scale, anonymous, bureaucratic institutions. Weber foundbureaucratization at work not only in the state apparatus, but also inpolitical parties, private companies, and even churches and voluntaryassociations.3 As is well known, Weber’s attitude toward bureaucratic

119

modernity was deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, he found modernbureaucracies tremendously efficient, and the process of bureaucratiza-tion therefore all but unstoppable. On the other, he worried that thisvery process would eat up individual freedom and suffocate cultural life.Accordingly, in Weber’s political writings we can find numerouspolemics against the creeping bureaucratization of WilhelmianGermany.4

Max Weber’s theory of modernization is in many ways a theory ofrationalization, and for him the anonymous bureaucratic machine wasthe dominant institutional form that societal and political rationalizationtakes. Bureaucracy reflects the formalization and legalization of powerrelations, the demystification and depersonalization of authority and theincreasing resort to technical and scientific expertise. The bureaucraticapparatus is aMenschenmaschine, a humanmachinery populated by a newtype of professional who follows predesigned career paths, loyal to theabstract institution rather than to any particular person. It is probably noexaggeration to say that Weber’s account of industrial modernity finds itsmost characteristic expression in his description of the bureaucratic formof organization.

Although Max Weber had such a keen interest in the many faces ofthe bureaucratic phenomenon, he did not write much on internationalorganizations, and if he did, it was in the context of power politics. Hedid not study the international bureaus and “public unions” thatalready existed during his lifetime in Europe, mainly in Brussels andGeneva. As an expert member of the German delegation to Versailles,Weber witnessed the birth of the League of Nations firsthand. Yet hewas too absorbed with gauging the future balance of power and theprecarious prospects of defeated Germany to occupy himself with theextension of the bureaucratic phenomenon to the international sphere,which the creation of the League and the International LabourOrganization (ILO) also implied.

Despite the lack of any explicit statement of his on internationalbureaucracy, students of IOs regularly refer to Max Weber’s work.Their purpose usually is to bolster the claim that international bureau-cracies have a considerable influence on international politics and need tobe taken seriously by IR scholars. Such references to Weber’s academicsociology now stand alongside and contrast with the more traditional IRinterpretation ofWeber as a “realist,” a theorist, and an advocate of powerpolitics.5 While realists tend to read Weber as a direct intellectual ances-tor of present-day IR scholarship, constructivist scholars rather seekinspiration from his sociological analysis of phenomena at the domesticlevel for their study of international phenomena.

120 Jens Steffek

In the first part of this chapter, I revisit Weber’s account of bureaucracyas an organizational form that expresses like hardly any other the ratio-nalization of Western societies. I also outline the sharp contrast thatWeber draws between the world of bureaucracy and the world of politics.Weber was an acute analyst of bureaucratization, but he remained com-mitted, analytically as well as normatively, to a conception of politics asa heroic struggle over values and ideals. The second part of this chapter isdevoted to the reception ofWeber’s work in the discipline of IR. In a briefsurvey of recent IO literature that refers to Weber, I identify a number ofrecurrent subjects: the internal functioning and organization of IOs; thefoundations of IO influence and authority; and the legitimacy of IOs, asperceived by citizens, politicians, and peers. All three subjects figureprominently in the arguably most influential reception of Weber’s workon bureaucracy in IR, which is Michael Barnett’s and MarthaFinnemore’s Rules for the World, a monograph published in 2004.6

In my discussion of this work, I point out the peculiar tension betweenthe authors’ claim that IOs are influential due to their “bureaucraticauthority” and their own disenchantment with precisely that bureaucraticcharacter. Although Barnett and Finnemore do not elaborate on it, theiracknowledgment of the empirical power of bureaucracy and normativeworries about the bureaucratization of the world resembles MaxWeber’sequally ambivalent attitude. Unlike Weber, however, Barnett andFinnemore seem to remain normatively committed to the project ofrationalization. They thus cannot propagate power politics as an alter-native to bureaucratization in the same way Weber did. I conclude thatBarnett and Finnemore, along with many other liberal IR scholars, are“disenchanted modernists,” conscious of the limits, pitfalls, and falsepromises of bureaucratic modes of international organization but withouta plausible institutional alternative at hand.

Modernization, Rationalization, and Bureaucracy

Hardly had I set foot in the office on the third floor of the old Palais desNations on an unforgettable May day in 1930 when a flood of files andmimeographed papers arrived, as if by magic, on a tray reserved for“incoming mail and documents.” . . . I sat down at the supersized deskwhich indicated that I had been appointed to an important post. BeforeI had time to recovermy breath the telephone began to ring. I was caughtin a machine which did not release me until I left the Secretariat exactlyten years later.

With these words, Austrian diplomat Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer oncedescribed his entry to the world of international organizations, “in the

International Organizations and Bureaucratic Modernity 121

position of a newcomer facing the machine with extreme bewildermentand awe.”7 Perceiving the League of Nations and its Secretariat asa tremendous piece of man-made machinery might have been the spon-taneous fruit of Ranshofen-Wertheimer’s own imagination. Machinemetaphors, however, were widely used in books and pamphlets on inter-national organizations, especially during the interwar period on whichRanshofen-Wertheimer reports here. Among diplomats, “internationalmachinery” was, and still is, a phrase used to denote the permanent staffaiding in the organization of international conferences and the implemen-tation of accords. It is a metaphor for bureaucracy beyond the state. MaxWeber also had a fancy for machine metaphors and machine analogieswhen writing about modern bureaucracies. He referred to the bureau-cratic apparatus as aMenschenmaschine, a “human machine,” whose coldefficiency he came to admire and abhor at the same time.8 The machinemetaphor also draws our attention to the link between bureaucratizationandmodernity, the “machine age,” a link I will explore further in this firstsection of the chapter.9

It is probably futile to search for the one and only master question thatmight have inspired the complex and multifaceted work of Max Weber.But if we allow for a small number of central concerns that guided hisresearch interests over extended periods of time, the process of moder-nization certainly is among them. The “Prefatory Remarks” prepared forthe 1920 edition of the Protestant Ethics, one of the last academic texts thatWeber wrote before his premature death, succinctly outline his long-termresearch question.10 Why did industrial capitalism, great advances inscience and technology, and the modern nation-state arise in theOccident and nowhere else in the world? Weber was well versed in globalhistory and knew the enormous cultural achievements of ancient China,India, Egypt,Mesopotamia, and the Islamic world in unusual detail.Whyhad these societies not embarked on a journey to industrial modernity?The answer Weber gives us is complex, but a central element of it is the“characteristic features of modern Western rationalism.”11

The presumed uniqueness of Western rationalism is also at the core ofthe conventional interpretation of Max Weber as a theorist ofmodernity.12 According to this reading, modernization is mainlya process of rationalization that takes place simultaneously at the indivi-dual and at the structural, societal levels. Weber’s famous Protestantethics thesis illustrates one important episode of the long-term historicaltrajectory (rather than being anything like its point of departure).According to this famous account, individuals started rationally andmethodically planning and controlling their way of life for religiousreasons.13 This systematic “self-governance” of individuals later

122 Jens Steffek

emancipated from its Protestant roots. What remained was a control ofimpulses and desires and a way of holding oneself to account for allchoices made, reviewing them with a view to achieving whatever endsone has chosen to pursue. These changes at the level of individual self-governance are accompanied by changes at the level of societal institu-tions. Weber was interested in both levels of analysis, even if much oftwentieth-century sociology placed its emphasis mostly on structuraltransformations.14

In the course of modernization, political, social, and economic organi-zation is increasingly based on the application of technical and scientificknowledge, on impersonality of procedure, and on capillary control ofindividual behavior.15 Although Weber argued that this type of rationa-lization was characteristic of the path to modernity taken in Europe andNorth America, he found some of its features in other epochs and culturalcontexts as well.16Whatmade theWest the avant-garde of modernity wasa particular constellation of factors that facilitated the rationalization of allspheres of society.17 A quite important role in the process of moderniza-tion comes to formalized and disciplined communication. Scientificknowledge is generated through reproducible, often experimental proce-dures, and it can be intersubjectively shared. The spread of this knowl-edge is greatly helped by new “symbolic technologies,” such as abstractand formal language.18 The advance of rationalized forms of communi-cation enables practices of reason giving and gives rise to the expectationthat reasons be provided for all choices. The development of the abilityrationally to ask questions and rationally to give answers is crucial inWeber’s account of modernization.19

The increasing importance of rational communication and coordina-tion of action is linked to some institutional aspects of modernization thatare crucial for the transformation of the political sphere in the industrialage. First of all, a general trend that permeates the public sector as well asthe industrial enterprise is formalization.20 Written, explicit, and precisenorms supplant custom, implicit conventions, and oral traditions.Decisions are documented in writing and records systematically kept.Especially in the public sector, formalization finds its expression in theadvance of law. The administration of the law is the task of a specializedorganizational apparatus in charge of norm interpretation and of estab-lishing noncompliance, including measures to be taken against violators.Judges, solicitors, and public prosecutors are specialized professionalswho have undergone rigorous training and examination. In the publicsector, they are salaried civil servants who are not directly accountable topolitical officeholders, but embedded into their own administrativehierarchies.


The progressive “legalization” of society helps establish control, pre-dictability of behavior, and stable expectations.21 Calculability and pre-dictability are increasingly required by the expansion of capitalism andthe concomitant creation of markets for goods and services.22

The creation of anonymous markets implies the need for cooperationamong strangers, rendering trust and stable expectations problematic.The modern capitalist enterprise itself was built around techniques ofprediction, calculation, and the elimination of uncertainty. Capitalismneeded a law that functioned with almost machine-like accuracy andpredictability.23 It depended on a system of public administration andjurisprudence that made its own decisions (and the reasons for them)transparent and predictable.24 Feudal administration and premodernforms of jurisprudence with ample discretion of civil servants and judgeswere not able to guarantee such a predictability of decisions.25

The modern capitalist state enlisted lawyers to enforce its claim topower.26

The advance of formal law is a good example to illustrate the interplaybetween individual agency and social structure in the great transforma-tion to modernity. Legalization always had sponsors in society. It waspromoted by the possessing classes that were most interested in thecodification and formalization of the law to protect themselves againstassaults of the ruling elite. Weber cites the call of Roman plebeians,English Puritans, and the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie for formal lawas evidence.27 These classes were interested in securing their own lifechances (Lebenschancen) against the despotism of the rulers.28 For theproletariat, the legal guarantees of private property and the predictabilityof administrative procedure were less relevant. Proletarians ratherappealed to material principles of justice when calling for new ways ofeconomic distribution that were not yet incorporated into the formal legalorder. Such “revolutionary” demands were based on substantial ethicalprinciples, or appeals to natural law that challenged standard bureau-cratic routines.29

Parallel to the advance of law and the rise of the legal professions, thecharacteristic organizational form that proliferates during the process ofmodernization is the bureaucracy, in both the private and the publicdomains. Some speak of “legal bureaucratization” to highlight the inti-mate link between the two processes.30 The bureaucratic phenomenon“provides an ‘opportunity’ for the sociologist to get to know rationaliza-tion relatively first hand.”31 Weber’s account of modern bureaucracyneeds to be seen in the context of his sociology of domination andsociology of law. In the sociology of domination, the conceptual startingpoint is the notion of power: in Weber’s famous definition, “the

124 Jens Steffek

probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a positionto carry out its own will despite resistance.”32 Raw power turns intoaccepted authority when it is institutionalized into a social relationshipof voluntary deference that functions smoothly without the presence ofthreats or incentives. Theremust be a will to obey on the part of the ruled-over. Two factors determine the transition from power to authority: first,there must be perceptions of legitimacy, that is, the widespread belief thatauthority is rightfully exercised. Second, there also must be some perma-nent organizational structure to implement the commands of the ruler,whatWeber often called Stab. It is part of the ruling class and of the ruled-over at the same time.

Throughout history this administrative apparatus has taken very dif-ferent forms. Ancient rulers often had only a small, largely untrainedadministrative staff. In many cases, these administrators were nottenured, but given privileges to extract their remuneration in form oflevies and taxes from the population they presided over.33 Weber exten-sively cites such historical evidence to document the wide variety oforganizational forms that had existed, but often only to contrast themimmediately with the modern form of bureaucracy. Weber argued that inan increasingly complex society that required ever more technical andscientific expertise, formal bureaucracies were efficient instruments ofgovernance.34 They were technically superior to premodern forms ofadministration, as expertise and strict rule-following secured the formalrationality of decisions, as well as the predictability of administrative acts.This superior efficiency spurred the spread of the modern administrationinto all societal spheres, and, wemay add from today’s perspective, also tonon-Western societies. Modern bureaucracies also rely on a new andspecific type of “rational-legal” legitimacy that is related to, but notequal with, their technical efficiency. Obedience is not owed (as in tradi-tional societies) to individual persons, such as lords, chiefs, or priests, butessentially to abstract rules, fixed as law and executed by the bureaucraticapparatus.35

As Weber described it, a modern bureaucratic apparatus consists ofsalaried professionals, hierarchically organized, and often specialized incertain areas of competence. In German, Weber called these profes-sionals Fachbeamte: civil servants with certified expertise in a subjectarea.36 While administrators had existed in all cultures with a minimumof functional differentiation of social roles, themodernFachbeamte embo-died a new type of specialist in the public service. These civil servants hadsystematic training and examination in law or in other practically applic-able academic disciplines, such as economics or engineering. Modernbureaucracies take decisions not on the basis of personal interests of


officeholders, but on the basis of formal legal prescriptions.37 Withoutsuch a legal base to act on, a modern bureaucracy is paralyzed.The faculty of rational communication is crucial for bureaucraciesbecause “in principle a system of rationally debatable ‘reasons’ stand[s]behind every act of bureaucratic administration, namely, either subsump-tion under norms, or a weighing of ends and means.”38 Thus, the virtuesof rationalization do not boil down to mere advantages in administrativeefficiency.

WhatWeber also seemed to value was that, in modernity, reasons weregiven for decisions made. This more cognitive, maybe even moral, aspectof rationalization of governance emergesmost clearly in discussions aboutWillkür in Weber’s academic and political writings. The way Weber usesthe term dates back to the Enlightenment. In Germany’s most compre-hensive encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, Willkür is named asa faculty of the human mind, with spontaneitas given as its Latin equiva-lent (next to other meanings of the word now obsolete).39 Willkür isexplained as the faculty of choice, the ability of the humanmind to resolveto do something, or to abstain from doing it. Having it thus isa precondition of individual freedom. We find two variants of Willkür inZedler’s encyclopedia; mere (blosse) Willkür is a choice made “withoutknowing and willing” while free (freye) Willkür denotes an act of choicebased on such reflection.

In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant makes an important distinctionbetween Willkür and Wille. In Kant, “Willkür, or the power of choice, isthe power of intentional causation, that is, effective desire; by contrastWille, or the will, is the power of self-legislation, or giving ourselves eitherinstrumental or non-instrumental reasons for the determination ofchoice.”40 While Wille is informed by reasons and can be subject tojustification, Willkür is the human “faculty of arbitrary choice.”41

The distinction between Wille and Willkür remained prominent inGerman philosophy, with Hegel adding to the pejorative connotationsthatWillkür acquired until Weber’s time (and which it still carries today).An act or decision springing from Willkür is arbitrary and capricious.42

It does not require justification, for itsmotivation is strictly subjective; norcan we expect that comprehensible reasons be given for it.

In the realm of public government, decisions made by Willkür aremanifestations of “raw,” unaccountable power. Government by Willküris therefore despotic and (according to our contemporary Western stan-dards) normatively illegitimate. In his academic writings, Max Weberoften uses the term Willkür when contrasting modern with premodernforms of government, in particular in the section of Economy and Societyon traditional authority. Weber there distinguishes different forms of

126 Jens Steffek

traditional authority according to their degree of personalization of rule.43

Willkür is a function of personalization of government and comes indegrees; it is at its highest in whatWeber called “sultanism,” an extremelypersonalized form of autocratic government that is stripped of all tradi-tional norms and conventions. InWeber’s work,Willkür often comes withthe adjective “free” (frei) attached to it, to underline the unrestrainedchoice of the individual exerting it. Its motivations are purely personaldesires. It is the elimination ofWillkür as the despotic element in decisionmaking that makes the rationalization of government possible, and it isclear that Weber had sympathies for it, even if he retained some romanticlonging for the figure of the political leader free from all formalconstraints.

This brings us to one of the most intriguing ambiguities in Weber’swritings, which is his personal attitude toward modernity. Max Weberwas an outstanding analyst of industrial modernity, but not a partisan ofmodernization. He not only shared some voguish skepticism about thenew “nervous age” with many of his contemporaries.44 He also worried,very specifically, about the loss of individual and collective freedom thatbureaucratization was bringing about. There is a sharp contrast inWeber’s work between his academic praise for the advantages of bureau-cratization and his political militancy against it.45 Fritz Ringer observesthat “[i]t was as if he had two different perceptions of the bureaucraticphenomenon, or if that phenomenon had two different faces. One cannothelp asking whether these two faces of bureaucracy were ever fully recon-ciled in Weber’s thought, and how one is to account for the differencesbetween them.”46

Most of Weber’s statements against bureaucratization can be foundin pamphlets, speeches, and short essays in which he commented on thepolitical controversies of his day. Many of these texts do not live up tothe standards of dispassionate academic reflection that Weber propa-gated elsewhere. They were often hastily written, polemical in tone, andharsh in judgment. Other statements on politics, however, are morescholarly in character, such as the book-length treatise on the Russianrevolutions and, most famously, his essay on “Politics as Vocation.”47

There has been some controversy over the status of these politicalwritings, and whether Weber had, next to his sociology, somethinglike a theory of politics.48 It may not have been developed anywherein a systematic fashion, but its broad contours can be reconstructedfrom his writings.49 Understanding the place of politics in Weber’ssocial theory can also help us understand his attitude toward bureau-cracy, because the ideal-typical fonctionnaire is the counterpart of theideal-typical politician.


Weber’s conception of politics is appropriately described as agonistic.50

He was convinced that politics was a sphere of conflict, where individualwills, material group interests, and fundamental values clashed. For him,the political process hence was a continuous and inevitable struggle forpower.51 Any “political question”was in someway related to the exercise,conservation, or distribution of power in society. The figure of thepolitical leader in Weber’s account of politics is almost an archaic one.Politicians who win the political struggle have particular virtues: theircharisma, their willpower, their creativity, and their strategic skills.Weber, who sometimes played with the idea of running for politicaloffice, adored the idealized figure of the homo politicus, a virtuous andcharismatic political leader. He appreciated idealism, the determinationof aman to fight adamantly for his cause (women not really being foreseenin that role). In his personal life, Weber respected political activistsdevoted to their ideals, even if he may have argued with themfiercely over programmatic questions. Anecdotes to this effect abound:Although a self-conscious and confessing bourgeois, Weber had muchpersonal esteem for revolutionaries and their fight against the system.52

With much zeal he criticized, on the other hand, the German socialdemocratic party for its compromise tactics and “extremely petty-bourgeois demeanour.”53

MaxWeber, as is well known, was an ardent German nationalist.54 Forhim, the nation was the cradle of culture and serving the nation wasa noble activity. Weber claimed that every politician, every party, andevery faction had to assume responsibility for the fate of the nation asa whole and, whenever necessary, subordinate factional goals to nationalinterests. Weber called upon German politicians of his day to behaveresponsibly and to serve the great cause of their nation.55 This normativestance can be related to his analysis of the nature of international politics.Nations were embroiled in a power struggle and a mobilization of alldomestic forces was required for the nation to succeed in it. There is sometension inWeber’s political writings between the empirical analysis of thedynamics of modern party politics and his programmatic political ethics:political leaders were called upon to resist the “natural” dynamics ofdomestic group struggle whenever the fate of the nation so required.This requirement can only be deduced from Weber’s ethic of responsi-bility and does not logically follow from his analysis of the dynamics of thepolitical game.

Max Weber’s conception of politics and the politician stands in sharpcontrast with his description of bureaucracy and the figure of the bureau-crat. Weber found that the bureaucratic mode of dealing with socialproblems along with a bureaucratic mentality and worldview were

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empirically on the advance.56He feared that the bureaucracy, this facelessapparatus, would encroach upon the political sphere, imposing its inher-ent logic onto the politician. In his political commentary, Weber wasextremely critical of such tendencies. He argued that theGerman politicalsystem since unification in 1871 had left far too little space for talentedpolitical entrepreneurs seeking to realize their vision. Instead it favoredpeople with the mentality of a civil servant.57 However, “[i]f a man ina leading position is an ‘official’ in the spirit of his performance, nomatterhow qualified . . . then he is as useless at the helm of a private enterprise asof a government.”58

Thus, Weber’s view of bureaucracy was highly ambivalent. As a socialscientist committed to objective analysis of societal transformations,Weber came to conclude that the modern trend toward formal and legalreasoning was irreversible, also in the political sphere. As a political com-mentator and activist, he hated this prospect and his outlook to the futurewas, accordingly, rather pessimistic. He predicted that more and morespheres of social life would become usurped by the logic of administra-tion. The irresistible advance of the bureaucracy would suffocate thefreedom and creativity of the individual, and this would affect the averagecitizen as much as the ambitious political entrepreneur.59

Weber’s stark characterization of the spheres of politics and adminis-tration as “diametrically opposed pure types” is noteworthy and impor-tant for the study of bureaucracy in contemporary internationalrelations.60 On one side of the fence there is the political realm of powerstruggle but also of creativity, innovation, and change, and on the otherthe “continuous rule-bound conduct of official business.”61 For Weber,the internal logic according to which the two domains of politics andadministration function cannot be reconciled, only spheres of influencedemarcated.

Max Weber and the Study of InternationalOrganizations

MaxWeber’s characterization of modern bureaucracies has been a majorinspiration for scholars working in the fields of organizational sociology,political science, and public administration. His influence was so funda-mental that it is commonplace today to speak of “Weberian” bureau-cracy. This term has come to mean a hierarchically ordered, strictlyrule-bound, mechanistic, and rather inflexible type of public administra-tion with strong supervisory discipline and little discretion for individualcivil servants. This conception of public administration has been exten-sively criticized and supposedly superseded by new paradigms, such as


the “New Public Management.” For many of today’s students of bureau-cracy, Weber’s account represents an obsolete form of organizationalsociology, and it seems that Weber has not been right in his anticipationsof the fate of Western societies. “The possible future outlined in hispolitical and social-philosophical writings – massive bureaucratization,the reign of cold, instrumental rationality in the public realms of work andpolitics, and societal ossification – has not become reality. Modern socie-ties have experienced waves of populist protest against bureaucratization,retained more dynamism than Weber foresaw as likely, and repeatedlyrejuvenated ethical debates.”62

In fact, public administration in many countries no longer fits Weber’sdescription, especially in the most advanced Western economies.The organizational forms and routines have shifted from “legal bureau-cracy” to “managerial technocracy,” to use Göran Therborn’s terms63;whether this is better or worse is not the issue here. What I would like tohighlight instead is some remarkable continuity at a deeper level ofanalysis. Take, for instance, the expectation that reasons should begiven for any decision made by public administration. We still pretend,arguably even more so than Weber’s contemporaries, that these reasonsshould be transparent and comprehensible, and that public administra-tors should have particular expertise in their field. The specific organiza-tional form of bureaucracy may well have changed since Weber’s days,I contend, but not the ultimate purpose of bureaucratization asrationalization.

IR as an academic discipline needed quite some time to discoverWeber’s work on bureaucracy and bureaucratic legitimacy. The moreimmediate, and in some sense also more straightforward reception of hiswork in the field was to read him as a political realist, an ancestor ofMorgenthau and other theorists of international power politics.64

The somewhat belated reception of his work on bureaucracy in IR isalso due to the fact that Weber himself did not study the advance ofbureaucratic and legal forms of organization at the international level.He could have done so. Since the foundation of the Rhine River commis-sion in 1815, international “bureaus” proliferated throughout the nine-teenth century.65 Their growth in numbers paralleled the expansion andprofessionalization of public administration that took place in Westernindustrialized countries during the same period. For a scholar of rationa-lization and bureaucracy, interested as Weber was in comparativeresearch, these new institutions might have been an attractive object ofstudy. But neither the public unions of the nineteenth century, nor theLeague of Nations and ILO, whose creation happened right before hiseyes, elicited his interest. Neither did Weber show much interest in

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international law. He had read international law at university, and fromremarks in Economy and Society, we can infer that he was familiar withdoctrinal debates over its status as proper law in the absence of centralizedenforcement capacities.66 But no systematic treatment of internationallaw appears anywhere in his academic writings, despite his keen interest inlegal phenomena, generally speaking. We can of course only speculatewhy Weber largely ignored international organizations and internationallaw. Next to the low political salience of IOs before World War I itprobably also has to do with his preconceptions of international relationsas realm of unfettered power politics (see Chapter 2).

Another reason why Weber’s work on bureaucratic modernity camerelatively late to IR is the realist imprint and state-centrism of the disci-pline afterWorldWar II. In this perspective, IOs are but a special instanceof the broader phenomenon of “international cooperation,” created andmaintained by states to serve some specific purpose. The prevalent idea inmainstream IR still is that states “act through” IOs.67 Realist and neolib-eral institutionalists remain divided over the question of how likely suchcooperation among states is and what precise role IOs would have in it.Realists tend to see IOs as handmaidens of hegemonic states, created tosmoothen and legitimate the exercise of the hegemon’s power by disguis-ing it in the mantle of multilateralism. Rational institutionalists, by con-trast, identify the functional advantages of IOs in reducing thetransactions costs of international cooperation. In both views, IOs essen-tially remain mechanisms of interstate cooperation.68 What varies is thenature and number of the functions that they allegedly perform.Compared to their governmental masters, IOs are supposed to have, inany event, very little independent agency. Their secretariats are imaginedas silent and (hopefully) efficient machineries.

This state-centric perspective on IOs has been challenged in the courseof the social-constructivist turn in IR. A new type of literature on IOs tookissue with their peculiar character as bureaucratic organizations, recover-ing in a way the bottom-up view that Ranshofen-Wertheimer and otherscholar-practitioners had taken decades before. Recent studies of IOsecretariats, their civil servants, and their bureaucratic politics havebuilt on classical sociological work on organizations. It was only in thecourse of this rediscovery of IOs as bureaucratic bodies that Max Weberhas become something like a standard reference in the IO literature,accompanied by amore general opening up of IR theory toward sociologyand an increasing interest of sociologists and public administration spe-cialists in transnational phenomena.69

For sociologically oriented IO scholars, international and transnationalorganizations constitute a specific manifestation of the more universal


bureaucratic phenomenon.70 Some even have come to assert that“[b]ureaucracy, not anarchy, is likely to be the defining feature of theinternational system in the twenty-first century.”71 The sociologicallyoriented literature usually takes an inside perspective on IOs, thus treat-ing international institutions as “social environments.”72 It thus shifts thelevel of analysis from the corporate actor to the individual civil servant,her organizational routines and practices. This type of “bottom-up” IOstudies is often written by scholars who originally come from publicadministration, organizational sociology, or comparative politics, ratherthan from the IR community narrowly conceived; or, as in Ranshofen-Wertheimer’s times, by academics with some practical working experi-ence in IOs.73

The literature on IOs as bureaucracies opened up new horizons ininternational studies and it brought sociology and public administrationsomewhat closer to IR. It linked up to traditional debates in IR theory byfocusing on the authority, legitimacy, and influence of IOs in interna-tional politics. The central question in much of this literature is how IOs,which avail of much lessmaterial resources than states, manage to have anindependent influence on world politics. The arguably most influentialbook of this genre is Rules for the World by Michael Barnett and MarthaFinnemore. The authors refer extensively to Weber to impute a connec-tion between the bureaucratic character of IOs and their authority.

Rational-legal authority . . . constitutes IOs in the sense that it gives them a specificform (bureaucracy) and empowers them to act in specific ways. . . .To be author-itative, ergo powerful, they must be seen to serve some valued and legitimatesocial purpose. They must also be seen to serve that purpose in an impartial andtechnocratic way using their impersonal rules. The authority of IOs, and bureau-cracies generally, therefore lies in their ability to present themselves as impersonaland neutral – as not exercising power but instead serving others. The acceptanceof these claims is critical to their authority.74

Barnett and Finnemore deploy this argument to bolster their claimthat IOs are influential actors in world politics that deserve to be takenseriously, and they mobilize evidence from IO case studies to supportthis view. Their target audience is realists and rational institutionalistswho tend to deny that IOs as bureaucratic bodies have independentinfluence on world politics. Implicitly at least, Max Weber, the theor-ist of bureaucracy, is pitched here against Weber the political realistand advocate of power politics. What realist readings of Weber oftensideline, but Barnett and Finnemore emphasize, are his ponderingsover the relation between power and legitimacy, to be found mainly inhis sociology of domination.

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Max Weber is famous for being the founding father of an empiricalapproach to the study of political legitimacy.75 Again, for the predomi-nance of the state-centric paradigm this aspect of his work has comerelatively late to IR. The legitimacy of states and domestic forms ofgovernment had been a traditional issue in IR and, even more so, forinternational law.76 But to ask whether IOs need legitimacy (and if so,what kind) meant to acknowledge that these organizations had somediscernable power over states and/or individuals in the first place.77

Such a framing of IOs as powerful agents in need of legitimacy did notspread in IR before the 1990s, and international lawyers clearly antici-pated political scientist in viewing IOs in this light.78 Working at the edgebetween the two disciplines, Ian Hurd was quite successful in hooking upWeber’s empirical-analytical work on legitimacy to the IRmainstream viathe compliance debate.79 That debate is focused on the question of whystates follow international rules and norms even when these at times runcounter to their self-interest. Hurd and others have brought questionsabout legitimacy and rule-following to the analysis of IOs that issue andimplement rules, such as the United Nations.80 Ian Clark has investi-gated, in historical perspective, how an international order as a whole waslegitimated.81 Especially in the field of EU studies, where the indepen-dent agency and authority of the IO is beyond serious dispute, scholarshave used a Weberian approach to study the legitimacy of the organiza-tion and its single organs.82 The post-Maastricht ratification crisis in theEU had brought the question of empirical legitimacy of the organizationto the table already in the early 1990s. Legitimation discourse and self-legitimation strategies of international organizations are, by now, majortopics in IO studies and the European integration literature.83

As I argued at the beginning of this essay, the reception of Weberiansociology in IR widely disregarded the modernization-theoretical contextin which Weber’s treatments of bureaucracies and bureaucratic legiti-macy are rooted. To illustrate this point, I shall return for a moment toBarnett’s and Finnemore’s work on the authority of IOs in world politics.Quite interestingly, their seminal book on the power of IOs does not endon an optimistic note. In the last chapter, the authors express theirconcern with the “undemocratic liberalism” of IOs, the fact that theseinstitutions promote some liberal values while violating others, in parti-cular democratic standards.84 Barnett and Finnemore have very mixedfeelings about governance by global bureaucracies. This seems to bea somewhat odd conclusion for a book that over some 150 pagesadvanced the claim that IOs are legitimate because they are bureaucra-cies. If not even progressive intellectuals such as Barnett and Finnemorebelieve that bureaucratic IOs are a blessing, why is it plausible that IOs


have so much “bureaucratic authority” and can capitalize on it? Is itbecause IOs are still able “to present themselves as impersonal andneutral” to an unsuspecting audience?

Not quite. The strangely mixed feelings that Barnett and Finnemore(and many other broadly “liberal” IR theorists) have toward IOs must beseen in the context of a more general Western disenchantment with thebureaucraticmodernity thatWeber described. Like few other phenomenain the field of international relations, IOs embody the type of bureaucraticmodernity that Weber described. Their task is to rationalize socialrelations across borders, and this is why they have been advocated byprogressively minded IR scholars for more than a century. As a program-matic statement and political justification, a conception of IOs as mod-ernizers of international relations was pervasive in the academic IRliterature of the twentieth century. Many idealists of the interwar yearspromoted such a modernization project, the (neo-)functionalists of thepostwar years did it very explicitly, and much of the literature on inter-dependence management and global governance still does.85

Disenchanted modernism, I submit, is something like the emotionalstate of “progressive” IR at the moment.86 Scholars keep prescribingmodernist recipes, such as increased legalization, the resort to science,and the transfer of tasks to transnational agencies whenever a new pro-blem reaches the agenda of international politics. Formal organizationalmachinery is built incessantly around new or seemingly new problems.This strategy has been followed, in the real world, in the fight againstHIV/AIDS and anthropogenic climate change, to name just two relativelyrecent global challenges. At the same time we are too aware of the limits,pitfalls, and pathologies of bureaucratic forms of organization to whole-heartedly endorse themodernist recipe in the sameway that IR scholars ofearlier periods did.

One core theme of contemporary criticism of bureaucracy can be foundalready in Weber’s work: the inevitable tension between formal andmaterial rationality. The semantic distinction occurs only in his latewritings and is not fully theorized.87 It is not, as one might be temptedto think, a distinction between the rationality of the bureaucratic appara-tus and other spheres of life. Rather, both rationalities are inherent in thespirit (normaler Geist) of the bureaucracy. The first and dominant elementof the bureaucratic modus operandi is formalism. It means tackling con-crete “cases”with the help of logical reasoning and abstract legal proposi-tions. Yet, Weber argues, officials also adopt a utilitarian perspective(material-utilitarisch). This type of reasoning pertains to the goals andideals of public administration and how they would be reached best.These two elements of the bureaucratic spirit are, as Weber said,

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“apparently, and in part genuinely, in contradiction.”88 Legal formalismhas a strong status-quo bias whereasmaterial considerations often suggestdeviations from an existing legal order.

The tension between formal and material rationality is latent inWeber’s writings about modern bureaucracy, and it is never reallyresolved. Karl Löwith radicalized it when he denounced the “peculiarirrationality” of a bureaucratic formalism that reversed the relationshipbetween ends andmeans, in the sense that adherence to formal procedurehad become an end in itself.89 Today’s widespread critique of bureau-cracy as ossified, inefficient, and often dysfunctional in its stubbornadherence to formalities echoes this line of criticism. Max Weber neverwas a partisan of bureaucratization and most certainly was not a moder-nist, but he could still present the rationalizing features and superiorefficiency of bureaucratic modernity as a historical matter of fact. Withthe benefit of hindsight, we may qualify his account of modernity to theextent that the bureaucratic rationalization of government was alwaysmore of a promise and idealization than an undisputable reality.

Max Weber, as I have shown, had his misgivings about the bureau-cratization of the world, but he did not worry about possible inefficienciesof bureaucratic organizations, or their “democratic deficit,” even if it isplausible to say that he worried about their “politics deficit.”At that pointthere seems to be considerable overlap between his position and present-day work on IOs. Weber, however, still had an alternative to bureau-cratization that he could hold on to: the heroic political struggle overinterests and values. Among nations, this struggle often escalated intowar, and Weber did not really object to this. During World War I, whileserving his country in the administration of a military hospital, heregretted that he was unfit to fight at the front line.90 Thus, for Weberthere still was an alternative to bureaucratization of the world that feltboth empirically viable and desirable. In the context of internationalaffairs, this alternative meant power politics, struggle, and ultimatelywar. Unlike Weber, today’s disenchanted modernists like the prospectof power politics and war even less than the pathologies and increasingintrusiveness of global bureaucracies. Disenchanted modernists thus facethe conundrum that they need to support, for the lack of better optionsand in the name of “civilizing” world politics, a strategy of “internationalorganization” whose side effects they have come to be wary of.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed Max Weber’s work on modern bureau-cracy, and the way that it has been appropriated in the field of IR. While


Weber had been read in IR as a political realist for quite some time, hissociology of domination found broader resonance only after the social-constructivist turn of the discipline. Its precondition was a somewhatrevised and less state-centric view on IOs as social environments andsites of independent authority in the international system. The increasinginterest of researchers in the bureaucratic character of IOs has promotedthe dialogue between IR and scholars from public administration andorganizational sociology. However, much of the political science litera-ture still seems committed to a perspective whose ultimate explanandum isIO “power,” relative to other collective actors in the internationalsystem.91 The interest is in finding out why and under what conditionsIOs exert independent influence on political decisions. This framing ofthe problematique allowed authors to link up Weberian sociology to estab-lished disciplinary debates in IR, but it may render conversation withresearch on domestic bureaucratic phenomena a bit awkward. Whatpublic administration scholar would need to struggle against the defaultassumption that bureaucracies are powerless? In the Western world, wetend to find domestic bureaucracies rather too powerful.

On the other hand, the rather uncritical praise for IOs that permeatedthe progressive IR literature for much of the twentieth century is nowgiving way to a more nuanced and critical perspective. The critique ofbureaucracy that filled sociological libraries during the twentieth centuryis beginning to be discussed also in IR.92What remains a peculiarity of theWeber reception in IR is the missing modernization-theoretical contex-tualization of his work. In sociology, a link betweenWeber andmodernitythrough rationalization is made almost by default, no matter if scholarsbelieve that Weber’s key academic concern was theorizing modernity, orif they militate against such a view. I suggest that the academic study ofIOs could profit from amore self-conscious engagement with moderniza-tion theory. The installation of bureaucratic machinery was and is part ofa project of rationalization inWestern societies, from where it spilled overto the international level. When put into such a perspective, the bureau-cratization of international relations is more than simply a functionalresponse to manifest problems of interdependence that have befallenthe world since the globalization of capitalism and the advent of moderntechnologies. It is also part of a more encompassing project of rationaliza-tion that implies increased predictability and control of behavior, theformalization and legalization of social relations, and the accountabilityfor choices made, no matter if individually or collectively.

Max Weber, to be sure, never had such a project. To the contrary, hewas highly skeptical of the increasing rationalization and bureaucratiza-tion of all spheres of social and political life. The timeless relevance of his

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writings is not least here. Weber not only succinctly described the con-tours of modernization as rationalization, but, more than that, he alsodelivered important building blocks of the postmodern critique ofmodernity.93 I therefore suggest that there is hardly a better way to startthinking about our own disenchanted attitudes toward the project ofinternational organization than revisiting the writings of Max Weber.Weber’s work is so instructive because it not only provides us witha rich account of modern bureaucracies, and why they emerged, butalso gives us the reasons to fear them.

What distinguishes us fromWeber, however, is that we are skeptical notonly of international organizations, but even more so of internationalpower politics. For Weber, struggles for power between individuals andparties, but also between nations and “cultures,” were the daily businessof politics, and he did not mind. At the international level, where nocoercive apparatus kept these struggles within the bounds of orderly andpeaceful competition, they often degenerated into violence. Max Weberembracedwar, at least at the outset, and hadmuch contempt for pacifism.He was able to find an attractive alternative to bureaucratic routines inheroic political struggles. This is different for most contemporaryWestern IR scholars. For them, war is not an option, and the heroicstruggle between nations and cultures is not an ideal to be pursued.Therefore, we are stuck with the ambiguities of a disenchanted modern-ism that has ceased to believe in the virtues of bureaucratic organizationwhile applying the bureaucratic recipe to every new international problemthat arises.

Notes

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 55th Annual Convention ofthe International Studies Association in Toronto, March 26–29, 2014. I wish tothank conference participants and in particularMlada Bukovansky for their helpfulsuggestions. Christer Jönsson, Fritz Kratochwil, Ned Lebow, and Nick Onuf alsokindly shared comments on earlier versions of this text with me. MariekeKnußmann provided excellent research assistance. Financial support by theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Cluster of Excellence“Formation of Normative Orders” (EXC 243) is gratefully acknowledged.1. Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity (London: Routledge,

1992), vii.2. On Weber and bureaucratic modernity, see Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber:

An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1962), 423–30.3. MaxWeber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, 2 vols.,

ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978), I, 223.


4. See Max Weber,MaxWeber: Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Lassmanand Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

5. Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought fromWeber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Tarak Barkawi, “Strategy asa Vocation: Weber, Morgenthau and Modern Strategic Studies,” Review ofInternational Studies 24 (1998).

6. Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: InternationalOrganizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

7. Egon F. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, The International Secretariat (New York:Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945), ix.

8. Marianne Weber cites an unpublished speech of 1909 centering on thehuman machine in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans.Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), 416.

9. On the “machine age”metaphor, see John M. Jordan,Machine-Age Ideology:Social Engineering and American Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1994). For Ranshofen-Wertheimer’s own academic musingson the “machinery of international affairs,” see Egon F. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Victory Is Not Enough: The Strategy for a Lasting Peace(New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), chapter 10.

10. Benjamin Nelson, “Max Weber’s ‘Author’s Introduction’ (1920): A MasterClue to His Main Aims,” Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974); Max Weber,“‘Prefatory Remarks’ to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion,” inThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. and trans.Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publishing, 2001).

11. Weber, “Prefatory Remarks,” 160.12. In my reading of Weber as a theorist of bureaucratic modernity, I draw on

Bendix,Max Weber, and especially Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of WesternRationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1982).

13. Stephen Kalberg, “Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for theAnalysis of Rationalization Processes in History,” American Journal ofSociology 85 (1980): 1149.

14. Against the structuralist reading of Weber as a prophet of grand societaltransformations, in particular Wilhelm Hennis emphasized Weber’s interestin individual conduct of life; see Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber’s CentralQuestion, trans. Keith Tribe (Newbury: Threshold Press, 2000).

15. Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and MoralThought of Max Weber (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 30–32.

16. Guenther Roth, “Rationalization in Max Weber’s Developmental History,”in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster(London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

17. Weber famously traced rationalization processes also in Western forms ofvisual art and especially music; see his Max Weber, The Rational and SocialFoundations of Music (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958).

18. Nelson, “Max Weber,” 272.19. Johannes Weiss, “Rationalität als Kommunikabilität: Überlegungen zur

Rolle von Rationalitätsunterstellungen in der Soziologie,” in Max Weber

138 Jens Steffek

und die Rationalisierung sozialen Handelns, ed. Walter M. Sprondel andConstans Seyfarth (Stuttgart: Enke, 1981).

20. Cary Boucock, In the Grip of Freedom: Law and Modernity in Max Weber(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

21. Brubaker, Limits of Rationality, 12.22. Weber, Economy and Society, I, 223.23. On law and capitalism inWeber, see DavidM. Trubek, “MaxWeber on Law

and the Rise of Capitalism,” Wisconsin Law Review 3 (1972); andRichard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

24. Weber, Economy and Society, II, 1395.25. Ibid., II, 1095.26. This connection is discussed at some length in Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s

Theory of the Modern State: Origins, Structure and Significance (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chapter 5.

27. Weber, Economy and Society, II, 814.28. Ibid., I, 226; on the class aspect, see also David Beetham,MaxWeber and the

Theory of Modern Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985) and John O’Neill,“The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault,” British Journal ofSociology 37 (1986).

29. Weber, Economy and Society, I, 226 and II, 872–74.30. The term is used in Martha Finnemore and Stephen J. Toope, “Alternatives

to ‘Legalization’: Richer Views of Law and Politics,” InternationalOrganization 55 (2001): 744.

31. H. T. Wilson, The American Ideology: Science, Technology and Organisation asModes of Rationality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 149.

32. Weber, Economy and Society, I, 53.33. Ibid., II, 969–73.34. Ibid., II, 998.35. Ibid., I, 217–18.36. Themost extensive treatment of the Fachbeamte and their relation to political

officeholders can be found in Max Weber, “Parliament and Government inGermany under a New Political Order,” inMaxWeber: Political Writings, ed.and trans. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994).

37. Weber, Economy and Society, II, 958.38. Ibid., II, 979.39. Johann Heinrich Zedler, “(Art.) Willkühr,” in Grosses vollständiges Universal

Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, Bd. 57, ed. Johann Heinrich Zedler(Leipzig: Zedler, 1748).

40. Robert Hanna and A. W. Moore, “Reason, Freedom and Kant:An Exchange,” Kantian Review 12 (2007): 116, emphasis in original (thispassage written by Hanna).

41. In Kant there is a distinction, similar to the one in Zedler’s encyclopedia,between positive and negativeWillkür, but there is little use in going into thedetails here. The translation of Willkür as “faculty of arbitrary choice” issuggested in Corinna Mieth and Jacob Rosenthal, “Freedom Must


Be Presupposed as a Property of the Will of All Rational Beings,” inGroundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Christoph Horn andDieter Schönecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 271, fn 13.

42. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaftenim Grundrisse, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, [1830] 1986), III, § 478.

43. Weber, Economy and Society, I, 231–32.44. Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009),

164–65.45. Karl Jaspers, Max Weber: Politiker, Forscher, Philosoph (Bremen: Storm,

1946).46. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2004), 220.47. Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Max Weber:

Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Max Weber, The RussianRevolutions, trans. Gordon C.Wells and Peter R. Baehr (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1995).

48. David Beetham defends the position that Weber was (also) a veritablepolitical theorist. See Beetham, Max Weber.

49. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “MaxWeber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politicsof Theory,” Political Theory 9 (1981).

50. In fact, the irreconcilable plurality of values that Weber states was animportant influence on Chantal Mouffe’s theorizing on agonistic politicalconflict; see Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso,2000), 103; and also Peter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), chapter 2.

51. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”52. In 1919, for instance, Weber gave testimony before a Munich court to defend

revolutionary Ernst Toller, one of the leading figures of the short-lived sovietrepublic in Munich. Weber did not share Toller’s political intentions, butappreciated his steadfast and idealist character, helping him out on severaloccasions. On these event and their personal relationship, seeDittmar Dahlmann, “Max Weber’s Relation to Anarchism and Anarchists:TheCase of Ernst Toller,” inMaxWeber andHis Contemporaries, ed.WolfgangJ. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (Abingdon: Routledge, 1987).

53. MaxWeber, Letter to Robert Michels, October 8, 1906, cited and translatedby Wolfgang Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber(Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 77–78.

54. See Richard Bellamy, “Liberalism and Nationalism in the Thought of MaxWeber,” History of European Ideas 14 (1992).

55. Weber, “Parliament and Government.”56. On the effects of the bureaucratized world on the individual, seeHennis,Max

Weber.57. Weber, Economy and Society, II, 1427, 1448.58. Ibid., II, 1404.59. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, 46.60. Ibid., 118.

140 Jens Steffek

61. Weber, Economy and Society, I, 218.62. Stephen Kalberg, “Introduction,” in Max Weber: Readings and Commentary

on Modernity, ed. Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 37.63. Göran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? State

Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism(London: NLB, 1978), 55.

64. Smith, Realist Thought; Barkawi, “Strategy as a Vocation.”65. Bob Reinalda, Routledge History of International Organizations (New York:

Routledge, 2009).66. “As is well known, it has often been denied that international law could be

called law, precisely because there is no legal authority above the state capableof enforcing it” (Weber, Economy and Society, I, 35); “Thus, in the sphere ofpublic law the domain of free contract is essentially found in internationallaw” (ibid., I, 670).

67. Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, “Why States Act through FormalInternational Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (1998).

68. For the “classic” debate in IR over the prospects of institutionalizinginterstate cooperation, see David A. Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism:The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

69. On this development, see Mathias Albert et al., Bringing Sociology toInternational Relation: World Politics as Differentiation Theory (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2013).

70. Gili S. Drori et al., “Introduction,” in Globalization and Organization: WorldSociety and Organizational Change, ed. Gili S. Drori et al. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006), 18. See also John Boli and George M. Thomas,Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since1875 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

71. Jörn Ege and Michael W. Bauer, “International Bureaucracies from a PublicAdministration and International Relations Perspective,” in RoutledgeHandbook of International Organization, ed. Bob Reinalda (Abingdon:Routledge, 2013), 136.

72. Alastair Iain Johnston, “Treating International Institutions as SocialEnvironments,” International Studies Quarterly 45 (2001).

73. An example is the work of JohnMathiason, Invisible Governance: InternationalSecretariats in Global Politics (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2007).

74. Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World, 21.75. David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Houndmills, Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1991), chapter 1.76. See, e.g., Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and

French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2002).

77. I have discussed this point at some length in Jens Steffek, “Legitimacy inInternational Relations: From State Compliance to Citizen Consensus,” inLegitimacy in an Age of Global Politics, ed. Achim Hurrelmann et al.(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

78. Thomas M. Franck, “Legitimacy in the International System,” AmericanJournal of International Law 82 (1988).


79. Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics,” InternationalOrganization 53 (1999): 388–90. On the turn to legitimacy more generally,see Ian Clark, “Legitimacy in a Global Order,” Review of International Studies29 (2003).

80. Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy, Power, and the Symbolic Life of the UN SecurityCouncil,” Global Governance 8 (2002); Ian Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacyand Power in the United Nations Security Council (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007). See also Jonathan Koppel, “Global GovernanceOrganizations: Legitimacy and Authority in Conflict,” Journal of PublicAdministration Research and Theory 18 (2008); Jens Steffek, EmbeddedLiberalism and Its Critics: Justifying Global Governance in the AmericanCentury (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), chapter 1.

81. Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005).

82. Thomas Banchoff and Mitchell P. Smith, “Conceptualizing Legitimacy ina Contested Polity,” in Legitimacy and the European Union: The ContestedPolity, ed. Thomas Banchoff and Mitchell P. Smith (London: Routledge,1997); J. Peter Burgess, “What’s So European about the European Union?Legitimacy between Institution and Identity,” European Journal of SocialTheory 5 (2002).

83. Dominika Biegón, “Specifying the Arena of Possibilities: Post-structuralistNarrative Analysis and the European Commission’s LegitimationStrategies,” Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (2013).

84. Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World, 172–73.85. I develop this argument in more detail in Jens Steffek, “Max Weber,

Modernity, and the Project of International Organization,” CambridgeReview of International Affairs (in press). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2015.1020481.

86. I use the term modernism to mean a progressive and programmatic attitude ofhuman beings, affirming their power and determination to improve andreshape their human and social environment with the aid of experimentation,scientific knowledge, and technology.

87. Wolfgang Mommsen, “Personal Conduct and Societal Change: Towardsa Reconstruction of Max Weber’s Concept of History,” in Max Weber,Rationality and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster (London:Allen & Unwin, 1987), 43–44.

88. Weber, Economy and Society, I, 226.89. Karl Löwith, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1993), 68.90. On this episode, see Radkau, Max Weber, chapter 17.91. Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World, 29–31.92. This argument is succinctly made in Renate Mayntz, “Legitimacy and

Compliance in Transnational Governance” (Working Paper 05/10, MaxPlanck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, 2010).

93. Turner, Max Weber, 18–9.

142 Jens Steffek

7 Decolonizing Weber: The Eurocentrismof Weber’s IR and Historical Sociology

John M. Hobson

In this chapter, I argue that Weber’s work on both historical sociology andIR was founded on a consistent Western-centric base. This base com-prises what I call “Eurocentric institutionalism,” which I differentiatefrom scientific racism. Having spelled out the difference between thesetwo forms of Western-centrism in the first section, I then reveal howEurocentric institutionalism underpins Weber’s historical sociology inthe second section. This then forms the launching pad for the third andfourth sections, in which I “decolonize” Weber’s IR. Here the narrativebecomes rather more complicated than that which is traditionally asso-ciated with Weber’s IR. For I suggest that there are three potential inter-pretations. In the third section, I view the realism of Weber’s early writingson IR through the prism of the extensive secondary literature on thistheme. Then in the fourth section I consider the approach to IR that hedeveloped during World War I. This has strong resonances with twointernational theories; first, that of the English School (associated withHedley Bull and Martin Wight); and second, that of “pacifist eugenics”and the cause of European defensiveness. Still, while the overlaps with theEuropean defensive approach are suggestive, nevertheless, I argue that noscientific racist arguments can be found there. Thus at this point it is thethematic overlaps that are noteworthy, even if for Weber it was Eurocentricinstitutional ideas that informed such parallels. All in all, Weber’sEurocentric historical sociology, which emphasized the unique or excep-tional rationalization process that enabled the rise of European modernityand argued that modernity was destined to materialize in Europe and notin the East, converged with his Eurocentric wartime IR writings, whichwere concerned most fundamentally with consolidating European civiliza-tion in part through German trading-based imperialism in the East.

Introduction: Constructing Weber

Perhaps more than any other classical thinker, Max Weber exhibits inhis large corpus of work a wide range of positions covering historical

143

sociology and international politics.1 Some scholars claim Weber to bea liberal though others read him as a realist international thinker; someclaim he is an orthodox sociologist while others detect a critical socio-logical stream of thought running through his work concerning hiscritique of modernity based on bureaucratization and disenchantmentwith modernity. And yet others see in Weber’s work various constructi-vist themes while many well-known historical sociologists read himsquarely as a materialist. Moreover, some read him as a deterministicthinker who advanced an evolutionary schema underpinning modernityas governed by an ineluctable rationalization process, whereas othersemphasize his non-deterministic and non-reductionist ontology thatemphasizes discontinuity in world affairs rather than continuity.In many ways, Weber himself might be thought of as an epistemicconstruct in which different facets of his work can be highlighted todiffering ends by different authors. In this chapter, I start from analternative point of departure to those who seek to reveal the “trueWeber.”

I acknowledge that realist themes run through his work in variousways – both in his historical sociology and in his international politicalthought – but it is also the case that another vein pulses through hiswartime discussions of international relations. Pinpointing thisapproach is difficult because two possible contenders are vying forhegemony here; one is a quasi-liberal approach that has strong reso-nances with the English School, while the other has certain thematicparallels with the “pacifist eugenicist/peace biology” stream thatI associate with “defensive Europeanism.” But whichever of thesethree readings we choose to run with is less important than the pointthat they all reflect an underlying Eurocentrism. Critically, though,I shall argue that no traces of scientific racism appear in his thought,even if his Eurocentric Western-centrism pervades his large corpus ofknowledge and scholarship. I shall begin in the first section by outliningthe Eurocentric approach and differentiating it from scientific racism.In the second section, I shall reveal how Eurocentric institutionalismrather than scientific racism permeates Weber’s historical sociologybefore proceeding to deconstruct or “decolonize” his thinking on IR inthe third and fourth sections.

Eurocentric Institutionalism and Its Differentiationfrom Scientific Racism

The first issue to resolve is defining what is meant by Eurocentrism orOrientalism. Edward Said famously described Orientalism as a discourse

144 John M. Hobson

that permeated Western thinking after about 1750.2 While much of whathe argues provides the key inspiration for my own approach, neverthelessI find that his conception of Orientalism is problematic for its doublyreductive properties. In the first instance Said conflates two generic dis-courses, what I call Eurocentric institutionalism and scientific racism.And in the second instance, he reduces Orientalism to an imperialistnormative political posture. Of the many examples that could be used,the following two seem to be as good as any. For when discussing theprevalence of Orientalism in nineteenth-century Europe, Said believes itto be “correct that every European, in what he could say about theOrient,was . . . a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”3 Oragain: “[t]o say that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule isto ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance byOrientalism, rather than after the fact.”4 One problem that emerges hereis that while these generic discourses have universalist pretensions, never-theless a good number of racists and Eurocentrics embraced an anti-imperialist normative politics. This is important to appreciate in orderto contextualize my later discussion, but given that Weber’s various IRstances all advocated a form of German imperialism, I do not want tomake too much of this point here. Of what, in essence, do these twodiscourses comprise?

Eurocentric and racist thinkers performed four key moves as they wentabout constructing Eurocentrism in its mature form after about 1750 inaccordance with the European identity-formation process (i.e., as med-ieval Christendomwas superseded by modern Europe). First, they prisedor split East and West apart and then elevated the West to the superiorlevel of “civilization” on the basis that it had, allegedly, exceptional“rational” institutions (e.g., democracy, liberal capitalism, rationalbureaucracy/rule of law, individualism, science). Conversely the Eastwas relegated to the realm of the “uncivilized” – the savage and thebarbaric – given its alleged “irrational” institutions (e.g., Oriental despot-ism, patrimonial bureaucracy/no rule of law, domestic anarchy, collecti-vism, superstitious religions). In the process both East and West wereimagined as self-constituting entities separated by a civilizational frontier.Scientific racists did much the same, though they locate difference tosuperior genes (along with climatic and environmental features), whilethe Eurocentrics focus only on the rationality of the culture and itsinstitutions (economic, social, and political). Either way, the civilizedWest, which is deemed to be unique or exceptional, is thought to bemarked by superior rational institutions and culture as much as the back-ward East is marked by their absence. In this way, civilization versus un-civilization is governed by a series of presences and absences.

Decolonizing Weber 145

This leads to the second move, where it is argued that the West’sexceptional institutions ensured that it would inevitably develop throughthe endogenous Eurocentric or white racial logic of immanence, while theEast’s irrational institutions were thought either to block its economicdevelopment (such that only a Western civilizing mission could unblockthe Eastern obstacles to capitalist development, as in “paternalist”Eurocentrism and racism), or that the East can develop, but that it willdo so only by following the natural path the pioneering Europeans hadblazed and that would necessarily culminate with the idealized Westerncivilizational terminus (as in the anti-paternalist Eurocentric institution-alism of Smith and Kant or the anti-paternalist scientific racism ofSpencer and Sumner).5 That is, it was preordained or foretold that thesuperior rational European institutions would ensure Europe’s autono-mous and pioneering breakthrough intomodernity such that this achieve-ment was deemed to be but a fait accompli.6 And, with the exception ofsome scientific racists such as Herbert Spencer, as well as Eurocentricinstitutionalists such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, the East wasthought to be permanently undeveloped as a result either of the inferiorgenetic make-up of its peoples, often as a result of intemperate/torridclimates and environments, or because of its irrational culture andinstitutions.

The third key move involves overlaying on this binary division of theworld a three-worlds meta-geography based on the Eurocentric standardof civilization. This comprises:(a) The first world of civilized liberal European states and societies.(b) The second world of barbaric Oriental despotisms.(c) The third world of savage anarchic societies.Thus, while a constructed civilizational frontier divides the civilizedWestfrom the uncivilized East, nevertheless the latter is subdivided into twoconstituent categories of “barbarism” (as in the Islamic Middle East,China, and India) and “savagery” (as in Africa and Australasia), all ofwhich is summarized in Table 1.

These three moves culminate with the fourth key move of Eurocentricinstitutionalism, which entails the construction of a schizophrenic con-ception of sovereignty that yields two twin-hierarchical conceptions of“gradated sovereignty” within world politics:(a) A formal-hierarchical regime of gradated sovereignties. This entails the

conception of Western imperial-state “hyper-sovereignty” andEastern state “a-sovereignty” before 1945 such that European statesare awarded the mandate to imperially intervene in Eastern polities/societies.

146 John M. Hobson

(b) An informal-hierarchical regime of gradated sovereignties. This entails ananti-imperialist conception of Western state “full-sovereignty” andEastern state “qualified/default sovereignty,” such that while Easternstates must be free of Western imperial intervention, neverthelessthey are normatively required to develop by becoming Western.However, because Weber’s IR consistently evoked the normativeimperative of German imperialism, I shall not consider this anti-imperialist stream any further here.

Three core upshots follow from this discussion, first that the various racistand Eurocentric approaches deny the impact of positive Eastern influenceson the development of the West and vice versa. That is, the Westerndevelopmental breakthrough into modernity is a task performed solely bythe Europeans without any positive help from the East. Conversely, thebackward state of the East is a function of its inferior institutions or genes/climate/environment and has nothing to do with any imperialist actionsundertaken by the West. Second, given that the West enjoyed a great dealof Eastern help in making the breakthrough into modernity,7 so Europeappears as far more ingenious than it has been while the East appears lessingenious than it has been on the one hand, and far more incapable ofdeveloping than it has been owing to the silencing of the negative impactthat Western imperialism has played on the other hand. And third, whilethere are all manner of overlaps between scientific racism and Eurocentricinstitutionalism, nevertheless they rest on fundamentally different cate-gories – genes/climate and environment in the case of the former and thedegree of rationality of culture and institutions in the case of the latter. Howthen does this Eurocentric narrative play out inWeber’s historical sociology?

Table 1 The Eurocentric Construction of the “West versus the East”

The Dynamic West The backward, unchanging East

Inventive, Ingenious, Proactive Imitative, Ignorant, PassiveRational IrrationalScientific Superstitious, RitualisticDisciplined, Ordered, Self-controlled, Sane,Sensible

Lazy, Chaotic/Erratic, Spontaneous, Insane,Emotional

Mind-oriented Body-oriented, Exotic, AlluringPaternal, Independent, Functional Child-like, Dependent, DysfunctionalFree, Democratic, Tolerant, Honest Enslaved, Despotic, Intolerant, CorruptCivilized Savagery/BarbarismMorally and Economically Progressive Morally Regressive and Economically

Stagnant


The Eurocentric Institutionalism of Weber’sHistorical Sociology

While Weber was certainly not the originator of Eurocentric institution-alism, it would not be unfair to assert that he was the godfather ofEurocentric historical sociology. Weber’s whole approach was foundedon the most poignant Eurocentric question: what was it about the Westthat made its path to modern capitalism inevitable and why was the Eastpredestined for economic backwardness? The Eurocentric cue in Weberis found both with the initial question and the subsequent analyticalmethodology that he deployed in order to answer it. Weber’s view wasthat the essence of modern capitalism lies with its exceptional and pro-nounced degree of “rationality” and “predictability”; values, he insists,that are found only in the West. From there, as neo-Weberian historicalsociologist Randall Collins points out:

the logic of Weber’s argument is first to describe these characteristics; then toshow the obstacles to them that were present in virtually all societies of world history untilrecent centuries in the West; and finally, by the method of comparative analysis, toshow the social conditions responsible for their [unique] emergence [in theWest].8

This is a pristine Eurocentric logic given that Weber selected only thosefeatures that were allegedly unique to the West while simultaneouslyinsisting on their complete absence in the East. Nevertheless, althoughspace precludes such a discussion, I argue that Weber imputed thesecategories given that rational institutions could be located in the Eastwhile many of Europe’s so-called rational institutions turn out on furtherinvestigation to be less rational than Weber supposed.9 The Eurocentriccharacter of Weber’s analytical template is revealed most clearly in hisdepiction of the East and West (see Table 2).

The crucial comparison here is between Tables 1 and 2, which revealshow Weber transposed the Eurocentric categories into his central social-scientific concepts. Thus theWest was blessed with a unique or exceptionalset of rational institutions that were both liberal and growth-permissive.The growth-permissive factors are striking for their presence in the Westand for their absence in the East. This became apparent in his variousbooks on Western and Eastern religions, which include The Religion ofChina, The Religion of India, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism, as well as his General Economic History and his two-volumeset, Economy and Society.10 In particular, the final two categories locatedat the bottom of Table 2 deserve emphasis. First, the critical differencesare summarized in Weber’s claim that Western capitalist modernity ischaracterized by a fundamental separation of the public and private

148 John M. Hobson

realms whereas in traditional society (as in the East) there was no suchseparation. Crucially, only when there is such a separation can formalrationality – the leitmotif of modernity – prevail. This supposedly infusesall spheres – the political, military, economic, social, and cultural.

The second general distinguishing feature between the Orient andOccident was the existence of a “social balance of power” in the latterand its absence in the former. As Weber put it in Economy and Society:

All in all, the specific roots of Occidental culturemust be sought in the tension andpeculiar balance, on the one hand, between office charisma andmonasticism, andon the other between the contractual character of the feudal state and the auton-omous, bureaucratic hierocracy . . . [In contrast to the non-Western world,]authority was set against authority, legitimacy against legitimacy.11

Likewise, taking their cue from Weber, neo-Weberian analyses com-monly differentiate “multi-power actor civilizations” or the Europeanmultistate system from Eastern single-state systems or “empires ofdomination.”12 This feeds directly into Eurocentrism because the multi-state system is deemed to be a unique property of Europe; one thatcontains within it the exceptional dynamic imperative that propelsEurope forward into modernity. Thus Weber and numerous neo-Weberians, as well as various Marxian world-systems theorists and non-

Table 2 Max Weber’s Eurocentric Conception of East and West: The GreatRationality Divide

Occident (MODERNITY) Orient (TRADITION)

Rational (public) law Ad hoc (private) lawDouble-entry bookkeeping Lack of rational accountingFree and independent cities Political/administrative campsIndependent urban bourgeoisie State-controlled merchantsRational-legal (and democratic) state Patrimonial (Oriental despotic) stateRational science MysticismProtestant ethic and the emergence of therational individual

Repressive religions and the predominanceof the social-collective

Basic institutional constitution of theWest

Basic institutional constitution of theEast

Fragmented civilization with a balance ofsocial power between all groups andinstitutions(i.e., multistate system or multi-poweractor civilization)

Unified regions with no social balance ofpower between all groups and institutions(i.e., single-state systems or empires ofdomination)

Separation of public and private realms(rational institutions)

Fusion of public and private realms(irrational institutions)


Marxists, emphasize the vital role that warfare between states played inthe rise of Europe (which allegedly did not exist in the “single-stateempires” in the East).13 It is here where the theory of Oriental despotismbecomes pivotal. Only the Occident enjoyed a precarious balance ofsocial forces and institutions where none could predominate.14

European secular rulers could not dominate on a despotic model. Theygranted “powers and liberties” to individuals in civil society, initially tothe nobles and later on to the bourgeoisie. By 1500, rulers were anxious topromote capitalism in order to enhance tax revenues in the face of con-stant and increasingly expensive military competition between states.This fiscal-military imperative was enhanced further by the rising costsassociated with the European Military Revolution (1550–1660).By contrast, in the East, the predominance of “single-state systems” ledto backward empires of domination, in large part because a lack ofmilitary competition released the state from the pressure of having tonurture the development of society. Thus in contrast to the fief (hereditaryland title) that Western European rulers had granted the nobility beforeabout 1500, Eastern nobles were stifled by the despotic or patrimonialstate, which imposed prebendal rights (that is, non-hereditary title, whichprevented the consolidation of this class’s power). Moreover, the Easternbourgeoisie was thoroughly repressed by the despotic or patrimonial stateand was confined to “administrative camps” as opposed to the “freecities” that were allegedly found only in the West. In addition,European rulers were also balanced against the power of the HolyRoman Empire as well as the papacy, which contrasted with EasternCaesaropapism (where religious and political institutions were fused).

Finally, while Western man became imbued with a “rational restless-ness” and a transformative “ethic of worldmastery” in part because of theenergizing impulse of Protestantism, Eastern man was choked by regres-sive religions and was thereby marked by a long-term fatalism and passiveconformity to the world. Note that what Weber meant by the “ethic ofworld mastery” was the notion that Europeans sought to adapt the worldaccording to their developmental logic whereas the Eastern peoplessought to passively adapt themselves to the world. Accordingly, forWeber, the rise of capitalism was as much an inevitability in the West asits impossibility was in the East.

There is no doubting the point that the struggle between states wasa vitally important component in Weber’s explanation of the rise ofcapitalism in Europe.15 For some observers, as we shall see in the nextsection, this logic reflects Weber’s Darwinian stance. However, althoughWeber did not explicitly refer to the “anarchy” of the state system, aswould be made famous in IR by Kenneth Waltz,16 nevertheless it is this

150 John M. Hobson

which underpins his claim that European states were engaged in constantstruggle, as it is for neo-Weberians such as Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly,and Randall Collins.17 This contrasts with racist-social Darwinian theor-ists such as Ludwig Gumplowicz, Gustav Ratzenhofer, and Heinrich vonTreitschke, who saw in state competition a Darwinian logic of interracialstruggle. In other words, it was the institutional composition of theEuropean state system that was key to Weber’s thinking here ratherthan that of a racial struggle for survival. And it is particularly noteworthythat inEconomy and SocietyWeber was explicit that racism of any kindwasnot just morally repulsive,18 but was akin to a “pathetic pride” based on“pretensions to national power.”19 Notable too are several related pointsthat Ned Lebow makes in his chapter on “Max Weber and InternationalRelations” that Weber protested against a colleague’s effort to definenations in racial terms at a 1910 meeting of the Social PolicyAssociation; that he strongly opposed anti-Semitism; and that “Weberimagined what an intellectual joy it would be to teach a seminar com-posed of only Jewish, Polish, and Russian students.” A little more reflec-tion here is helpful in order to discard any potential scientific racistcredentials to Weber.

As Lawrence Scaff points out, Weber was most enthused byW. E. B. Du Bois’ classic text The Souls of Black Folk. So much so thatthis was one reason why he chose to visit the United States in the openingyears of the twentieth century. There he met up with, inter alia, Du Boisand formed a strong relationship with him. And it was there that hefocused on the “race question,” viewing it as a product of economic andstatus-based phenomena as opposed to biological/racial factors.20 Indeedlater on, at the 1910 inaugural meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fürSoziologie, Weber engaged in a heated debate with scientific racist AlfredPloetz. Weber’s antipathy to biological definitions of race was made inunequivocal terms:

To Ploetz’s claim that “inferiority” could be demonstrated using the methods ofempirical science, [Weber] gave the trenchant reply, “Nothing of the kind isproven. I wish to state that the most important sociological scholar anywhere inthe Southern States in America, with who no white scholar can compare isa Negro Burckhardt [sic] Du Bois. At the Congress of scholars in St. Louis wewere permitted to have breakfast with him. If a gentleman from the SouthernStates had been there it would have been a scandal. The Southerner wouldnaturally have found him to be intellectually and morally inferior. We foundthat the Southerner like other gentlemen would have deceived themselves.21

Moreover, Weber replied to the general question of group characteristicsor personal qualities attributable to race as follows:


But does there exist even today a single fact that would be relevant for sociology –a single concrete fact which in a truly illuminating, valid, exact and incontestableway traces a definite type of sociological circumstance back to inborn and heredi-tary qualities which are possessed by one race or another? The answer is defini-tively – note well – definitively no!22

In short, the biological determinism associated with much of scientificracism was simply incommensurable with the albeit Eurocentric-institutional foundations of Weber’s sociological enterprise.

Returning to the discussion of Weber’s Eurocentrism, it is notable thatprobably the key Eurocentric problem that infects Weber’s historicalsociology lies with his opening question. Thus by taking European mod-ernity as a fact at the time of his writing and then looking back in time tolocate the causal properties that exist only within Europe, as much as bytaking Eastern backwardness as a fact in the early twentieth century andthen extrapolating back in time to identify the “blockages” to Easterndevelopment, soWeber necessarily imputes an inevitability to both the riseof the West and the stagnation of the East. For he in effect performed theEurocentric sleight of hand whereby the question contained the answertherein: how did the ingenious and progressive, liberal West advance tocapitalist modernity as opposed to the regressive, despotic East, whoseeternal fate lay with stagnation and slavery? In other words, the place of theessential causal categories had already been assigned in advance of histor-ical inquiry and all that remained was merely specifying which intra-European causal variables were vital.

But it might be replied that it is surely reasonable to begin by noting thepresent situation of an advanced West and a backward East and to thenexplore the past to “reveal” the factors that made this so. The problem,however, is that in extrapolating back in time the notion of a backwardEast, a subtle but erroneous slippage is made: that in “revealing” thevarious blockages that held the East back, Eurocentrism ends up byimputing to the East a permanent iron law of non-development. Andabove all, because Eurocentrism appraises the East only through thelens of making the final breakthrough to modern capitalism, so anytechnological or economic developments that are made are immediatelydismissed as inconsequential. In contrast, by taking present-day Westernsuperiority as a fact and then extrapolating this conception back throughhistorical time, the inquirer necessarily ends up by imputing to the Westa permanent iron law of immanent development. But, as I have arguedelsewhere, there was nothing inevitable about the West’s rise, preciselybecause theWest was nowhere near as ingenious ormorally progressive asEurocentrism assumes. For without the helping hand of the moreadvanced East in the 500–1800 period, the West might not have made

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it into modernity.23 Thus our Western historical sociological thinking,much of which was bequeathed by Weber, is not scientific and objective,but is orientated through a one-eyed lens that, albeit usually unwittingly,reflects the prejudiced values of theWest and that necessarily prevents theinquirer from seeing the full picture; an approach James Blaut describes as“Eurocentric tunnel history.”24

All in all, the key take-home points of this discussion are first, thatWeber’s historical sociology, which spans the whole of his academiccareer, was riven with Eurocentric institutionalism. Second, whileWeber’s historical sociology was thoroughly Western-centric, neverthe-less nowhere in this extensive body of work can we find any traces ofscientific racist logic. And as the next section argues, it is Weber’sEurocentrism rather than any scientific racism that underpins his variousconceptions of international politics.

Weber’s Eurocentric Conceptions of InternationalRelations: His “Early” Realist Writings

It is a staple of the extensive secondary literature that realism under-pinned Weber’s analysis of politics and IR. Indeed, for some observerswithin IR,MaxWeber is viewed as one of the founding fathers of realism,if not its “godfather.”25 Equally, some see in Weber’s writings a latentproto-Nazi voice, either in his alleged calling for Germany to pursueworld power (Weltpolitik orWeltmachtpolitik), or in his supposed advocacyof the “cleansing” of the Poles and his desire for the German people to bethe “master race” (Herrenvolk). Added to this are claims concerning hisadvocacy of a great and charismatic authoritarian leader (which pre-empted Adolf Hitler), which some see as coupled with Nietzsche’s con-cepts of the Übermensch and the will to power. Thus as R. B. J. Walkerargues, “Weber’s statist power politics has been recognised as being alltoo close to Carl Schmitt’s conception of the total(itarian) state or thepractices of the Third Reich.”26 Much of this is reinforced by the pointthat Weber joined the Pan-German League in 1893 mainly because hewas attracted to the organization’s desire to rid Germany of the Poles.

However, while Weber’s early writings on IR undoubtedly had indeedmany realist themes, though I argue that these were founded ona Eurocentric institutional- rather than a scientific racist-metanarrative,nevertheless Weber’s views shifted during World War I. Specifying theexact theoretical category that these writings fit into is a problematic task.As such I shall offer two main theoretical avenues that might apply to hiswartime IR posture; one is close to Eurocentric English School theorywhile the other has echoes of the pacifist eugenics/peace biology literature


that revolved around the core theme of defensive Europeanism. To coverall this, I shall begin with a brief summary of his early realist conception inthis subsection before proceeding on to the latter two theories in thefollowing two subsections.

Weber’s Early IR’s Links with Realism

Regarding Weber’s early IR realist writings, I shall focus on four coreissues. First, almost all commentators see in Weber’s theory of the statea pure realist conception; one that privileges the coercive means of power inwhich ethics play no part,27 and where politics everywhere is an eternalstruggle for power given that no ethical solutions are available to escapethis. Second, and running on from the first, is that the “pessimistic”theme of an eternal domestic struggle for power is transposed into histheory of international politics. Smith cites from chapter 9 ofEconomy andSociety, in which Weber depicts states as locked into a “dynamic ofpower” in which the smaller powers are constantly threatened by thegreat powers as the latter pursue great power status and prestige.28

This, of course, resonates with the familiar realist theme of struggle-without-end owing to the absence of any mitigating ethic.29

Extrapolating this out, Mommsen argues that in the absence of an ethicalsolution, Weber advocated that Germany should pursue great powerpolitics in order to gain “the utmost possible freedom through the utmostpossible dominance.”30 In this reading the statesman, for Weber, mustplace the national interest “above the salvation of one’s soul” and submit“to the genius or demon of politics.”31

The realist reading presumes that Weber rejected all ethics. But, asI shall argue in detail in the next subsection, in his famous 1919 essay,“Politics as a Vocation,” Weber critiqued what he called the “ethic of(ideological) conviction” and in its place advocated an “ethic of respon-sibility,” which requires that a leader justify his actions in terms of theiroutcome, not their purity of conception.32 However, Smith argues that“the ethic of responsibility is a quintessentially political ethic, because it isan ethic of doing evil when circumstances require it, and evil is aninescapable component of political action”;33 while Walker claims that“Weber’s . . . ethics of responsibility held out little hope for any mitigationof international conflict . . . responsibility to one’s own value sphere [i.e.,the national interest] implies the necessary intensification of internationalconflict.”34

Third,Weber’s realism is portrayed as informing his preferred Germanforeign policy, where Smith reads Weber such that because “the strugglebetween cultures is unending . . . [so this] led him to urge that Germany

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pursue its ‘cultural mission’ with bellicose vigor and, if necessary,force.”35 Germany’s “duty” or “responsibility,” which Smith interpretsas a duty to ensure the survival of the German race and state over allothers, in turn required a policy of imperialism. This would enableGerman great power through the expropriation of economic resourceswhile also enabling the maintenance of Germanic racial purity. Manysuch writers believe that this theme, coupled with various others, betraysa scientific racism.

Fourth, and following on from the third core theme, concerns Weber’scalling for the Poles to be expelled from Prussia and subsequently beprevented from entering Germany. Key here, as Coker suggests, is thepoint that Weber viewed the “ethnic cleansing” of the Poles as necessaryin order to maintain the racial purity of the German people.36 In short,this solution was necessary in order to maintain the racial purity of theGerman people as the “master race” (Herrenvolk), as well as to ensurethat the German state realize the all-important goal of great power(Machtstaat). A similar conclusion is drawn by Golo Mann, who sum-marizesWeber’s antipathy toward Russia and the “Slavic problem” in thefollowing way: “For him [Weber] life was a permanent, relentless war,and Germans and Slavs must fight like wild beasts for space [Lebensraum]in which to live.”37 Finally, there is a fifth theme, concerning Weber’scalling for a strong and charismatic leader that forms a prong of therealist-racist reading, but I shall leave that aside here.

Much of the realist reading of Weber hinges, albeit not exclusively, onan underlying scientific racism. Thus, if we ran with this body of scholar-ship in terms of its reading of Weber, we could conclude that his theoryand analysis of IR is fundamentally Western-centric as well as Germano-centric. In the following section, I shall pursue another two-prongedreading of Weber’s approach to IR, one founded on a Eurocentricinstitutionalism and the other resonating more with certain a variant ofscientific racism. Even so, I want to argue that while Weber wasWestern-centric in his early as well as in his later writings on IR, nevertheless thistook the consistent form of a Eurocentric institutionalist modus operandirather than a scientific racist one.

Weber’s Eurocentric Conceptions of InternationalRelations: His “Wartime” Writings

There is little doubt that a strong element of realism permeated Weber’stheory of historical sociology and IR.We have already shown howmilitarycompetition betweenEuropean states both acted as a vital spur for the riseand development of capitalism within Europe and was deemed to be


a natural property of the European multistate system in accordance withchapter 9 of Economy & Society. I have also argued that this conceptionreflected a Eurocentric institutionalist approach given that it is the excep-tional international “institution” of anarchy within Europe’s multistatesystem that was key (as opposed to a scientific racist Darwinian logic).However, in his wartime writings, Weber’s discussions of IR held outmany strong resonances with two other approaches. I shall begin bydrawing parallels with the Eurocentric approach of the English Schoolbefore turning to draw out links with what I shall term “defensiveEuropeanism.” Both of these approaches I derive from a reading of hiswartime writings that were later published in Gesammelte PolitischeSchriften.38

Weber’s Wartime IR’s Links with the Eurocentric English School

In his wartime writings, there is no doubt thatWeber continued to deploythe well-known terms Weltpolitik, Machtpolitik, and Realpolitik. But themeaning Weber attached to them shifted in part because they were nowrefracted through his conception of the “ethic of responsibility.” In thisspecific context, the ethic of responsibility lay midway between (unethi-cal) realist power politics and that which he called the “ethic of principledconviction.” It is here whereWeber enters the terrain of, or preempts, theEnglish School. Martin Wight famously situated IR theory in three greattraditions: revolutionism or idealism, realism, and Grotian rationalism,the latter standing midway between the two extremes.39 Likewise, wecould retain the essence of Wight’s typology by replacing his terms withthose used by Weber: the ethic of principled conviction (revolutionism/idealism) at one extreme, unethical realist power politics at the other endof the spectrum, and Weber’s ethic of responsibility similarly lying mid-way between the two. Here Günther Roth’s point is relevant:

Weber needed a term to set himself off from the worship of Realpolitik among hispolitical opponents on the right, whom he berated for their political irresponsi-bility. By choosing the term “policy (or ethic) of responsibility” he could empha-size the ethical element in politics and better confront not only the amoral politicalright but also the political left with its genuine or pretended good intentions.40

Weber’s critique of idealism is well known and I shall, therefore, deal withit quickly. In essence, it refers to his belief that idealism, as governed bythe ethic of conviction, though always motivated by the best of intentions,is nevertheless dangerous because it neglects to ethically consider themeans that could realize such ideals; means that could have unintendedconsequences that contradict the vision that was originally intended. This

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was driven home in his discussions of socialism. For while socialism wasto be achieved through the violence of the dictatorship of the proletariat,nevertheless the historical terminus of communism would, he argued, beheaded off at the pass by the inevitable emergence of a despoticallycentralized bureaucracy, which, in being unchecked, would constitutean even more repressive political system than the one that preceded it.41

Or as Ned Lebow puts it nicely in his chapter on “Max Weber andInternational Relations,” Weber “opposed radical socialist attempts atrevolution, which he dismissed as a ‘bloody carnival.’” In general, Weberconcluded that all absolute ethics lead to irresponsible action given that“[c]onsequences . . . are no concern of absolute ethics.”42

Critically, Weber argued that the same problem infected realism wherethe cold pursuit of Realpolitik requires an absolute rejection of any ethi-cally guided policy and, like its ethical antinomy (idealism), leads inevi-tably to irresponsible action and ethically unacceptable consequences.As he put it, “Anyone who makes a pact with the means of violence, forwhatever purpose . . . is at the mercy of its specific consequences,”43 andto ignore the ethic of responsibility means “becoming involved, I repeat,with the diabolical powers that lurk in all violence.”44 Weber came tobelieve that war could be prevented or ameliorated within Europe, interms of preventing the conditions for its emergence in the first place, aswell as achieving the means to secure a hasty end once it had broken out.However, it could be achieved only through the application of the ethic ofresponsibility in which central concern is accorded to the ethical conse-quences of action.

How then is this ethical standpoint embedded within his argumentsconcerning international politics on the one hand and his calls forGerman Machtpolitik, Realpolitik, and Weltpolitik on the other?Preempting English School theory, Weber urged that Germany’s “mis-sion” must be based on the need to pursue a socially responsible foreignpolicy, whose consequences are ethically important: namely, the need topromote and sustain the reproduction of all European national cultures,especially those of the smaller states.45 However, as I shall emphasize inthe next subsection, whatWeber seems to have inmind here is not a worldvision that reproduces all national cultures on equal terms (as in Herder),but one that applies only to the confines of Europe. To this end, he arguedthat Germany’s “duty” or social “responsibility” lay not in expandingGermany’s power against other states in Europe, but paradoxically withsecuring the survival of the smaller European states and nations, not leastthe Poles, the Ukrainians, the Danes, and the Swiss.46 Only Germany,positioned at the center of Europe and with the potential to bea responsible great power, could secure the continued existence of the


smaller nations on the one hand, and European international society onthe other.

It is because we are a power state, and thus, in contrast to those “smaller” peoples[the Poles, the Swiss, theDanes, theUkrainians, and others] can throw our weightinto the scales of history – it is because of this that there lies heavy on us, and noton them, this duty and obligation towards the future, to oppose the complete[cultural] domination of the world by those two powers [Russia and Britain].Were we to renounce this obligation, then the German Reich would become anexpensive luxury whose vanity would be harmful to culture . . . a luxury which weought to renounce in favour of a small federation of politically powerlesscantons . . . and return to cultivate the comfortable cultural values of a smallpeople, values which ought always to have remained the meaning of ourexistence.47

As Beetham points out, “What Weber emphasises here is the responsi-bility of power. Certainly he attributes to power an ethical significance,yet this is not to use power itself [as an end point] but the responsibilityassociated with it.”48

As noted in the previous section, it is especially Weber’s solution to the“Polish question” wherein his critics perceive a set of nationalist/realisttendencies bound up within a scientific racist posture and, for some,a latent proto-Nazism.49 But Weber’s wartime position saw him arguethat a central political concern for Germany was to secure Polish indepen-dence against the depredations of tsarist autocracy.50

A state does not have to be a “national state” in the sense that it concerns itselfexclusively with the interests of its one dominant nationality. It can serve thecultural interests of a number of nationalities, a policy from which its owndominant nationality can also benefit, if its interests are properly understood.In the light of changing needs it is now also in the cultural interest of the Germannationality to demand that our state increasingly undertake such a task.The Russian state may then as a result, through the challenge of our [ethical]example, be induced to guarantee its foreign peoples the measure of culturalautonomy that Dragomanov and other like-minded politicians made the centreof their reform programmes some fifty years ago. If so, it will not find that thisdiminishes its power, but only perhaps that the pressure for expansion on the partof its bureaucracy and the one-sided myth of Greater Russia will recede.51

Only Germany had the means to actually enable or even guaranteethe Poles their own independent state in the face of a predatory Russianimperialism. Aiming to secure the autonomy of the Poles was notjust ethically desirable, but should be, once World War I hadbegun, “a central aim of the war in the East”;52 or as Weber put itelsewhere, “the creation of military guarantees in the East is the onlypossible war aim.”53

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Indeed,Weber saw it as Germany’s responsibility to be “the liberator ofthe small nations in the [European] East, even if that duty was not directlyin the German national interest.54 Weber’s point was that “in a world” ofpower states, the independence of small nations could only be guaranteedby the tension of one great power against another – i.e., the balance ofpower. It was in this sense that Germany had a duty to be a‘Machtstaat.’”55 Or as Weber himself expressed it:

The small nations live around us in the shadow of our power.What would becomeof the independence of the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the people of Tessin, ifRussia, France, England, Italy, did not have to respect our armies? Only thebalance of the great powers against one another guarantees the freedom of thesmall states.56

This point fed into Weber’s critique of Russian foreign policy. WithinWeber’s response to the question of Fideikommiß (estates of entail) inPrussia, he writes about the threat to the Poles. Russia may be about toform a so-called international solidarity of state-permitting interests withnationalities on its western borders, but such an alliance for Weber wasmorally repulsive and could result only in the formation of “vassal states”(Vasallenstaaten) that would serve the interests of Russian imperialism.57

Here he was critical of the notion of a cordon sanitaire, which he believedthat Russia was aiming for. As with the Polish question, Weber rejectedthe extension of feudal systems within Europe. Weber stood resolutelyopposed to any system or state – German, Russian, or otherwise – thatseeks to create a series of buffer or “vassal” states inside Europe. In sum,then, Weber insisted that these smaller European cultures should havethe means to independent, democratic self-government, free from allpotential imperial predations. He also argued that Poland should enterinto a customs union with Prussia, not so as to enhance the latter’s power,but rather as a means to bind these two independent nations together inorder to secure a peaceful international society. Moreover, as Ned Lebowpoints out in his chapter on “Max Weber and International Relations,”Weber was concerned not simply to counteract Russian imperialismwithin Europe, but also to prevent the domination of Britain and itsAnglo-Saxon culture. Indeed, as Lebow put it: “in the tradition ofHerder, [Weber] warned that a German defeat [in World War I] wouldreduce the cultural diversity of humankind.”

It is striking how closely the spirit of Weber’s arguments here resonatenot with Waltz, but with Hedley Bull’s English School rationalistapproach. In contrast to Waltz, for Bull, the balance of power wasa collective institution by which all states agreed to be bound so as tomaintain international society.58 This is commensurate with Weber’s


wartime position. Pursuing a vacuous policy ofMachtpolitik or Realpolitikwithout ethical responsibility turned out for Weber to be themost funda-mental problem that confronted the European international society ofstates in the twenty years after 1900, and it was precisely this, he argued,that was responsible for World War I.59 The peaceful reproduction ofEuropean international society was threatened by an unreformedGerman authoritarianism and above all by Russian despotism (auto-cracy). Authoritarianism and autocracy were seen in particular (unlikeliberal parliamentarism) as self-destructive, which could yield onlybloodshed, cruelty, the suppression of smaller national cultures in parti-cular, and the abuse of human rights more generally.60 Until Russia hadproduced the necessary liberal reforms that would avert its militaristictendencies, Germany’s “mission” or “responsibility” was, having under-taken the necessary domestic social and political reform, to counterRussian autocracy and imperialism in order to enable the reproductionof European international society.

This notion of German “responsibility,” “mission,” or “duty” finds itsequivalent in the argument that Hedley Bull made in his discussion of therole of the great powers in reproducing international society. Greatpowers are deemed to be such only when they are “recognised by othersto have, and [are] conceived by their own leaders and peoples to have,certain special rights and duties . . .They accept the duty, and are thoughtby others to have the duty, of modifying their policies in the light of themanagerial responsibilities they bear.”61 And one of these tasks was toavoid war, or limit it once it had broken out. This could be achieved by thegreat powers’ ability to preserve the balance of power.62 Likewise,Weber’s wartime notion of great power “responsibility” is to act asguardian of (European) international society through the maintenanceof the balance of power, though Weber also saw a positive role that thesmaller powers could play in mediating between the great powers.63

Weber argued that Germany could undertake this ethically responsiblemission only once its own people had reached “political maturity.”And itwas in this context that he spoke of a “nation of masters” or a “self-mastered people,” defined as such by their ability to gain control overtheir own political destiny. This was in part to be achieved throughdemocratization and social reform, but also through the expansion oftrading empires abroad. German imperialism would also prevent a landwar in Europe for a host of reasons, including that it would help mitigatethe militarism of the authoritarian Bismarckians; it would providea stronger economic base that would enable Germany to repel tsaristcultural and military imperialism as well as British cultural and militaryexpansion within Europe; and it would help promote the political

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maturity of the German people.64 Thus overseas trading colonies anddomestic liberal political reform were two vital means by which Germansociety could reach the necessary political maturity that would enableGermany to play the key progressive role in reproducing European inter-national society and preventing damaging wars.65

Moreover, it is within the context of political maturity rather than racialpurity that Weber advocated the need for the German nation to becomea “master race” (Herrenvolk). The actual translation of the termHerrenvolk is ambiguous and some observers interpret it as the masterrace. However, what Weber meant by it was most definitely not thatwhich Hitler propagated. For Weber, it represented a “nation of mas-ters,” or as mentioned earlier, a “self-mastered people.” More specifi-cally, what Weber meant here was that under German “rule byofficialdom,” the German people had lost its sense of personal destiny,and was accordingly “politically immature” in that it was unable to playa full part in the shaping of government policy. As Weber put it:

Only a politically mature people is a “nation of masters” (Herrenvolk),which means a people controlling the administration of its affairs itself,and, through its elected representatives, sharing decisively in the selectionof its political leaders. . . .Only nations ofmasters are called upon to thrusttheir hands into the spokes of the world’s development. . . .By a “nation ofmasters” we do not mean that ugly, parvenus face worn by people whosesense of national dignity allows them and their nation to be told by anEnglish [scientific racist] turncoat like Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlainwhat it means to be a “German.”66

Indeed, this particular Chamberlain was an English expatriate whopropagandized the theme of a pan-German nationalism, which he justi-fied on racial grounds. ThusWeber’s calling for the German people to bea nation of masters was thoroughly in keeping with his liberal urging fora politically inclusive conception of citizenship, which in turn was a vitalprerequisite that could enable the state to break with Realpolitik divorcedfrom ethics, and thereby play a positive and progressive role in Europeaninternational society.

Moreover, the critical reading of Weber’s advocacy for a German mas-ter race underpins the oft-made claim that his solution to the “Polishquestion” – i.e., the expelling of the Poles from Germany – revealeddeeply nationalist and realist or even proto-Nazi tendencies. But in hiswartime writings, his position transcended this conception. For in addi-tion to the arguments already made concerningWeber’s desire to achievePoland’s independence, three further points are noteworthy. First,Weberpublicly defended the Poles against the Conservative push to expropriatetheir lands in Prussia in 1907/8.67 Second, Weber urged that Polish


cultural autonomy must not be trammeled by deference to Germanicculture and he also rejected von Bülow’s “language law” (which restrictedthe use of Polish in political assemblies) because such policies were“morally and politically impossible and nonsensical.”68 And third, asI have argued in detail already, it is clear that one of Weber’s abidingpolitical concerns was that Germany had a social responsibility to securenot just Polish independence, but the independence of all the smallercultures in European international society. Paradoxically, the conven-tional reading of Weber here assumes that Germany had a responsibilityonly to its own people – and especially to its own future generations, whichonly a “great power” could secure. But as he argued time and again in hiswartime writings, the quality of Germany’s foreign policy will ultimatelybe measured in terms of its ability to realize this “ethically responsible”progressive mission of securing European stability rather than its successin pursuing a realist agenda of world domination and great power.69

Interestingly, Weber ended his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation” bysaying that only a politically mature person (or by implication, state ornation) is equipped with an ethic of responsibility, and only in this waycan a meaningful ethical principle steer Europe to a better and peacefulfuture. By contrast, the current state of affairs in Europe at that time (i.e.,1919) had been ruined both by the unchecked ethic of conviction (viz.Bolshevik communism) and by Realpolitik. And it was precisely in thiscontext that Weber penned his famous statement at the end of that essay:

What immediately lies ahead of us is not the flowering of summer but a polar nightof icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group wins the outward victorynow. For where there is nothing, not only has the Kaiser lost his rights but so toohas the proletarian. When this night begins to recede, which of those people willstill be alive whose early summer seems not to have flowered so profusely? Andwhat will have become of you all inwardly? Embitterment or philistinism, sheer,dull acceptance of the world and of your job.70

As he concluded, it is the policies of both ethical conviction andRealpolitik that had created this “polar night of icy darkness,” preciselybecause both ignored the ethical consequences of action. And for Weber,this “icy darkness” could thaw only once an ethic of responsibility hadreturned to European politics. But until that time, it was Germany’smission to prevent any potential predatory great power from underminingthe orderly foundations of European international society.

Turning more directly to the issue of Eurocentrism, a number ofdimensions inWeber’s wartime IR posture exhibit very strong resonanceswith the Eurocentric English School. Within Bull and Wight’s pluralistapproach is an ambivalent argument concerning the need for shared

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values as underpinning a successful international society. This is madeexplicit in the case of European international society, but is rather moreambivalent in the case of global international society following 1945. Forin this post-1945 era, it is generally believed that Bull argued that sharedvalues are decidedly not a prerequisite for the successful reproduction ofglobal international society; and indeed it is this assumption that suppo-sedly underpins the rationale for calling this approach “pluralist.”But thisis contradicted by Bull’s Eurocentrism, as becomes clear in his discussionof what might be called the “Eastern problem.”71 Bull argued that con-temporary global international society was compromised by the Easternproblem. This becomes apparent in his discussion of the fifth “revoltagainst the West.”Here Bull is referring to the point that Eastern peoplesfought for cultural independence from the West. This is coupled with hiscomplaint that many third-world states were either tyrannical (or in nine-teenth-century Eurocentric language, Oriental despotisms) or simplyquasi-states (as in savage, stateless societies in nineteenth-centuryEurocentric parlance) so global international society was insufficientlysocially uniform to enable its successful reproduction. And given thatnon-Western states were unwilling to conform to theWestern standard ofcivilization, global international society stood at an impasse.While he sawEuropean imperialism before 1945 as a viable means to solve the tradi-tional Eastern problem, nevertheless he shied away from this prescriptionconcerning the postcolonial world. Instead, he argued that non-Westernstates should sign up to the “developmental requirement” – i.e., that non-Western states need to voluntarily culturally convert their societies alongthe Western model. Only then could global international society becomeorderly.

Reminiscent of this Eurocentric approach, one of Weber’s centralarguments is that all European states and societies need to conform toa specific democratic and liberal-capitalist standard. Weber’s mostfundamental claim was that European international society could besuccessfully reproduced only once an ethic of responsibility governedstate behavior (equivalent to Bull and Wight’s conception of rational-ism); this could be achieved only once a certain type of state-societycomplex had emerged (what might be called a “socially embedded”state-society complex). Such a complex presupposes a “domesticsocial balance of power” in which a “politically mature” and strongcivil society is balanced against a liberal-democratic state. In short,much like Bull ended up arguing, a shared set of Western values wasa crucial prerequisite for the successful reproduction of the Europeansociety of states. Relevant here is Wight’s argument that a domesticcommitment to the rule of law and constitutionalism was important in


the establishment of European international society.72 This thick cul-tural base on which European international society must be founded isreflected in the fact that on Weber’s criteria tsarist Russia would notbe a full-fledged member of European international society because ithad a social imbalance of power at the domestic level. Accordingly, itwould pose a constant threat to the successful reproduction ofEuropean international society so long as this domestic social imbal-ance continued. This is why he was concerned to contain tsaristRussian imperialism within Europe. Moreover, this can be extrapo-lated out into the wider global society, whereby the logic of Weber’sargument is that a more orderly and peaceful global society can bereproduced only once all states and societies conform to the liberal-capitalist model that for him originated in Europe and was entirely“self-made.”

A further Eurocentric theme that underpins Bull’s and Weber’sapproach concerns their schizophrenic conception of the world. ForBull, in his discussions of world politics prior to 1945, it turns out thatthe conception of the “anarchical society” applies only to relations withinEurope. Outside of Europe, he in effect conceptualized world politics interms of the global “hierarchical society,” such that theWest had a duty toengage in imperialism as a means to spread the “good” of Westerncivilization in order to civilize non-Western societies so that they couldjoin European international society (i.e., he positively embraced theEuropean civilizing mission).73 Weber echoes this in his calling for self-determining sovereign states within Europe while also advocating thatGermany engage in imperialism in the non-Western world in order toshore up its power so that it could play a key role in managing thesuccessful reproduction of European society. And notably, this schizo-phrenic or bipolar conception of world politics constitutes a fundamentaltrope of all imperialist Eurocentric (and scientific racist) internationaltheories.

This Eurocentric problem intersects Weber’s IR and historical sociol-ogy. For it is clear that he views Europe as a self-constituting, self-madeentity differentiated fundamentally from the non-Western world.Nowhere in his work is there a discussion of the mutual constitution ofEast and West, whereby the East played important roles in enabling therise of Europe. Instead, the non-West is dismissed as inconsequential tothe process of world development, and being irrational or uncivilizedmakes it fair game or ripe for European imperialism. All in all, themaintenance of European stability and its civilization based on a liberal-capitalist and democratic model is the key normative concern of Weber’swartime IR writings. And it is in the context of what might be called the

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theory of “European defensiveness” that I nowwish to pursuemy readingof Weber’s wartime IR further.

From the Eurocentric English School to “PacifistEugenics/Peace Biology”

Building on the argument just made, I want to explore another possibleinterpretation of Weber’s wartime IR approach. For what becomes clearin the previous section is Weber’s overriding concern to create an orderlyand functional European international society of states. This reading isone that in some respects overlaps with another approach that becameprevalent after the turn of the twentieth century – that of “pacifistEugenics” as well as the more general “peace biology,” all of which wasfounded on scientific racism and all of which was concerned most funda-mentally with maintaining European and, above all, white racial supre-macy. Here I shall focus on the overlaps betweenWeber’s wartime IR andthat which might be called, for want of a better term, the theory of“European defensiveness” or even “Western defensiveness.” Note thatin so doing my aim here is not to suggest that Weber’s IR was founded onscientific racism, but rather to point out thematic similarities betweenWeber’s wartime approach and that of the “defensive Europeanists.”Interestingly, some of these were anti-imperialist though many turnedout to be pro-imperialist.

A key route into this theory of Western or European defensiveness canbe found in the (quasi-anti-imperialist) work of Lothrop Stoddard, whowas an arch-Eugenicist and who embraced pacifist Eugenics. In hisfamous work The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy,74

Stoddard was extremely critical of the realistMachtpolitik advanced by theGerman state. For it was this, he contended, that had led toWorldWar I.And the war was catastrophic because it served to divide the white race atthe very time when the world was witnessing the “rising tide of color.”By this he was referring to the rise of China and the Islamic world and thenonwhite immigration threats to Europe (and the United States) that thistide brought in its wake. Equally, he was extremely critical of socialism ingeneral and Soviet Bolshevism in particular, again because he believedthis served to disunite the white race.75 This is worth briefly elaborat-ing on.

While for Stoddard the pre-1914 situation witnessed a series ofomens – especially the military defeat of the white Russians by theyellow Japanese in 1905 – it was World War I that was perceived asissuing a major attack on the cause of white racial supremacy.Stoddard’s largely antiwar/anti-imperialist eugenics, which echoed


others such as David Starr Jordan and Vernon Kellogg,76 led him toemphasize the dysgenic effect of World War I in which the best of thewhite stock was lost on the battlefields of continental Europe while theless fit white stock was left at home, thereby resulting in “a headlongplunge into white race suicide.”77 Equally problematic was that ingeneral, this great intra-Western civil war served merely to self-divideand conquer the unity and solidarity of the white race. Here Stoddarddescribes World War I as the “modern Peloponnesian War,” an argu-ment that fed directly into the arguments of a string of “pacifistEugenicists” such as G. F. Nicolai, Jacques Novicow, and CharlesRichet,78 as well as Helene Stöcker, Christian von Ehrenfels, andAlfred Ploetz, all of whom lamented the war on the grounds that itweakened and divided white civilized Europe. And this in turn feedsdirectly into Stoddard’s critique of the cause of national-imperialism;for it was the “Prussian plotters of Weltmacht” whom he indicts for theconflagration that unintentionally undermined white racial unity whilesimultaneously promoting the colored racial cause.79 Here he singlesout for particular criticism (as did Weber, as was noted earlier) thefamous scientific racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (one of theprecursors to Hitler) and his pan-Germanic propaganda. And, at thispoint, he also singles out Russian pan-Slavism and the rise of commun-ism on the grounds that this dealt a similarly cruel blow to the noblecause of white racial unity.80 Ultimately Stoddard was highly critical ofthe cause of national imperialism, not for the destruction that it causedin the East, but for the fact that it has shown a “callous indifference tolarger [white] race-interests,” effectively sacrificing white racial unityon the altar of arrogant and short-sighted national-imperial politics.81

In essence, Stoddard’s politics – much like Weber’s – stood midwaybetween realist Weltpolitik at one end of the spectrum and socialistutopianism at the other. Still, for Stoddard, this critique was foundedon a scientific racist analysis in which socialism and realist Machtpolitk/Weltpolitik were problematic in part for the dysgenic impact they had onthe white race. No such racist base informs Weber’s critique of realistRealpolitik and socialist idealism. But what brings them together isa desire to defend European integrity and unity. Indeed, as we haveseen already, Weber was equally critical of Russian imperialism andGerman Realpolitik on the grounds that they served to fragmentEurope.

Other pacifist eugenicists who were highly critical of World WarI adopted an imperialist stance, though again for reasons connectedto maintaining white racial supremacy in the world. The paradox ofpacifist eugenics was that a good number of its representatives who

166 John M. Hobson

advocated peace reserved such aspirations only for relations betweencivilized European states, which in turn was a function of their desire tomaintain white racial unity and supremacy. For when it came to speci-fying relations between the civilized and savage races, warfare andcolonialism were often advocated.82 Hence we confront the paradoxthat someone like social Darwinist Ernst Haeckel could set up the“pacifist” German Monist League in 1906 while also beinga founding member of the imperialist Pan-German League. No lessparadoxical is the point that in both these organizations, he was able togive vent to his brand of indirect racial exterminism, whereby theinferior races would die out naturally upon contact with the whiteraces as a function of their inability to survive in the face of the fitterrace (rather than through direct genocidal policies of planned racialextermination). Again, no such racist-Darwinian logic can be found inWeber’s approach.

But a link here lies in the point that, for Weber, European interna-tional society could be maintained only by the responsible actions ofGermany and that these required or entailed German imperialism inthe East. To reiterate, German imperialism in the East was a vitalmeans by which a future land war within Europe could be avertedwhile also enhancing German military power in order to contain thespecter of Russian and British imperialism within Europe. Whatbecomes clear in all of this is that Weber’s wartime writings on IRwere concerned most fundamentally with securing an orderlyEuropean society of states rather than an orderly global society; somuch so that Weber was in effect happy to sacrifice the interests ofand justice for the non-Western world on the altar of European peaceand stability. And so while no scientific racist logic was in place that wascommensurate with pacifist eugenics, nevertheless one could makea plausible case that Weber’s IR fed into such an approach albeit froma Eurocentric institutional perspective.

Conclusion

Overall, when seen in the round, Weber’s IR posture was theoreticallypromiscuous or polymorphous, crystallizing in not one, but possibly threeforms. But whichever theory Weber’s writings crystallized in at any parti-cular point in time does not detract from the point that all were consis-tently Eurocentric. Moreover, this was entirely consistent with hishistorical sociology, which has in so many ways formed the bedrock ofmuch subsequent Eurocentric historical sociological scholarship,whether it be neo-Weberian, neo-Marxist, or liberal.


Notes

1. I am extremely grateful to Len Seabrooke for his translations of Weber’sGerman works and other German writings as well as for much of his help inwriting this chapter, even though I take full responsibility for the finalproduct.

2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978/2003).3. Ibid., 203–04.4. Ibid., 39.5. Note that Immanuel Kant’s work was schizophrenic on this issue, with

Eurocentric institutionalism permeating his international political writings,but scientific racism underpinning his work on physical geography; seeJohn M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: WesternInternational Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2012), chapter 3.

6. For a critique, see JohnM.Hobson,The Eastern Origins ofWestern Civilisation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

7. Ibid.8. Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1986), 23 (my emphasis).9. See Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1996); Hobson, Eastern Origins.10. Max Weber, The Religion of China (New York: Free Press, 1951); Weber,

The Religion of India (New York: Free Press, 1958); Weber,General EconomicHistory (London: Transaction Books, 1981); Weber, The Protestant Ethic andthe Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen &Unwin, 1976); Weber, Economy andSociety, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

11. Weber, Economy and Society, 1192–93.12. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, I (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1986); Jean Baechler, The Origins of Capitalism (Oxford:Blackwell, 1988); Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence(Cambridge: Polity, 1985); J. A. Hall, Powers and Liberties (London:Penguin, 1986); Patricia Crone, Pre-industrial Societies (Oxford: Blackwell,1989); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

13. Cf. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, I (London: AcademicPress, 1974); Giovanni Arrighi, “The World According to Andre GunderFrank,”Review 22(3) (1999): 348–53; JaredDiamond,Guns, Germs and Steel(London: Vintage, 1998); Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas,The Rise of the Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1973); Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981).

14. E.g., Weber, Economy and Society, 1192–93.15. E.g., Weber, Economy and Society, 353–54.16. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979).17. See Stephen Hobden, International Relations and Historical Sociology

(London: Routledge, 1998); John M. Hobson, The State and InternationalRelations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 6.

168 John M. Hobson

18. Weber, Economy and Society, 385–98.19. Ibid., 398.20. Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2011), chapter 6.21. Weber cited in Scaff, Max Weber in America, 113.22. Ibid.23. See Hobson, Eastern Origins; Arun Bala, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the

Birth of Modern Science (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).24. James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (London: Guilford,

1993), 5.25. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1991); Hans-Karl Pichler, “The Godfathers of ‘Truth’: Max Weber andCarl Schmitt in Morgenthau’s Theory of Power Politics,” Review ofInternational Studies 24(2) (1998): 185–200.

26. Walker, Inside/Outside, 57.27. E.g., Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 41; Michael J. Smith, RealistThought from Weber to Kissinger (London: Louisiana University Press,1986), 24, 25; Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in InternationalRelations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 4, 9, 18–19.

28. Smith, Realist Thought, 26; cf. Christian von Ferber, Die Gewalt in der Politik(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970), 53, 68, 72.

29. See also: Sven Eliaeson, “Max Weber and Plebiscitary Democracy,” inRalph Schroeder (ed.), Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization (London:Macmillan, 1998), 49; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and GermanPolitics 1890–1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 43; Walker,Inside/Outside; R. B. J. Walker, “Ethics, Modernity and the Theory ofInternational Relations,” in Richard Higgott and James Richardson (eds.),International Relations (Canberra: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 128–87; Warner,Ethic of Responsibility, 4, 18–21.

30. Mommsen, “Weber’s Political Sociology,” 41–42.31. Peter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1996), 169; also J. P. Mayer, Max Weber and GermanPolitics, London: Faber & Faber, 1944), 109.

32. MaxWeber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in PoliticalWritings, eds. Peter Lassmanand Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

33. Smith, Realist Thought, 47.34. Walker, Inside/Outside, 58; see also Walker, “Ethics, Modernity,” 135–40;

Smith, Realist Thought, 44–53; Warner, Ethic of Responsibility, 4, 10–13, 17.35. Smith, Realist Thought, 30.36. Christopher Coker, War and the Illiberal Conscience (Boulder, CO:

Westview Press, 1998), 104; cf. Günther Roth, “BetweenCosmopolitanism and Ethnocentrism: Max Weber in the Nineties,”Telos, 96 (1993), 158.

37. Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789 (New York: FrederickA. Praeger, 1968), 209.

38. MaxWeber,Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B.Mohr, 1988).


39. Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Political Theory?,” inHerbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations(London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), 17–34.

40. Günther Roth, “Max Weber’s Ethics and the Peace Movement Today,”Theory and Society, 13(4) (1984), 494.

41. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen:J. C. B. Mohr, 1924), 495–521.

42. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 551, his emphasis.43. Weber, Political Writings, 364.44. Ibid., 365–67.45. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 129, 174–77.46. Ibid., 142–43, 175.47. Ibid., 143.48. David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (Cambridge:

Polity, 1985), 137.49. E.g., Roth, “Between Cosmopolitanism and Ethnocentrism,” 158; Coker,

War, 104.50. Ilse Dronberger, The Political Thought of Max Weber (New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts, 1971), 197, 256.51. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 128–29, cited in Beetham, Max

Weber, 141.52. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 122–23, 168–70, 172–74, 586; also

Beetham, Max Weber, 142.53. Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 263.54. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 174.55. Beetham, Max Weber, 142.56. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 176–77.57. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen:

J. C. B. Mohr, 1924), 394; cf. Weber, Russian Revolutions, 108.58. Waltz, Theory, 121, chapter 6; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London:

Macmillan, 1977), chapter 5.59. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 168, 363, 377, 496.60. Ibid., 202, 377, 435, 496.61. Bull, Anarchical Society, 202.62. Ibid., 212–13.63. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 138–39; Dronberger, Political

Thought, 173.64. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 133; Dronberger, Political

Thought, 124.65. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 113–17, 251, 489; Dronberger,

Political Thought, 143–44.66. Weber, Political Writings, 269; Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 442.67. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 123; Max Weber, Briefe 1906–1908

(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), 548.68. Weber, Briefe 1906–1908, 548; also, Weber, Gesammelte Politische

Schriften, 123.69. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 174–77, 442.

170 John M. Hobson

70. Weber, Political Writings, 368.71. See Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, 228–32.72. Martin Wight, “Western Values in International Relations,” in Butterfield

and Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations, 91; Martin Wight, “The Balanceof Power and International Order,” in Alan James (ed.), The Bases ofInternational Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 96–97, 111.

73. See especially: Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002); Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Hobson, EurocentricConception, chapter 9.

74. T. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920).

75. T. Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization (London: Chapman &Hall, 1922).

76. David Starr Jordan, Imperial Democracy (New York: D. Appleton & Co.,1901); Vernon Kellogg, Military Selection and Race Deterioration (Oxford:Clarendon, 1916).

77. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 179. Note that Edward A. Ross coined the term “racesuicide” in 1899.

78. G. F. Nicolai, The Biology of War (New York: The Century Co., 1918);Jacques Novicow, War and Its Alleged Benefits (New York: Henry Holt &Co., 1911), esp. chapter 4; Charles Richet, Peace and War, London: J. M.Dent & Co., 1906).

79. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 175.80. Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, chapters 5 and 6.81. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 204.82. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,

2003).


8 Weber’s Tragic Legacy

David Bohmer Lebow and Richard Ned Lebow

There are many possible conclusions to this book given the long shadowthatWeber cast over twentieth-century social science and political theory.Our book is about international relations, and it has been the principalfocus of all the preceding chapters even when they have addressed ques-tions like ideal types that have equally important implications for othersubjects. Our conclusion retains the focus on international relations, astwo of the authors discussed –Morgenthau and Schmitt – are central to it.Horkheimer and Adorno, whom it also treats, did not write about inter-national relations, but helped to establish critical theory, which hasbecome a major paradigm within international relations. Comparisonsof these thinkers allow us to relate them to one another through thewritings of Weber, and also to use them to explore deep tensions that hewrestled with but never resolved.We chose these thinkers because of theirprominence for international relations theory, but also because theyillustrate different approaches to Weberian tensions.

Much of what makes Max Weber immensely interesting are the deeptensions with which he wrestled but could not resolve. We address foursuch tensions: the epistemological between subjective values and objec-tive knowledge; the sociological between social rationalization and irra-tional myths; the political among conflicting values; and the tragicbetween human conscience and worldly affairs. Weber was a man of histimes, and the tensions he identified captured especially well the intellec-tual, ethical, and political problems of the first decades of the twentiethcentury. We contend they are just as germane to our era.

The German thinkers who were Weber’s immediate successors livedthrough Weimar’s failure, Hitler’s rise to power, World War II, and theHolocaust. His corpus was immensely alluring and provocative for them.Joseph Schumpeter, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, Theodor Adorno,and Max Horkheimer, among others, were deeply affected by Weber’ssubstantive and epistemological writings. They reinterpreted his ideas fortheir time, and in the process faced a difficult problem: wereWeber’s fourtensions an enduring challenge or an impetus to social science and

172

political philosophy, or had they been somehow heightened to the pointwhere they became outright contradictions?

Writing during the Weimar era, Carl Schmitt articulated a polemical,anti-rational, agonistic, and illiberal political theology. He attempted todissolve the Weberian tensions by transforming them into contradictionsor oppositions. By radicalizing Weberian thought, Schmitt honed it intoa weapon against modern liberal democracy, for which his writings arestill used today.

After World War II and the Holocaust, German thinkers again turnedto Weber to understand why their world had collapsed and what, if any,possibilities for order and human fulfillment existed in the one that wasemerging. Weber’s influence is deeply imprinted on the famous earlypostwar writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. Like Schmitt – if in anutterly different direction – Adorno and Horkheimer transformWeberian tensions into outright contradictions.

Hans Morgenthau’s early postwar oeuvre retains Weber’s tensions;they guide his analysis, although he does little to refine them. It is con-ventional wisdom to pair Morgenthau with Schmitt as their critique ofinternational law and emphasis on power has much in common. Whencomparing these several thinkers in terms of their response to Weber, themore appropriate pairing is Schmitt and Adorno and Horkheimer.By contrast, Morgenthau’s greater engagement with the practice andtheory of international politics may have heightened his sensitivity tounavoidable contingencies and unresolvable practical dilemmas. He didnot come to discern contradiction, but continued to feel potentially tragictensions.

Tragic Tensions

The four key tensions we identify run through Weber’s extensive andsubtle corpus, and were very much on the minds of some of his mostinfluential successors.

Epistemological: Weber’s epistemology begins with the Kantian mani-fold of an “infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistently emergingand disappearing events” that in themselves are neither lawful norrational. According to Weber, we categorize and select a “finite part” ofthat reality that is “worth knowing about.”1 Only what we think of as“value relevant” is likely to receive our attention. “[E]ven purely empiri-cal scientific research is guided by cultural interests – that is to say: valueinterests.”2 Only because of values do specific facts become intelligible.Social science is an immensely creative practice. The “ideal types” centralto this neo-Kantian vision of social science are “utopian” mental

Weber’s Tragic Legacy 173

constructs formed by imaginative “one-sided accentuation” in their “con-ceptual purity.”They “cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.”3

They are theoretical abstractions created as analytical tools to “grasp theelements of reality which are significant in a given case” selected out fromthe “infinite abundance of reality.”4 Weber is nevertheless adamant thatwhile facts become intelligible through the prism of value, empirical socialscience can offer no prescriptions. “An empirical science”must be robustin its methods, Weber writes, and “cannot tell someone what he ought todo.”5 It is “indisputable” that science does not answer the question“What shall we do and how shall we live?”6

Sociological: The separation of truth and morality is a key facet ofrationalization as Weber understands it. In modernity, social institu-tions – notably, the state and the market – separate from cultural “valuespheres” like science, morality, and art. Marx’s notion of the alienationof the laborer from ownership of the means of production is “merelyone special case” of this process, accompanied by many others such asthe alienation of the state bureaucrat from ownership of the means ofcoercion. “Restricted” by social differentiation to “specialized work,”moderns must confront the “abandonment of the Faustian universalityof humankind.”7 The differentiation of cultural value spheres under-mines the possibility of ethical unification. “Nietzsche has remindedus,” Weber writes, that “not only can something be beautiful althoughit is not good – it can also be beautiful because of what is not goodabout it.”8

Weber famously looks to Protestantism, among other phenomena, toelucidate the differentiation of economic institutions from cultural valuesystems. The terrible incongruity between human merit and worldlydestiny always cries out for a “rational theodicy of misfortune.”9

The heavily Augustinian Calvinist doctrines of divine omnipotence andpredestination constitute one of a limited number of “rationally satisfac-tory” answers to the theodicy problem. Born of efforts to systematize therelations between sinful mankind, omnipotent God, and the world, thebelief in predestination led Calvinists, desperate to demonstrate theirgrace, to highly rationalized and ascetic worldly conduct. The religiouslyinspired Protestant work ethic was unwittingly hypostasized into animpersonal, amoral “steel-hard cage” (Stallhartes Gehäuse) of capitalistcompetition. Though its original foundation was cultural, the logic ofeconomic necessity became dominant in social institutions independentof the sphere of cultural value. Once established, the autonomous impera-tives of market competition compelled the rationalization of the worldlyactivities of all who came under its sway, regardless of their spiritual valuesystems. Completing the dialectical interplay of the ideal and material,

174 David Bohmer Lebow and Richard Ned Lebow

this economic rationality disenchanted spiritual life and underminedcultural meaning.

Political: The “fate of a cultural epoch that has eaten of the tree ofknowledge” is to recognize that events in the world have meaning onlyinsofar as we ascribe it and that there is no one comprehensive andrational value system.10 Experience in our disenchanted age leads, para-doxically, to “polytheism” as the “numerous gods of former times, whohave lost their magic and have therefore assumed the aspect of impersonalpowers, rise up out of their graves.”11 Wemust “acknowledge” that these“gods are forever warring with each other,” that “the ultimate possiblestandpoints towards life are irreconcilable.”12 Anyone in this world, saysWeber, “can only feel himself subject to the struggle between multiplesets of values, each of which, viewed separately, seems to impose anobligation on him.”13

This view of endemic value conflict colored Weber’s view of interna-tional as well as domestic politics. The state, thought Weber, was thevehicle of inevitable conflict, although he came to believe that empireswould replace states as the leading political units. He understood thattragedy is an even more common phenomenon in international relationsbecause competition for standing among states, and especially among themajor powers, introduces an irrational element into international rela-tions that exacerbates tensions, military preparations, and conflict. Self-assertion is appropriate to great powers, and for this reason he supportedGerman imperialism. In the immediate aftermath ofWorldWar I, WeberjustifiedGermany’s entry into the war with the observation that “Anationwill forgive damage to its interests, but not injury to its honour, andcertainly not when this is done in a spirit of priggish self-righteousness.”14

Weber was troubled – even disgusted – by the kinds of people who enterpolitics. They do not possess the kind of holistic understanding, judg-ment, and commitment to respond to the objective needs of the state.This tension arises because Weber is drawn to Hegel’s conception andcommitment to reference to the nation’s so-called objective cultural tasks(Kulturaufgaben).15 Political leaders across the spectrum in Germany andelsewhere, he repeatedly complains, are focused instead on the parochialgoals of their factions.

Weber hoped plebiscitary democracy would allow a leader to governmore or less unconstrained by the hurly burly of politics and focus onnational tasks. Weber’s typology of authority might be regarded as histheoretical response to the leadership problem. Elected charismatic lea-ders could appeal to the people over the head of legislatures and overcomesome of the political restraints of pluralistic democracy. Spiritual renewalis deeply imperiled in this disenchanted world, but remains possible.


Charisma, admittedly extraordinary and evanescent, has the potential toovercome, at least in part, the stultifying bureaucratization that rationalityimposes on society. A plebiscitarian political system might allow electedcharismatic leaders to stave off the creep of bureaucratic metastasis. Evenhere, the seemingly stark opposition of irrational charisma and institu-tional rationality is desperately tangled, as preserving a residue of char-isma requires its transformation into its rationalized and institutionalizedantithesis.

Tragic: According to Weber, the breakdown of cosmic order leads notjust to renewed value pluralism, but to reckoning with an “ethicallyirrational”world.Disenchantment shatters religious systems that attemptto rationalize the seemingly senseless discrepancy between moral person-ality and worldly compromises. It is simply false that “good can followonly from good and evil only from evil, as the opposite is often true.”Notjust “the entire course of world history,” but “any unbiased examinationof daily experience proclaims the opposite.”16

Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, in which the “profoundopposition” between the ethics of “conviction” and “responsibility” issharpest.17 The former requires people to act in accord with their princi-ples regardless of the outcome.Weber describes this ethic as an unafford-able luxury. “No ethics in the world,” he reasons, “can get round the factthat the achievement of ‘good’ ends is in many cases tied to the necessityof employing morally dangerous means, and that one must reckon withthe possibility or even likelihood of evil side-effects.”18 The ethic ofresponsibility, by contrast, recognizes that people who get involved withpolitics – that is with the “means of power and violence” – are “makinga pact with diabolical powers.”19 It directs attention to the consequencesof one’s behavior, is more appropriate to politics, and international rela-tions especially. No political actor can avoid the “tragedy in which allaction, but quite particularly political action, is in truth enmeshed.”20

Anybody who fails to recognize this truth “is indeed a child in politicalmatters.”21 Weber’s ethic of responsibility remains obscure becauseaction so often has unforeseen consequences, especially when violenceis used in volatile domestic or foreign conflicts among adversaries withcompeting values.22Morally justifiable policies can produce horrible out-comes, and so too can policies crafted to produce good ones. He does notidentify the conditions that should govern the choices between them onthe grounds that they are situation specific.

After distinguishing these ethics from each other,Weber concludes thatthey “are complementary and only in combination do they produce thetrue human being who is capable of having a ‘vocation for politics.’”23

A wise leader must “be conscious of these ethical paradoxes and of his


responsibility for what may become of himself under pressure fromthem.”24 They must think with their head, but also listen with theirheart. Politics, Weber says, requires the “mature man” who is “certainthat he will be able to say ‘Nevertheless’ in spite of everything,” he hasa “‘vocation’ for politics.”25 It is “immensely moving” when, aware of hisresponsibilities and convictions, this man can say with Luther, “HereI stand, I can do no other.”26

Weber attempted to live up to his vocational ideals and confront head-on their paradoxes. He fell far short of his goals, as all of usmust, given thedifficulty of denaturalizing our most fundamental values andcommitments.27 Asked about the exhausting and painful discipline heimposed on himself as a scholar, he replied: “I want to see howmuch I canstand.” Recalling this acknowledgment, his wife, Marianne, speculatedthat he personally “regarded it as his task to endure the antinomies ofexistence.”28

Schmitt’s Political Theology

Immediately after World War I, Schmitt is reported to have attendedWeber’s “Science as a Profession” and “Politics as a Profession” lecturesin Munich, and Weber’s influence on Schmitt is well noted. Schmittwould adapt Weber’s ideas, and hone his tragic tensions into contra-dictions to be deployed as weapons against the liberalism that Weberhad supported as the best system for encouraging salubrious valueconflict and achieving national greatness.

Epistemological: Like Weber, Schmitt embraced the creativity of scho-larship and the constitutive place of ideas in imposing order on the worldand rendering it intelligible. He understood the task of the jurist as “thedevelopment of concrete concepts out of the immanence of a concretelegal and social order.”29 The Weberian scientist’s will to know finds itscounterpart in Schmitt’s “will to form.”30 Weber recognized andstruggled with what he regarded as the tension between value commit-ments and knowledge. Schmitt rejects that goal of knowledge as an end inits own right; it should serve the political. He resolves Weber’s epistemo-logical tension by framing concepts as weapons to bemobilized in specificpolitical conflicts.

Sociological: Schmitt articulated his “sociology of concepts” withpolemical intent. His idiosyncratic historical idealism identifiesa profound correspondence between an epoch’s “basic, radically systema-tic” metaphysical “structure” and its “conceptually represented socialstructure.”31 The sociology of concepts is the most fundamental sort ofintellectual history because concepts represent “the most intensive and


the clearest expression of an epoch.”32 In turn, the most important pieceof a conceptual architecture lies at its most radical point. Schmitt focusedon “borderline concepts” like sovereignty and “the enemy” that pertain tothe “outermost sphere.”33 The “exception” is “more important” and“more interesting” than the “rule.” Ordinary legal norms, he insisted,are less fundamental than their extraordinary suspension. The rule, heinsists “proves nothing; the exception proves everything.”34

The centerpiece of this sociology of concepts is Schmitt’s famousprecept that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the stateare secularized theological concepts” because “they were transferredfrom the theology to the theory of the state” and retain the same “sys-tematic structure.”35 The dependence of the natural order’s existence onthe will of an omnipotent god is transferred to that of the state on thesovereign. Neither gods nor sovereigns are bound by laws of their crea-tion; both can suspend them at will. The sovereign is “he who decides onthe exception.”36 Weber’s interpretation of the Protestant ethic at thejuncture between medieval theology and modern society had beenentirely dialectical. Schmitt, by contrast, depicts a linear transferencefrom the theological to the political. Weber’s interpretation of the theo-logical aspects of politics had been limited to an empirical analysis ofextraordinary charisma and plebiscitary institutions. If Weber sought tosupplement and balance parliamentary democracy with charismatic lea-ders, Schmitt sought to replace it with authoritarianism. He believed itwas the only form of government that could overcome the tensions ofmodernity by virtue of its ability to actualize the serious commitment ofgenuine politics and engage in decisive action.37 Schmitt’s political theol-ogy radicalizes something akin to charisma into a metaphysics of theexceptional “miracle” – a flash that reveals sovereign transcendence inthe otherwise humdrum, immanent world.

Schmitt rejects Weber’s depiction of modern law as increasinglycoherent, allowing experts to administer it in something approachingan objective manner.38 Schmitt’s political theology is anti-modern ina way that Weber’s is not. The “greatest and most egregious misun-derstandings,” Schmitt insists, “can be explained by the erroneoustransfer of a concept at home in one domain” to “other domains ofintellectual life.”39 “Every truth is only true once,” because it is validonly in its original, autochthonous domain.40 The “rationalism of theEnlightenment” is illegitimate because it “rejected the exception inevery form.”41 It is also hypocritical because behind pretensions torationality and universality lie concrete decisions. Because conceptsare essentially polemical, liberal universalism’s self-identification withneutrality and the supersession of political conflict makes it an


incoherent ideology. Even a “decision about whether something isunpolitical is always a political decision.”42 Liberalism is the mostcontradictory of conceptual systems because it defines itself as notpolitical, something no conceptual system can be. The firmest asser-tion of being unpolitical is necessarily the most rabidly political.

Political: For Schmitt, modernity’s unrequited search for a neutral,central domain has unfolded as a series of successive stages, theological,metaphysical, humanitarian-moral, and economic, each a failed attemptto transcend political conflict. Because each attempt has been a moredramatic attempt to escape from the inescapable, there has beena dialectical heightening of contradiction, as ever more radical politicalextremes lurk beneath the increasingly depoliticized surface. In Schmitt’sage of “technology,” the superlative neutralization of the political istightly enmeshed with its most extreme antithesis, the total politicizationof all life. Schmitt defines the political, what he calls the “decisive humangrouping,” as the distinction between friend and enemy.43 Since nothingcan be more serious and less neutral than the specter of violent conflictwith the enemy, politics is the central domain of life.

The enemy is a myth. This myth is the “borderline” case of the irra-tional polemical concept. Like a concept, the “creation of a political orhistorical myth,” Schmitt writes, “arises from political activity.”44

The myth offers a “great moral decision” that unifies a group and galva-nizes collective action. Because myths, like concepts, are inherentlypolemic, the most extreme myth – the myth that best establishes politicalunity and action – is a negative one that singles out a concretely, existen-tially threatening enemy “other.”

Linking political theology to this concept of the political, Schmitt aversthat by “virtue of its possession of a monopoly on politics, the state is theonly entity able to distinguish friend from enemy and thereby demand ofits citizens the readiness to die.”45 Themyth of the enemy entails a criticalgloss on the Hobbesian theory of the state. Recrudescent myth in an ageof technological neutralization represents a return to the state of nature.Hobbes’s Behemoth, the title of his account of the English civil wars, is,Schmitt claims, his mythic name for the fearful state of nature.46 Againstthe state of nature, Hobbes counter-poses another myth, that of theLeviathan. Trading peace for obedience, the Leviathan brings man outof the state of nature, where everyone is everyone else’s enemy. But,Schmitt maintains, the possibility of violence neither can nor shouldend under sovereign authority. The terrifying natural state of violence islatent even in peace, and endures in the sovereign prerogative to name theenemy. The lingering fear of the existential foe perpetuates the mythicirrationalism dominant in the state of nature.


The sovereign Leviathan was supposed to unite the political and theo-logical for the sake of peace. But the “Jewish” myth of the Leviathan,dispensed byway ofHobbes’s Protestant sensibility, permitted the privatefreedom of religious conscience. In this tiny foothold, Schmitt argues,liberalism set down roots and ultimately found the leverage to tear apartthe political and theological. By reasserting the enduring sovereignauthority to name an enemy, Schmitt hopes to expose Hobbes, whomhe describes as the secret founder of liberal pacifism. Critical of theProtestant privatization of faith, Schmitt embraced the Catholic Churchas a template for an alternative political form that would maintain thepublic and political dimension of religion.47

Schmitt addresses international relationsmore extensively thanWeber,especially in his important 1950 book, Nomos of the Earth.48 ThereSchmitt argues that under the traditional Jus Publicum Europaeum, theEuropean balance of power was no anarchic state of nature, but a politicalorder grounded on the Christian homogeneity of Europe. War was“bracketed” by common cultural and moral norms. Toward the end ofthe nineteenth century, the European Völkerrecht unraveled, replaced bya “spaceless universalism” and the empty legal normativism of the Leagueof Nations.

For Schmitt, liberalism likewise fails at the international level. Itsproponents contend that political conflicts can be resolved by legal insti-tutions. For them, law can be a neutral instrument administered byexperts – judges who render decisions by applying transparent legalnorms. But the insurmountable and intensely political question of “whodecides” remains.49 These legal fictions in practice intensify conflicts,and, when they recognized for what they are, transform them into cru-sades in which liberals resort to the most extreme forms of violence, alljustified with reference to international law. An “absolute last war ofhumanity,” a “war against war,” says Schmitt, would be “unusuallyintense and inhuman.”50 Bracketed warfare is supplanted not by perpe-tual peace, but by total war between enemies.

Schmitt arguably builds on Weber’s belief in empires as increasingly thedominant units of international relations. He describes the Grossraum –

a large, territorial space in which the state exercises effective, but notnecessarily de jure, authority. It is a kind of informal empire. His primeexample is the authority the United States exercises over most of LatinAmerica. He envisages a world dominated by a limited number ofGrossraüme. Germany was too small to be a Grossraum, and during theNazi era, he hoped it would achieve it by military and economic means.Schmitt departs sharply fromWeber in his concept of law andhowauthorityis exercised in Grossraüme; he reduces law to a mechanism of domination.


Tragic: Schmitt agrees with Weber that rationalization and the onsetof modernity imperil moral personality, that the specter of violence isthe essence of politics, and that man’s highest possibilities are foundin struggle. Schmitt’s pseudo-Catholic public mythology is neverthe-less a decisive break with Weber’s pseudo-Protestant private ethic ofconviction. Private conscience can have no enemy; individualisticWeberian conviction would negate Schmittian political unity and thetotal commitment it demands. Weber had discovered a polytheismthat beset moral commitment with tragic irreconcilability and coun-seled careful responsibility. His “Here I stand, I can do no other” wasrecognition of a contradictory and tragic world. Schmitt explicitlyworried that the polytheistic proliferation of myths would lead toa pluralism that undermined the sharp antagonism toward theenemy necessary for action.51 In place of the tragic tensions ofa complicated world that counseled reasoned restraint, he substitutedthe simplifying absolute opposition of warfare to make irrationalaction unlimited and dissolve consequentialist considerations ofresponsibility. Nor would Weber equate liberalism with the “neutrali-zation” of genuine politics. Liberalism could afford a space for genu-ine political struggle.

With his apotheosis of the extreme, Schmitt rejects ex ante theWeberian pathos of tension, asserting rather that any conceptual opposi-tion is tantamount to an outright contradiction. One of Schmitt’s earliestand best critics, Karl Löwith, argued that the opposition between rationalstultification and action spurred by irrational myth leads Schmitt intoa self-referential incongruity. His instrumental view of concepts as con-crete weapons situated in existential conflict abrade against his essentia-lizing conceptual definitions and assertion that concepts can be “true,”but only in their distinctive metaphysical epoch. Schmitt’s critique ofsubstantive metaphysics, Löwith maintains, commits him to the hollow“decision in favor of decisiveness.”52 Despite his insistence on the specter ofthe state of nature, there is no “natural” distinction between friend andenemy, but rather it emerges “accidentally or occasionally.”53 Schmitt’sconcept of the political reveals a “radical indifference” to “any kind ofpolitical content.”54 This arbitrariness is at loggerheads with his pro-claimed method. The political is “determined” by “clearly evaluatingthe concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctlythe real friend and real enemy.”55 Yet his essentializing agenda of creatingmyths of the enemy as a means of motivating political action depends onthese myths being taken seriously. Schmitt’s ideology critique of con-cepts, argues Löwith, undermines his ideological construction ofmyths tomobilize political action.


Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Schmitt’s writings were central to interwar German thought and eitherwith or were complicit in Nazi ideology. To critical theorists struggling tounderstand the Nazi catastrophe, Weber was an equally fundamentalresource. Especially inDialectic of Enlightenment, written in the immediateshadow of the war, Adorno and Horkheimer dissolved Weber’s tensionsinto outright contradictions, not, like Schmitt, in order to forge weaponsagainst liberalism, but rather as part of a profoundly bleak associationbetween fascism and Western rationalism. In this specific sense – radica-lization by transforming tension into contradiction – these extreme leftand extreme right Weberians share more in common (conceptually, not,of course, politically) with each other than with their shared progenitor.

Epistemological: Horkheimer’s seminal 1937 essay “Traditional andCritical Theory” offers a methodological critique of Weber. He, too,starts from Kant, claiming that the manifold is not in a “pre-establishedharmony”with the understanding, and that “reality is sunk in obscurity.”Kantian epistemology fails to distinguish between natural and socialworlds. The “world which is given to the individual,” says Horkheimer,is “a product of the activity of society” and not just of nature.56 Onceunderstood as an artifact of social activity, the Kantian “two-sidedness”of “supreme unity and purposefulness” and of “obscurity” and “impen-etrability,” he contends, “reflects exactly the contradiction-filled form ofhuman activity in the modern period.” Reality’s obscurity is not due toa rift between man and nature, but arises because men’s “work and itsresults are alienated from them.” The social world thus “seems to be anunchangeable force of nature, a fate beyond man’s control.”57

Horkheimer argues that the “alienation” described earlier manifestsitself in the Weberian “separation of value and research,” as the scientist“regards social reality and its products as extrinsic to him.”58 But becausethe “facts which the individual and his theory encounter are sociallyproduced,” that which is intelligible to the social scientist is determined –

if unintentionally – by worldly activity.59 Value relevance is the precondi-tion for the intelligibility of scientific knowledge and is dictated by socialorganization. In “traditional” theory, which he associates with Weber,Horkheimer claims, “the genesis of particular objective facts” is “taken tobe external to theoretical thinking itself.” Moving closer to Schmitt, heargues that the “truth” of facts cannot be decided by “supposedly neutralreflection,” but only in “personal thought and action.”60 Attempting toavoid values yields not neutrality, but systematic apologies. “[I]f we thinkof the object of the theory in separation from the theory,” Horkheimerinsists, “we falsify it and fall into quietism or conformism.”61


Critical theory, Horkheimer asserts, endeavors to “transcend the ten-sion” between theory and reality and to “abolish the opposition” betweenhuman rationality and the “work–process relationships on which societyis built.”62 Theory cannot and should not maintain the Olympian objec-tivity that Weber is alleged to have set as the scientist’s vocational ideal.Rather, it must adopt a method that reflexively recognizes its own social“situatedness.” Critical theory emerges as “a protest generated by theorder itself” and is committed to changing that order.63 It is “an elementin action leading to new social forms.”64 For the critical theorist, “willingand thinking, thought and action” can and must be fused.65

Sociological: Horkheimer’s essay is an important stepping stone inthe development of the Frankfurt School; with it, the traditional critiqueof political economy develops into a broader andmore abstract critique of“instrumental reason.”66 This move reached fruition in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Here, Horkheimer and Adorno radically rescale theWeberian dialectic and trace the genesis of the crisis of reason “incom-parably further back” than the late medieval emergence of bourgeoisthought, and all the way to the beginnings of Western civilization.67

The West begins with fear of the incomprehensible natural powers.The “cry of terror called forth from the unfamiliar becomes its name.”68

These myths projected anthropomorphic characteristics upon the inscru-table and terrifying forces that determined the fate of human beings.Absent the conceptual distinction between humanity and nature, magicalthinking was mimetic; mankind sought to influence the gods and demonsby imitating them through effigies or rituals.

Supplanting myth and making humanity the master, not the victim, ofnature were long a goal of rationalists. In Homer’sOdyssey, especially theencounter with the Sirens, we discern the primordial rudiments of thedialectic of enlightenment. The Sirens promise knowledge of all that hashappened – a metaphor for the dissolution of the self into the unchangingpast. To resist their appeal and preserve his individuality and future,Odysseus must do violence to himself by being bound to the ship’smast, and must plug the ears of his crew to ensure their unreflectiveobedience. By cunningly introverting sacrificial violence, Odysseus extri-cates the self from nature and its temptations. He makes himself anisolated exception to mythic fate by finding a “loophole.” The saga asa whole can be read as the struggle of its eponymous hero to extricatehimself from mythic powers to return home and resume sovereignkingship.69

Enlightenment aims at liberating human beings from fear, dispellingmyth with knowledge, disenchanting the world, and installing humanbeings as sovereign masters over nature. Man knows things to the extent


that he can classify and manipulate them. For “totalitarian” enlighten-ment, exemplified in the language of mathematics, nothing can beallowed to remain outside the system of knowledge; every unknownmust be classified and integrated into a new equation, and therebymade into something “long familiar.” Animism is then extirpated andthe multiplicity of gods is reduced to the unifying common denominatorof universally fungible matter. The “ambiguous profusion” of mythicfigures is replaced by a single dichotomy between mankind and theworld, between the knowing subject and known object. As with theSchmittian opposition of friend and foe, there is a reduction to a singlequintessential binary.

The ever-greater subjugation of the object and abstraction of the sub-ject paves the way for the reversion of enlightenment intomyth. Themorefully the “machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly itis satisfied with reproducing it.”70 Inevitable fate – the “eternity of theactual” – is as integral to the “arid wisdom” of mathematical laws, thetechnologies of control, and the unchanging repetitions of worldly orga-nization as it had been to primal myth.71 Self-preservation – the purposeof enlightened mastery of the world – is automated, uncoupled from thesubject who conjured it. Instruments become autonomous from theircreators. Once again, man is brought under the domination of immutableworldly powers.

Political: Whereas Weber coupled his account of the iron cage of socialrationalization with the revival of the polytheism of irreconcilable valuecommitments, themythology of Adorno andHorkheimer retains only theidea of myth as the accession of the eternal recurrence of irresistible fate.Arguing that modernity imperiled moral personality, Weber stoppedshort of asserting that it necessarily extinguished it. ForWeber, the returnof myth was not the final, stifling outcome of a dialectical Enlightenment,but a description of the values that might still enchant in a disenchantedage. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the fatefulness born of world domina-tion turns completely against the impermissibly incongruous and nowsuperfluous subject – closing, so to speak, the loophole.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the abolished subject is replaced by theautomatic mechanisms of the modern social order. Human beings areforced into conformity, difference is liquidated, and individuality is sub-sumed into the “herd” – an entire society of Odysseus’ oarsmen. In“factory and office,” reified and supremely passive human beings mustconform in order to survive. Whereas once “[a]nimism had endowedthings with souls,” now “industrialism makes souls into things.”72

Human beings are dissolved back into the “mere nature” from whichthey had first fled. The “oldest fear” of “losing one’s own name” is


fulfilled.73 Yet there is no cry of protest, because popular culture itself issubjugated by totalitarian reason. Liberalism was supposed to protect theindividual, but as capitalism became mass production, the individual wasswept up into the mass of stultified consumers. The culture industryprovides empty products for easy consumption. Culture reduces to pro-paganda, and plays its role in pacifyingmass society. Their critical theory,then, is in essential agreement with Schmitt’s claim that the pinnacle ofenlightened civilization is a cliff over which we fall back into the violentand terrifying state of nature. Their dialectical account further echoesSchmitt in foregrounding the deeply dangerous powers of myths and theirperverse capacity to undo their creators. Rationalizing civilization, theyconclude, is inextricable from increasingly profound irrationalbarbarism.74

Tragic: For Adorno and Horkheimer, fascist politics are the outgrowthof the dialectic of enlightenment. The “moment of mendacity” of theoriginal myths, perpetuated by enlightenment ultimately exposed as puredominion, triumphs in the “fraudulent myth of fascism.”75 Racial partic-ularism breaks with civilization and is a “regression to nature as mereviolence.”76 Fascism deploys “oppressed nature’s rebellion” againstmankind’s dominion in the service of domination.77 Fascist myths andrituals attempt to dedifferentiate subject and world, but by contrast toprimeval mimesis in which the subject made itself resemble its surround-ings, the “false projection” of the fascist subject demands that its sur-roundings resemble itself.78 In its concomitant “rage against difference,”anything left in the world that stands for difference becomes an enemythat must be liquidated.79 Yet in this radically pathological version of theKantian synthesis of concepts and intuitions, nothing substantive is left ofthe “exhausted” self, which has “give[n] up the ghost.”80 Conscience isliquidated, leaving only a drive for self-preservation, expressed as a blindhostility and lust for dominion turned against humanity. For the paranoidsubject, the outside world is a palimpsest for its delusions, which areprojected outward to create a unified illusion “petrified as reality.”81

Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes no less of a “rejection of Weber’sambivalent and resigned commitment to modernity.”82

Subsequent generations of Frankfurt school critical theorists likeJürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib understand that the totalizingrescaling of Weber’s dialectic lead Adorno and Horkheimer into insuper-able aporias. Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory turns enlighten-ment as a tool of demystification against enlightenment itself.83 But ifdominion is inherent in and the fulfillment of reason, then critical theory,itself a species of enlightenment, unavoidably “perpetrates the very struc-ture of domination it condemns.”84


This critique has important sociological ramifications. For Weber,the loss of social freedom imposed by the institutions of rationalizedbureaucratic capitalism was causally connected to the erosion of cul-tural meaning, but it was analytically distinct. It was due to thisdistinction between social institutions and cultural value that therewas any ambivalent space for moral personality to resist the ironcage. By contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer portray culture as nothingbut an industry serving as the ideological handmaiden of social orga-nization. Their indictment precludes any recognition of the “achieve-ments of Occidental rationalism” and denies the possibility of anythingemancipatory in the “rational content of cultural modernity.”85

If rationalization has totally absorbed cultural meaning into socialproduction, then “one-dimensional man” has no crisis or conflict ten-dencies on which to draw in pursuit of change. There are no resourcesof cultural meaning left on the basis of which to critique the social lossof freedom. Critical theory, Benhabib argues, accordingly loses touchwith any historically situated agents of immanent change orientedtoward some sort of social emancipation. By rejecting the “continuumof history” in toto, no constructive vision of an emancipated society canbe connected with historically situated needs and aspirations.

Morgenthau’s Realism

Morgenthau comes closest to preserving, even advancing, Weber’s ten-sions. Like Schmitt, he attended Weber’s lectures in Munich, and wasfurther exposed to his thought through the teaching of his Munich pro-fessor Hans Rothenbücher. He was deeply influenced byWeber, but alsoby Carl Schmitt; his doctoral thesis was a reply to Schmitt’s Concept of thePolitical.86 Schmitt in turn borrowed from Morgenthau, but neveracknowledged it. Morgenthau also makes few references to Weber in hiscorpus, especially those works in English written for American audiences.

Epistemological: Morgenthau followed Weber in finding a profoundrelationship but equally pronounced tension between theoretical knowl-edge and practical policy making. Like Weber, he conceived of the socialworld as “a chaos of contingencies,” but “not devoid of a measure ofrationality.”87 He recognized that theory inevitably reflects our normativecommitments and the problems we identify as important. Morgenthaupuzzled over Weber’s distinction between “fact” and “value,” which hebelieved English-language translations to misrepresent.

I think that this is one of the curses that a misunderstoodMaxWeber has inflictedon us. The distinction between facts and values in the social sciences is, I think,


extremely tenuous. Every fact in the social sciences that has any relevance ispermeated with value; otherwise we would not have chosen it. The very percep-tion of something as a relevant social fact presupposes a value-determined choiceamong a multitude of facts from which one chooses certain facts which are, forsome reason, interesting to one, that is to say, which have a positive or negativevalue, as the case may be. The problem with whichMaxWeber dealt was not thisproblem of values of facts objectively considered, but rather the attitudes whichthe individual scholar takes toward society in either dealing with it in an explana-tory fashion or dealing with in a value-oriented fashion. But I think that even thisdistinction is very difficult to maintain, so I really do not accept the distinction.88

In contrast to Schmitt’s epistemology of ideas as weapons and Adornoand Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical theory,Morgenthau sought to keep alive Weber’s tension between “fact” and“value.” Morgenthau argued that there are nearly endless ways of orga-nizing and describing reality and the principal step in research is toimpose limits on their world. The labeling of something as a “fact” isaccordingly a value choice that reflects a researcher’s commitments andinterests.89 For Morgenthau, the questions we ask and the methods weuse to find answers cannot be divorced from our politics. For this reason,scholarly as well as political questions have important ethical dimensions.Classical realism is not only a framework for studying international rela-tions; it is a way of doing ethics. The subjective decision to undertakea research program must be based on a commitment to a kind of sciencethat can inform practice. Morgenthau insists that “All lasting contribu-tions to political science, from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to theFederalist, Marx, and Calhoun, have been responses to such challengesarising from political reality. They have not been self-sufficient theoreticaldevelopments pursuing theoretical concerns for their own sake.”90 Greatpolitical thinkers confronted problems that could not be solved with thetools on hand; the role of the theorist is accordingly to develop new waysof thinking that use past experience to illuminate the present.91

For Weber, the danger science faces is that it will give in to the unscien-tific temptations, become politically prescriptive, and lose the value neu-trality that defines it. ForMorgenthau, theory aims at objectivity, not in theWeberian sense of autonomy from value commitments, but from theinfluence of power. Scientists of all kinds must maintain their ethical andpolitical autonomy; once they lose it, the critical edge of their enterprise isblunted. However, social science is a reflection of the power structure, and,not surprisingly, itsfindingsmost often justify that structure andbuttress itslegitimacy. “Truth itself becomes relative to social interests and emotions.”The real danger, in Morgenthau’s view, is that the quest for relevancewould transform scientists into lapdogs of the establishment.92


Ostensible value neutrality is worse, in his view, than outright pander-ing to power. He condemns American social science for moving in thisdirection. Economics in particular had reframed social issues as problemsof efficiency and tried, by doing so, to depoliticize them, but only madethem more political by smuggling values in through the back door.93

Scientism of this kind removes all the critical questions from the intellec-tual agenda and leads to “a general decay in the political thinking of theWestern world.”94

Sociological: Morgenthau was a critic of the Enlightenment for many ofthe same reasons as Weber. He criticizes the Enlightenment’s misplacedfaith in reason as the underlying cause of the twentieth century’s horrors.Reason had undermined religion and the values and norms that hadpreviously restrained and channeled individual and collective behavior.It enabled advances in technology and social organization responsible forthe modern industrial state, which was the most effective means ofexercising power. That state became the most exalted object of loyaltybut itself stood beyond value. “While the state is ideologically and physi-cally incomparably more powerful than its citizens, it is free from alleffective restraint from above. The state’s collective desire for power islimited, aside from self-chosen limitations, only by the ruins of an old, andthe rudiments of a new, normative order, both too feeble to offer morethan a mere intimation of actual restraint.”95 The Enlightenment’semphasis on reason, Morgenthau insists, is at odds with human naturebecause it totally ignores spiritual aspirations and needs. By brushingthem aside, it guarantees that people will seek to fulfill them by returningto old myths or new ones that promise to restore their human worth. Thisaccounted for much of the appeal of fascism.96

Morgenthau maintains that the power of the state feeds on itselfthrough a process of psychological transference. Impulses constrainedby ethics and law are mobilized by the state for its own ends.By transferring their egotism to the nation, people gain vicarious releasefor otherwise repressed impulses. What was formerly egotism, andignoble and immoral, now became patriotism, and therefore nobleand altruistic. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis took this process a stepfurther and encouraged direct violence by citizens against communitiesand classes they labeled enemies of the state.97 Weber regarded thestate as a positive power, loyalty to which could overcome divisive valuepluralism. Morgenthau depicts at least some states as villains.

Political: Morgenthau thought about the limitations of political science.As an autonomous sphere of struggle, the extent to which the politicalcould be rationalized by theory is sharply limited. The fallibility of knowl-edge and the absence of logical foundations ensure the inescapable


irrationalism of political life.98 Choices, even informed ones, are proble-matic and possibly tragic because they require difficult and logicallyindefensible trade-offs between political goals and between them andethical commitments. Nor is there any guarantee they will produce theresults that made them attractive at the time. Theory could help order thesocial world only insofar as it provides a limited measure of guidance inmaking political choices. Policy outcomes are unpredictable because ofthe inherent complexity of the social world. The most a theory can do “isto state the likely consequences of choosing one alternative as over againstanother and the conditions under which one alternative is more likely tooccur or to be successful than the other.”99

Morgenthau surprisingly found no contradiction between his negativedepiction of the consequences of the Enlightenment and his politicalliberalism, only some tensions that he hoped might be overcome. LikeWeber, he considered liberalism the only reasonable response to a worldin which all values were subjective. He valued it even more because itguaranteed, albeit imperfectly, he recognized, the rights of individualsand equal treatment of all people under the law. In the 1960s, he was anactive supporter of the civil rights movement.

Morgenthau shares Weber’s concern about leadership and frames it insomewhat similar terms. In the 1940s, he was nevertheless highly criticalof Anglo-American liberalism’s approach to foreign policy. He attributedisolationism to liberalism’s rejection of power politics and its tendency toignore or downplay the political element in both domestic and foreignpolitics. It “argues against war as something irrational, unreasonable, anaristocratic pastime or totalitarian atavism which has no place in themodern world.”100 This ideology, he maintained, blinded liberals to thetrue nature of the fascist challenge and left their countries unprepared todeal with it. Morgenthau acknowledged that this was an historical acci-dent, and not something inherent in liberalism.

His conception of national interest is of something that is quasi-objective in nature. He is willing to admit alternative conceptions, butthey are few in number – two really – and deeply rooted in Americanpolitical culture. He all but rejects one of them: the Jeffersonian under-standing of America’s wider mission to support other democracies.101 Heconsistently urges American leaders to focus on the national interest. Headdresses his pleas to those he understands to be motivated by largelydomestic political concerns and those with idealistic visions of the worldand America’s role in bringing them to reality. His Jeremiads can be readas akin to Weber’s.

Morgenthau differs from Weber in that his conception of the nationalinterest is not rooted in Hegel and Social Darwinism, but in his historical


reading of regional and international politics. He follows Weber andNietzsche, but also Hobbes, in believing that politics is a struggle fordomination, and international relations more so because there are fewerconstraints on actors. States must protect themselves bymaximizing theirpower, but also be restrained in using it. To the extent they benefit fromexisting territorial and other arrangements, they must cooperate withother states interested in preserving the status quo to check the ambitionsof those who would challenge it.

The same tension that characterized Weber’s approach to domesticpolitics characterizes Morgenthau’s approach to international politics.The selection process that governs leadership and policy making indemocracies is inimical to thinking and acting in terms of the nationalinterest and is largely anathema to a foreign policy based on the balanceof power. Democratic regimes produce leaders focused on domesticissues, and democratic leaders must sell their foreign policy in terms ofbroader value commitments. Foreign policy risks becoming a crusade, atthe expense of the national interest as Morgenthau alleged it had duringthe first decade of Cold War. In Scientific Man and Power Politics,Morgenthau proclaimed: “liberal wars far from fulfilling the liberalhopes [to end war], even brought about the very evils which they weresupposed to destroy. Far from being the ‘last wars,’ they were only theforerunners and pioneers of wars more destructive and extensive thanpre-liberal ones.”102

Morgenthau’s critique of liberalism sounds like that of Schmitt. But hisanalysis of fascism is a veiled critique of his political nemesis. The com-partmentalization of politics as a separate domain is a justification of purepolitics and the use of any means available to achieve ends. It justifies andencourages rather than seeks to retrain “the will to power.” Fascism is thepractical expression of this outlook on life and politics.103

LikeWeber,Morgenthau displays considerable nostalgia. In his case, itis for the bygone aristocratic age when Europe was a common culture andaristocratic leaders were allegedly committed to preserving it and itspolitical units by means of the balance of power. The balance of power,he insisted, worked well because leaders, while seeking advantage andrecognition, were keen to preserve the order that made status possible.Morgenthau somehow expected the balance of power to function in a verydifferent world, although at times recognized that it could not. He blamedleaders, as much as changes in circumstances, for its failure. BillScheuerman rightly observes that Morgenthau exaggerated the extent towhich the balance of power preserved the peace, protected human life,and guaranteed the survival of political units in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries.104


Weber’s solution of plebiscitary democracy does not appeal toMorgenthau, who is far more frightened of authoritarian rule than he isof the limitations and interest-based politics of democracies. To theextent that he has a solution, it is the cosmopolitan intellectual steepedin history and its lessons able to educate elite opinion and advise policymakers. Like Weber, he hoped he might fulfill such a role, and certainlycame closer to doing so than his predecessor, but was rejected, likeWeber, in a time of crisis – and for many of the same reasons.

Morgenthau also struggled, largely unsuccessfully, to address the con-nections and tensions between power and ethics. He hewed closely to theWeberian understanding of the autonomy of the political sphere, definedin terms of the struggle for power.He refers to hismentor’s understandingof the drive for power as the animus dominandi.105 For Weber, power isa tool in the fight for the “greatness” of one’s warring God, most notably,the nation. Morgenthau ignored Weber’s admonition that power wasa means to an end, and that prestige was the principal substantive goalof states. He reversed the relationship, making prestige subordinate topower and instrumental in achieving it. A state that wants to demonstratepower pursues “a policy of prestige.” It attempts to “impress othernations with the power one’s own nation actually possesses, or with thepower it believes, or wants the other nations to believe, it possesses.”106

Unlike Weber, Morgenthau theorized about how power was achievedandmaintained. Toward this end, he conceived of power conflicts amongsovereign states as inevitable and, within limits, a rational response toinsecurity.107 This helps explain why he downgraded prestige from anend to a means. States, like individuals, he wrote, seek to increase,maintain, or demonstrate their power. The overwhelming primacy ofthe struggle for power among modern states, as opposed, say, to thepursuit of prestige or justice, made international relations more rationaland more intelligible to systematic political science. With this move,Morgenthau appears to have overturned the Weberian identification ofmodern politics with recrudescent mythic irrationalism. Statesmen areexpected to abide by the rational strictures of the “reason of state,” andpolitical science depends on power’s rationality to penetrate into realitybeyond the facile “demonological approach to foreign policy.”In Morgenthau’s defense, it can be pointed out that Weber succumbedto the same contradiction. While emphasizing the irrational, he had onlysharp words for German politicians who sought refuge in irrational long-ings for worlds that never were and, by doing so, abdicated their respon-sibility to their country’s national interests.108

Morgenthau’s refusal to recognize the quest for prestige as an end forpeople and states was also motivated by his political agenda. He


considered the struggle for standing and honor the fundamental cause ofWorldWar I. Because Politics among Nationswas intended to be prescrip-tive as well as descriptive, he made standing and honor marginal to histheory of international relations. Honor was a dangerous motivation thatneeded to be restrained, if not banished as a motive and policy-makingclass. A theory that highlighted security as a goal, he hoped, mighteducate future leaders and make foreign policy more rational and lessrisk-prone.

Morgenthau was sensitive to inherent contradictions in the accumula-tion of power to advance the national interest and its misuse in ways thatthreatened that interest and the global peace. Power is nevertheless anunresolved tension in his corpus. It is absolutely central to his effort todefine international relations as a field of study in its own right based onthe centrality of power.109 Using Weber’s concept of the ideal type, heframes politics as the social domain in which power rules. But this isprecisely the world he condemns. He rejected fascism – in which heincluded Stalin’s Russia – as a movement driven by “the lust for powerwhich knows no limits nor values beside or above it.”110 Because it seekspower for its own sake, it is divorced from substantive projects rooted insome principle of justice.111 Morgenthau’s normative agenda took him ina direction at odds with his conceptual formulation of politics, and thistension became more acute in his later life with his pronounced commit-ment to civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War on ethical as wellas instrumental grounds. In effect, he was making the very kinds ofarguments for which he had earlier criticized liberals.

Tragic: In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau describes the“pre-rationalist age” as aware of two forces –God and the devil – engagedin a struggle for dominance. There was no expectation of progress, only ofcontinuing and undecided conflict. From this everlasting conflict camea tragic sense of life. Christianity introduced the idea of progress; goodwould ultimately triumph over evil and the second coming would usher ina new paradise. The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment secular-ized this vision; progress in the form of man’s mastery over nature andsocial organization now had the potential to produce a happy and justsociety. Remarkable success in harnessing nature for its productive endsencouraged equal optimism about the efficacy of social engineering. Manand the world were assumed to be rational, an assumption, Morgenthauinsisted, flatly contradicted by the experiences of the age. By denying thetragic nature of existence, the Enlightenment encouraged hubris andmade tragedy more likely.112

Ancient Greeks had multiple understandings of tragedy, attributing itto hubris, the opacity of the future, the clash of irreconcilable values, and


the necessity of making choices between or among equally admirablegoals.113 Morgenthau’s tragic view of life and politics reflected most ofthese understandings. In his lectures, talks, and articles, he attributed theSuez and Indochina interventions to hubris, and frequently spoke outagainst the deeply entrenched American belief that all problems, domes-tic and international, were amenable to solutions. He warned that effortsto impose these solutions risked producing outcomes the opposite ofthose intended, as it had for Oedipus, a play about which he and NedLebow had several long discussions when colleagues at The City Collegeof New York. These efforts were even less likely to succeed in a worldcharacterized by clashing ideologies and values. And despite, or perhaps,because of, America’s power, its leaders consistently refused tomake hardchoices in their goals, and by overextending themselves, threatened thesuccess of multiple initiatives as well as their power and influence. Thisneed for hard choices and restraint – already foregrounded in the first1948 edition of Politics among Nations – would remain central to hiswritings on foreign affairs. His sense of tragedy also embraced the realmof ideas. Schmitt viewed ideas as weapons. For Morgenthau, they weretools of restraint, and engagement with them could help develop phronesis,or practical wisdom.

Despite the inherent limitations of theory and its potential to encouragetragedy, Morgenthau believed that theory could inform practice. Goodpolicy would nevertheless depend on good leaders. He famously observedthat the moral quality of leaders would determine if a bipolar worldencourages war or peace. Despite the high premium he places on goodleadership, Morgenthau never tells us what it is or the conditions underwhich it can operate effectively. Offering a long train of historical exam-ples but no generalizations, he focused on judging good role models andemulating their behavior.

Morgenthau’s arguments were self-defeating in a parallel way to thoseof critical theory and Schmitt’s political theology. His desire to establishthe autonomy of international relations led him to frame it as a closedsystem in terms of which philosophical arguments could be presented inthe language of science.114 He flirted with a vulgar scientism at odds withhis earlier critique and with the more nuanced understanding of foreignpolicy that he espoused in his latter books and critiques of U.S. policy inIndochina. Many of Morgenthau’s epigones lost sight of the Weberianpathos by following only the Morgenthau of the first chapter of Politicsamong Nations. They portray international relations as something, notonly closed from other substantive domains, but also divorced fromethics, which negates Morgenthau’s endeavor to make theory a vehicleof political self-restraint.


Ironically, or even tragically, Morgenthau’s turn to reason asa possible promoter of constraint had the opposite effect. To appeal toan American readership unfamiliar with metaphysics and steeped in anempirical tradition, he simplified his theory and presented it asa “scientific” one. His only active disclaimer was to distinguish between“the science of politics [Staatswissenschaft]” and the “art of politics[Staatskunst],” but he centered both on the acquisition and use ofpower. By abandoning his earlier and more sophisticated German andFrench writings to “sell” his arguments to Americans, he encouragedmisinterpretation. A reductionist theory encouraged a reductionistunderstanding of international relations and an overvaluation of theimportance of power. Morgenthau’s invocation of reason and down-playing of emotions and nationalism could be interpreted as an effort topull the wool over the eyes of his readers, and to the extent it succeeded ithad the tragic effect of creating the opposite result of that which heintended.

Morgenthau was mortified by readings of Politics among Nations thatwere used to justify projects he deeply opposed, like military interven-tion in Indochina. In 1965, he participated in two television debateswith National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy over the wisdom ofmilitary intervention in Vietnam. Years later, Bundy told Ned Lebowthat after the debate, the two men talked about Politics among Nations.Bundy suggested that he could use the arguments of the book to defendintervention.Morgenthau was not pleased. Karl Deutschmade a similarobservation. In a more cordial exchange, he told Hans that it is almostinevitable that his theory becomes “hard boiled” in the hands of strate-gists like Herman Kahn who know no history. Deutsch said it remindedhim of the Heine poem describing his dream of a hangman who followedhim through the streets of Cologne repeating: “I am the action to yourtheories.”115 This cut deeply becauseMorgenthau loved Heine and hadexcoriated Kahn for treating nuclear war like conventional war andbasing his argument on the bizarre belief that human society was “aprimitive ant colony.”116 Morgenthau understood, in his own words,that “Political ideas have political consequences,” and that his writingswere often misread.117 But he never accepted his responsibility for thisphenomenon.

Conclusion

Weber’s heirs conclude that in striving to construct a rational world,modernity has created an ugly place that spawns irrational violence remi-niscent of the state of nature. Behind this shared outlook, two distinct


perspectives emerge. Although thematically, Schmitt’s agonism lies clo-ser to Morgenthau’s realism, Schmitt’s philosophy – conceived by a manhimself preoccupied with conceptual architecture – shares more in com-mon with critical theory. From the right and left, they are ideologicalcritiques of modern rationalism, the latter finding that reason hasregressed into unreason, the former that unreason was never dispelledin the first place. Critique becomes mythic and “total”; either instrumen-tal reason snuffs out subjectivity or the totalized political situationdemands unlimited war.

Hans Morgenthau proved a more faithful heir to Weber, affirmingtensions rather than finding contradictions, retaining a spirit of tragedy,and even advancing the authentic spirit of his mentor’s thought inoriginal ways. His scholarship is context-sensitive and politicallyengaged, oriented toward educating judgment and informing practice.Rather than finding a modern recrudescence of myth anda “demonological approach to foreign policy,” he turns to the consum-mate rationality of raison d’état and an alleged drive to power.Encouraging a cautious balance among international rivals, realismcould become an ideology of tolerance of value pluralism. Nationalgreatness in turn could be based on cultivated values of tolerance ratherthan antagonistic jingoism.

Morgenthau’s relative fealty to Weber might be explained by theparticular problems of his discipline and his abiding interest in foreignpolicy. The ineluctability of weighty policy making kept internationalrelations theory on the same plane as the political actors it was toinform. For the most part, Morgenthau was too practical a thinker tobe tempted by flight from contingent, open-ended politics into themisleading closure of the totalizing myths of history or politics. At hisbest, he endeavored to make theory a source of practical restraintborn of epistemological humility. The failures of Weber’s heirs topreserve his pathos, to an extent including Morgenthau himself,made Weber’s legacy, as much as his thought, more tragic than heever supposed.

Weber’s successors could not, of course, resolve the tensions in hiswork. Nor were their efforts to engage or finesse them notably successful.They appear to be inescapable features of our historical world eventhough it is different in so many ways from fin-de-siècle Europe.Twentieth-century political and economic developments appear to haveintensified all four tensions, making it more difficult, but also moreessential, to address them. Weber’s writings remain the most usefulstarting point for thinking about them.


Notes

An earlier version of this chapter was published as RichardNed Lebow, “Weber andHis Successors,” Journal of International Political Theory 13, no. 1 (2016), pp. 37–58.1. Max Weber, “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Sciences and Social

Policy,” in Hans Henrik Bruun and SamWhimster, eds., trans. Hans HenrikBruun (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 114.

2. Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Value Freedom’ in the Sociological andEconomic Sciences,” in Bruun and Whimster, Max Weber, p. 317.

3. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge,” p. 125.4. Max Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Rationality,” in Bruun and

Whimster, Max Weber, p. 34.5. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge,” p. 103.6. Max Weber, “Science as a Profession and Vocation,” in Bruun and

Whimster, Max Weber, p. 344.7. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge,” p. 120.8. Weber, “Science as a Profession and Vocation,” p. 347.9. MaxWeber, “The Social Psychology of theWorld Religions,” in H.H.Gerth

and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 275.

10. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge,” p. 104.11. Weber, “Science as a Profession and Vocation,” p. 348.12. Ibid., p. 350.13. Max Weber, “Between Two Laws,” in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs,

Weber: PoliticalWritings (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), p. 79.14. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”15. G. W. F. Hegel, “The German Constitution,” in Laurence Dickey and

H. B. Nisbet, eds., Hegel’s Political Writings (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, [1798–1802] 1999), pp. 6–101.

16. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics,” p. 362.17. Ibid., p. 359.18. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”19. Ibid., p. 362.20. Ibid., pp. 354–55.21. Ibid.22. Shalini Satkunanandan, “Max Weber and the Ethos of Politics beyond

Calculation,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 1 (2014), pp. 169–81,for a thoughtful discussion.

23. Ibid.24. Weber, “Profession and Vocation of Politics.”25. Ibid., p. 369.26. Ibid., p. 367.27. Richard Ned Lebow, “Max Weber and International Relations,” Chapter 2,

this volume.28. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,

1988), p. 678.29. Jan Mueller, “Carl Schmitt’s Method: Between Ideology, Demonology and

Myth,” Journal of Political Ideologies 4, no. 1 (1999), pp. 61–85.


30. Ibid.31. Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),

p. 45.32. Ibid., p. 46.33. Ibid., p. 5.34. Ibid., p. 15.35. Ibid., p. 36.36. Ibid., p. 5.37. William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt and the End of Law (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 185.38. William E Scheurman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt

School and the Rule of Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp.13–38, 67–96.

39. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2007), p. 85.

40. Mueller, “Carl Schmitt’s Method.”41. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 37.42. Ibid., p. 2.43. Ibid., p. 38.44. Mueller, “Carl Schmitt’s Method.”45. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 1.46. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 21.47. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1996).48. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus

Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006).49. Ibid.50. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 36.51. Mueller, “Carl Schmitt’s Method.”52. Karl Löwith, “The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt,” in Martin

Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press,1995), pp. 37–69.

53. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 147.54. Ibid., p. 150.55. Ibid., p. 37.56. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory:

Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Herder andHerder, 1975), pp. 188–243.

57. Ibid.58. Ibid.59. Ibid.60. Ibid.61. Ibid.62. Ibid.63. Ibid.64. Ibid.65. Ibid.


66. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations ofCritical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

67. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 36.

68. Ibid., p. 10.69. Ibid., p. 46.70. Ibid., p. 20.71. Ibid., pp. 20, 8.72. Ibid., p. 21.73. Ibid., p. 24.74. Ibid., p. 28.75. Ibid., p. 37.76. Ibid., p. 138.77. Ibid., p. 152.78. Ibid., p. 154.79. Ibid., p. 172.80. Ibid., p. 156.81. Ibid., p. 170.82. Seyla Benhabib, “Modernity and the Aporias of Critical Theory,” Telos 49

(1981), pp. 39–59, 40.83. Jürgen Habermas, 1987, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve

Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 118.84. Benhabib, “Modernity and Aporias in Critical Theory”; Habermas,

Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 119.85. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 121.86. Hans J.Morgenthau, “Fragment of anAutobiography,” inKennethThompson

and Robert J. Myers, ed., Truth & Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau(Washington, DC: New Republic, 1977), pp. 1–17.

87. Hans J. Morgenthau, comment in “Conference Discussion on Objectives,”in James C. Charlesworth, ed., A Design for Political Science: Scope, Objectivesand Methods (Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political and SocialScience, 1966), p. 141.

88. Ibid.89. Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. 1946), pp. 108–33.90. Ibid., p. 135.91. Stefano Guzzini, Power, Realism, and Constructivism (London: Routledge,

2013), p. 124.92. Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Purpose of Political Science,” in James

C. Charlesworth, ed., A Design for Political Science: Scope, Objectives andMethods (Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political and SocialScience, 1966), pp. 63–79.

93. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Scientific Politics, pp. 137–38.94. Ibid., p. 6.95. Ibid., p. 168.96. Ibid., pp. 10–15.97. Ibid., p. 169.


98. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, pp. 112–15.99. Morgenthau, “The Purpose of Political Science.”

100. Hans J. Morgenthau, “Liberalism and War,” 1941, p. 7. Unpublishedarticle manuscript in Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Library of Congress,Washington, DC.

101. Morgenthau, Purpose of American Politics.102. Morgenthau, Scientific Man and Power Politics, p. 67.103. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, pp. 8–9, 175–78.104. William E. Scheuerman, “Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism

and Beyond,” in Michael C.Williams, ed., Realism Reconsidered: The Legacyof Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2007), pp. 62–92.

105. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Alfred Knopf,1948), p. 41.

106. Ibid., pp. 69–82.107. Ibid., p. 125.108. Lebow, “Max Weber and International Politics.”109. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics.110. Hans J. Morgenthau “National Socialist Doctrine of World Organization,”

in Morgenthau, The Decline of Democratic Politics (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1962), pp. 245–72.

111. Morgenthau, “Purpose of Political Science.”112. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, pp. 174–78.113. Catherine Lu, “Tragedies and International Relations,” in Toni Erskine

and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Tragedy and International Relations (London:Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), pp. 158–71.

114. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations.115. Karl W. Deutsch, Comment in “Conference Discussion on Methods,” in

Charlesworth, Design for Political Science, p. 233.116. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 62–78.117. Morgenthau, “Purpose of Political Science.”


Index

Adorno, Theodor, 8, 172, 173, 182, 184,185, 187

agency, 54, 63, 93, 98anarchy, 119, 132anti-Semitism, 13, 16Archiv für Sozial Wissenschaft und

Sozialpolitik, 11aristocracy, 23Aristotle, 40, 187Aron, Raymond, 99, 101, 111Augustine of Hippo, 187Austro-Hungary, Austria, 23, 33Austro–Prussian War of 1866, 59authority, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 132,

133, 136, 141

balance of power, 61, 190Barnett, Michael, 121, 132Beetham, David, 158behaviouralism, 97Beiser, Frederick, 49Belgium, 32Benhabib, Seyla, 186Berlin, 16Bildung [education], 42, 49Bismarck, Otto von, 3, 11, 26Blaut, James, 153Bloch, Ernst, 13Bourdieu, Pierre, 115bourgeoisie, 23, 124Brest-Litovsk Treaty of, 12Britain, 33Bull, Hedley, 7, 160, 162, 163, 164Bundy, McGeorge, 61, 194Burckhardt, Jacob, 20bureaucracy, 2, 3, 28, 119, 120, 121, 122,

124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130,132, 134, 135, 136

Calhoun, John C, 187Calvinism [see also Protestantism], 60capitalism,24,50,60,110,122,124,136,139

causation, 43, 87, 93, 126Cervantes, Miguel de, 33Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 161, 166charisma (see authority), 82, 84, 85China, 53, 122Christianity [see also Calvinism,

Protestantism], 192Coker, Christopher, 155City College of New York, 193civil service, 129, 132Clark, Ian, 133Collins, Randall, 148, 151communication, 123, 126Comte, Auguste, 50constructivism, 6, 40, 63, 119, 122, 144Corbyn, Jeremy, 32counterfactuals, 60, 68critical theory [see Adorno, Habermas,

Horkheimer, Marcuse], 172

Dahl, Robert, 97, 98, 102, 103, 104, 113Darwin, Charles, 23democracy, 30, 62Democratic Peace research program, 62Deutsch, Karl W., 19, 194Dilthey Wilhelm, 4, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47,

48, 49, 50, 51, 65, 67, 72, 73Dilthey, 42, 44diplomacy, 122domination, [see Herrschaft], 119Droysen, Johann, 42Du Bois, W. E. B., 151Duhem, Pierre, 84

efficiency, 122, 125, 126, 135Egypt, 122Ehrenfels, Christian von, 166Eisner, Kurt, 12, 31Eliaeson, Sven, 49Elias, Norbert, 133elites, 193emergent properties, 67

200

empathy [see also historicism], 42England [see Britain], 13English School of international relations, 7,

156, 159Enlightenment, 178, 183, 185, 188, 189, 192Erleben [to experience], 42, 65ethics, 1, 6, 30, 31, 32, 176, 187, 188eugenics, 165Eurocentrism, 144, 146, 147, 150Europe, 120, 123expertise, 120, 125, 130

Fachmensch [expert], 2fact-value distinction, 4, 65, 69, 186, 187fascism, 185, 192Federalist Papers, 187feminism, 23feudalism, 62Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 48Finnemore, Martha, 121, 132, 138, 139models, formal, 67France, 13, 33Franco–Prussian War, 13, 31, 32Frankfurter Zeitung, 12, 13Frederick William IV, 57, 59freedom, 66, 120, 126, 127, 129Freiberg, University of, 11Freud, Sigmund, 70

game theory, 63Geertz, Clifford, 71Geneva, 120German Democratic Party, 12German Monist League, 167German Sociological Association, 12Germany, Weimar Republic, 12

National Socialist, 34Federal Republic, 27

Gerth, Hans H., 49globalization, 136Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 40great powers, 16, 19, 22, 31, 66Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 151

Habermas, Jürgen, 29, 185Haeckel, Ernst, 167Hayek, Friedrich, 67Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 3, 4, 10,

15, 28, 42, 67, 68Heidelberg University, 11, 12, 13, 14, 69Heine, Heinrich, 46, 48, 194Hempel, Carl, 95Herder, Johann Gottfried, 14Herrenvolk [master race] 155Herrschaft [domination], 5, 17, 99, 102,

105, 113

Hildebrand, Benno, 43historicism, 4, 10, 16, 42, 43Hitler, Adolf, 14, 24, 29, 30, 60, 172Hobbes, Thomas, 33, 179, 180, 190Hobson, John, 26Hölderlin, Friedrich, 28, 42Holocaust, 172, 173Homer, 183homo politicus, 128honor, 1, 23, 31, 32, 33, 175Horkheimer, Max, 8, 172, 173, 182, 183,

184, 185, 187hubris, 192, 193human nature, 97, 108Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 13Hume, David, 40, 43, 54, 61Hurd, Ian, 133, 142

ideal-type, 4, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88,91, 92, 93

imperialism, 7, 22, 23, 62, 107, 110India, 122individual behavior [see agency]Indochina, 193institutionalism, 131, 132intellectualsrole of, 111, 112

International Labour Organization, 120international organizations, 6, 119, 120,

121, 131, 133, 137irrationality [see rationality], 135

Jaffé, Edgar, 11Japan, 21Jeffersonian, 189Jews, 13, 151, 180Jordan, David Starr, 166Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 97, 98, 113

Kahn, Herman, 194Kant, Immanuel, 4, 8, 10, 15, 33, 40, 44,

46, 47, 51, 63, 146, 168, 182Kathedersozialisten, [academic socialists], 25Kellogg, Vernon, 166Kennedy, John F., 61Knies, Karl, 43, 59, 65, 69Kohn, Hans, 19, 36Kries, Johannes von, 49Krippendorff, Ekkehart, 117Kultur, 14, 34, 43Kulturmensch [civilized person], 2Kulturwissenschaft [human science], 51

Lask, Emil, 48Lassman, Peter, 28law, 184, 186, 192, 194

Index 201

League of Nations, 120, 122, 130Lebow, Richard Ned, 151, 157, 159legitimacy, 105, 106, 110, 115, 119, 121,

125, 130, 132, 133, 142Lenin, Vladimir I., 26liberalism, 28, 70, 181, 189, 192Lloyd George, David, 30Löwith, Karl, 181Ludendorff, Erich von, 29, 30Lukacs, Georg, 13Lutheranism, 11

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 17Macht [see power]Machtpolitik, 113, 157, 160Machtstaat, 110, 113, 159Mandeville, Bernard, 33Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, 14Mann, Golo, 155Marathon, Battle of, 59Marcuse, Herbert, 29marginal utility theory, 43, 50Marx, Karl, 23, 60, 63, 68, 70, 187Mearsheimer, John, 64mechanisms, 63Meinecke, Friedrich, 42Menger, Carl, 43, 44, 49Mesopotamia, 122Methodenstreit [epistemological conflict],

40, 41, 43, 49Meyer, Eduard, 51, 59Michels, Robert, 13Mill, John Stuart, 40, 43Mills, C. Wright, 1Mittelstände [middle classes], 23modernity, 1, 7, 174, 194modernization, 6, 7, 119, 120, 122, 123,

124, 127, 133, 134, 136, 137Molloy, Seán, 61Mommsen, Wolfgang, 154Morgenthau, Hans J., 1, 8, 61, 66, 172, 186,

187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193,194, 195

Munich, 12, 186Mussolini, Benito, 30

national interest, 189, 191National Liberal Party [Germany], 11National Party [Germany], 3nationalism, 13, 14, 21, 28neo-Kantianism, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 65neo-positivism, 67, 86neoliberalism, 100New Public Management, 130New Yorker, 68

Nicolai, Georg Friedrich, 166Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 28, 34, 66, 174, 190North America, 123Novalis [Georg Philipp Friedrich von

Hardenberg), 42Novicow, Jacques, 166

Oakes, Guy, 49Oedipus, 193organizational sociology, 129, 132, 136Ottoman Empire, 27

Pan-German League, 24, 167Parsons, Talcott, 1phronesis, 193Plato, 187plebiscitarian democracy, 3Ploetz, Alfred, 151Poland, 159, 169polarity, 62polytheism, 99, 111, 113, 175, 181power, 5, 17, 21, 26, 27, 66, 176, 191,

192, 193prediction, 97, 167, 192, 193, 194prestige, 25, 26, 37, 111Primat der Außenpolitik [primacy of foreign

policy], 16, 70Protestantism, 122, 138, 174psychology, 65, 67public administration, 119, 124, 129, 130,

131, 132, 134, 136

Rachfal, Felix, 60racism, 13Radbruch, Gustav, 49Ranke, Leopold von, 42, 46, 51Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Egon, 121rationalism, 119, 122rationality, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126,

127, 130, 135, 136, 138Ratzenhofer, Gustav, 151Rawls, John, 112Realism [see also Machtpolitik], 1Realpolitik [see Machtpolitik], 32, 157, 160,

162, 166regularity theories, 51, 62Rhine, 130Richet, Charles, 166Rickert, Heinrich, 49, 52, 65Ringer, Fritz, 29Romanticism, 42Roscher, Wilhelm, 50, 52Roth, Günther, 156Rothenbücher, Hans, 186Russia, 13, 27

202 Index

Said, Edward, 144, 145Schelling, Friedrich, 28, 42Schelling, Thomas, 43, 64Scheuerman, William, 190Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 42Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 42Schmitt, Carl, 172, 173Schmoller, Gustav, 43, 49scholarship, 79, 80, 89, 90, 91Schumpeter, Joseph, 19science, 84, 89, 90, 91security, 32, 33selection (Auslese), 100, 102Sermon on the Mount, 17Seven Years’ War, 57Shils, Edward, 1Simmel, Georg, 40, 52, 64, 65simulation, 67Skocpol, Theda, 151Smith, Adam, 146Smith, Michael J., 154Social Darwinian, 24, 108, 111, 113Social Democratic Party [Germany], 10socialism, 3sociology, 6, 7, 12, 54, 71, 99, 101–106,

109, 110–111, 119, 120, 143–144,148–153, 177–178

Sombart, Werner, 11, 34Sonderweg [special path], 43sovereignty, 146Soviet Union, 27, 28Speirs, Ronald, 28Spencer, Herbert, 146Stalin, Josef V., 30, 192Stände (status groups), 20state, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 175,

188, 190, 191statesmanship, 99, 107status [see also Stände], 1, 25Stöcker, Helene, 166Stoddard, T. Lothrop, 165Stresemann, Gustav, 27Strong, Tracy, 71Suez Canal, 193sultanism, 127Switzerland, 22, 27

teleology, 68Therborn, Göran, 172Thucydides, 33Tilly, Charles, 110, 151Toller, Ernst, 13Tönnies, Ferdinand, 163tragedy, 28, 176, 193transaction costs, 131

Treitschke, Heinrich von, 151Troeltsch, Ernst, 42

Ukraine, 25United States, 12utilitarianism, 134

values [see also fact-value distinction],64, 187

Versailles, Treaty of, 120Vienna Circle, 69Vienna School [see Methodenstreit]Vienna, University of, 12Vietnam, 194violence, 22, 32, 98, 100, 101, 106, 109,

110, 115, 137, 176, 179voluntary associations, 119

Wahlverwandtschaft [elective affinities], 60Walker, R. B. J., 153, 154Walt, Stephen, 61Waltz, Kenneth N., 27War [see also World Wars I and II], 12,

22, 109Washington consensus, 64Weber, Marianne Schnitger, 11Weber, Max, books and essays,

“Die ‘Objektivität’sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis”

Economy and Society, 12, 13, 18, 19,20, 21, 41, 126, 131, 137, 139, 140,141, 142

“Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet derkulturwissenschaftlichen Logik”, 41

“Politics as a Profession,” 177Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

12, 54, 56, 60, 63Roscher und Knies und die logischen

Probleme der historischenNationaleökonomie, 41

“Science as a Profession,” 177Sociology of Religion, 190Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden

Soziologie, 41Wendt, Alexander, 68Wight, Martin, 156, 162Wilhelm II, 27Willkür [arbitrariness], 7, 126, 139Wilson, Woodrow, 90Windelband, Wilhelm, 44, 46, 51World War I, 13, 19, 22, 34, 177World War II, 172, 173

Zentrum [Center Party] [Germany], 3

Index 203

max weber and international relations

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