Max Weber in Japan

Max Weber Programme

Authors like Francis Fukuyama or Robert Putnam claim that modern societies suffer from a decline of trust. On the other hand political scientists like Margaret Levi or Susan Stokes and sociologists like Karen Cook contend that as nice as trust might be, we can easily do without it. Especially in political life, distrust, vigilance and scepticism seem to be healthier and more fruitful than trust...

From Max Weber to Public Sociology

Growing up in a political as well as an intellectual environment, Max Weber not only sought to comprehend the world but also to change it. Arguably, he took Karl Marx’s 11th. Thesis on Feuerbach that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it,” far more seriously than its author. Marx, after all, did not reflect, in any systematic fashion...

Max Weber was Right about the Preconditions, Just Wrong about Japan: The Japanese Ethic and its Spirit of Capitalism

Max Weber claimed that while Protestantism provided the proper ethos necessary to spur capitalism, Eastern religions did not. Japan’s economic success has belied his hypothesis, and while there have been various theories explaining its rise, perhaps Weber’s own claims regarding the connection between embeddedness and capitalism best explain Japan’s rise. Simply put, Japanese capitalism was born...

Max Weber and the Reinvention of Popular Power

Political scientists are not generally accustomed to treating Max Weber’s unusual account of democracy—plebiscitary leader democracy—as a genuine democratic theory. The typical objection is that Weber’s account of democracy in terms of the generation of charismatic leadership is not really a democratic theory at all, because it contains no positive account of popular power: specifically, that i...

Max Weber: Traditional, Legal-Rational, and Charismatic Authority