Max Weber revisited

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 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

Max Weber , historiography , medical knowledge , and the formation of medicine

This paper applies Max Weber’s proposition regarding the differences between the ‘sciences’ to the ‘historicist controversy’: the problems emerging from opposing approaches to understanding the past. The historiography in question is the development of the ‘biomedical model’ of health and disease, and the rise of ‘medicine’ in the course of 19th century Europe and Britain. While Weber’s theoret...