HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

In the sociology of politics and government, Politics as a Vocation is considered to be Weber's most significant essay. Therein, Weber unveiled the definition of the state that has become so pivotal to Western social thought: the state is that entity which possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, which it may elect to delegate as it sees fit. Politics is to be understood as any activity in which the state might engage itself in order to influence the relative distribution of force. A politician must not be a man of the "true Christian ethic," understood by Weber as being the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, that is to say, the injunction to turn the other cheek. An adherent of such an ethic ought rather to be understood to be a saint, for it is only saints, according to Weber, that can appropriately follow it. The political realm is no realm for saints. A politician ought to marry the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, and must possess both a passion for his avocation and the capacity to distance himself from the subject of his exertions (the governed).

Weber distinguished three pure types of political leadership domination and authority: charismatic domination (familial and religious), traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonialism, feudalism), and legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy). In his view, every historical relation between rulers and ruled contained elements that can be analyzed on the basis of this tripartite distinction. He also noted that the instability of charismatic authority inevitably forces it to "routinize" into a more structured form of authority.

Many aspects of modern public administration are attributed to Weber. A classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the continental type is called "Weberian civil service," although this is only one ideal type of public administration and government described in his magnum opus, Economy and Society (1922). In this work, Weber outlined his description of rationalization (of which bureaucratization is a part) as a shift from a value-oriented organization and action (traditional authority and charismatic authority) to a goal-oriented organization and action (legal-rational authority). The result, according to Weber, is a "polar night of icy darkness," in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control.

Weber's studies of bureaucracy also led him to his accurate prediction that socialism in Russia would, due to abolishing the free market and its mechanisms, lead to over-bureaucratization (evident, for example, in the shortage economy) rather than to the "withering away of the state" (as Karl Marx had predicted would happen in a communist society).