The progressive thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected Christian Europe’s standard Stories which justified rule by monarchs, aristocrats, and clergy. They promoted instead reason rather than tradition and science rather than theology. Their faith in human agency, as expressed by thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, amounted to a project based on Humanism. Later, Max Weber pointed out that this part of the Enlightenment amounted to an onset of disenchantment.

This chapter sets out the dystopian critique of the liberal democratic state that emerged when neoclassical economic reasoning was applied to the political realm. The resulting ‘public choice theory’ made assertive claims of democratic state failure that became a mainstay of neoliberal argument, but here they are shown to possess clear affinities with the Leninist account of bureaucracy as the ‘real’ centre of power in a bourgeois democracy. It follows from the deterministic, closed-system reasoning in both Leninist and neoclassical 'public choice' theory that these affinities continued into the respective prescriptions for the preferred constitutional order. The ideal constitution of limited government set out in public choice theory, most notably by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Geoffrey Brennan is shown to be a logically inevitable counterpart to the ‘withering away of the state’ under socialism anticipated by Lenin. The adjacent constitutional arguments of Friedrich August von Hayek are also considered, as is the more empirically robust account of bureuacracy as an essential feature of modernity set out by Max Weber.

Anthropologists of ethics have often drawn inspiration from ancient virtue ethics and ordinary language philosophy. What might be gained for the study of ethics by drawing on a theory of values? This chapter shows that value theory, in allowing us to distinguish between moral and non-moral values, offers two ways of conceptualizing ethics. Narrowly conceived, ethics is about people’s efforts to realize moral values, hence to relate to other people in the right way. Broadly conceived, ethics is also about people’s efforts to relate in appropriate ways to the variety of values they recognize, including aesthetic and epistemic ones. Employed on their own or in combination, the narrow and the broad conceptions are uniquely suited for a systematic comparison of ethical life across a diverse range of societies. A comparative discussion of cases from Africa and Euro-America shows that while the content and relative weight given to moral values vary significantly, valuing things appropriately is always an ethical matter.

The first power of the police is their ability to use force to protect and rescue third parties. This understanding departs in a critical way from the Weberian argument that the government has a monopoly on the use of force by observing that a police officer’s ability to use force to defend others is available to all people. It is not only provided for under laws that allow all people to defend others but also as a moral prerogative that exists prior to and outside of political arrangements, democratic or otherwise. The police are distinguished from their fellow citizens by embodying a role that discharges protection and rescue as a duty, rather than a prerogative. The discharge of this duty by what Nozick would call a “dominant protective association” is a necessary requirement to demarcate the state from nature, suggesting that the police role is integral to the definition of the state and a requirement of its initial formulation. From this duty follows the role responsibility to use this force as minimally and economically as possible, and as a backstop, the police role further sanctifies life by creating the citizen’s duty to retreat from interpersonal threats when they can safely do so.

The Introduction examines the academic history of the study of sectarianism among Western sociologists, concluding that the categories established by Weber and his students are not overly helpful in understanding the history of the Muslim firaq. It outlines a new methodology for their study: the narrative-identity approach, which posits that human beings emplot themselves in narratives in order to find meaning and orient themselves, and that sect narratives are some of the narratives that human beings might choose to emplot themselves within. This methodology focuses more on what sectarian actors do, and treats the grand sect narratives as narratives of salvation that offer meaning to those emplotted. It then moves to the sources of Muslim sect narratives, paying particular attention to the problematic genre of heresiography. It ends with a brief discussion of the structure of the work.

As psychology emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, advances were made in the understanding of the nervous system. The specific functions of nerve fibers were described by Bell and Magendie. Müller’s analysis of neural conduction led Du Bois-Reymond and Helmholtz to describe the nerve impulse. As a reaction against Gall’s phrenology, localization of brain functions reached systematic description by Flourens and Sherrington. Concurrently, advances in physics led to experimental studies of sensations by Young, Helmholtz, and Müller, while Purkinje justified subjective sensory experience. The second intellectual backdrop to psychology was psychophysics, which proposed that sensory experience is not completely reducible to physics and physiology. Although Weber contributed both methodologically and substantively to psychophysics, its clearest expression is found in the quantitative analysis of Fechner. His work received strong support from the experiments of Helmholtz, especially in his doctrine of unconscious inference in perception. The final movement was centered on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which completed the Copernican revolution in science and established the primacy of scientific empiricism. Spencer applied Darwin’s writings to evolutionary associationism, and Galton made an intensive examination of individual differences through mental testing. All three movements demonstrated the efficacy of empirical science.

This chapter develops the analytical dynamics of public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty. It first situates public/private hybridity in the global governance literature and then introduces three ideal-types. Contractual hybridity features formal and publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private contractual exchanges. Institutional hybridity features informal and partly publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated through public/private institutional linkages. Shadow hybridity features nonformalized and nonpublicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private shadowy bargains. Finally, the chapter presents a Weberian-inspired research design to show off the three ideal-types in the empirics that follow.

“The problem of absolutes” refers to the difficulty of grounding and defending absolute prohibitions in a legal system that is rationalized on the basis of means-ends rationality. (An example might be the difficulty in identifying an absolute prohibition on torture that is not susceptible to being reinterpreted, read down, or negotiated away.) In the present paper, I associate this difficulty in the first instance with Max Weber’s account of the rationalization of law and the distancing of law from any sense of sacred or transcendent obligation. But other developments need to be considered as well. I argue that the problem is as much about morality as it is about law. The two law and morality develop together in a complementary way, and the problem of legal absolutes tends to be matched by a corresponding difficulty with moral absolutes, just as the desanctification of law tends to be matched by a desanctification of morality

I build on Max Weber's belief that theories had to be rational (internally consistent) and were only a starting point for understanding real-world behavior, which, even if rational, could understand rationality in different ways as a function of the values people sought to maximize.

I explore different understandings of cause, the extent to which it is a feature of the world or an artifact of our imagination, and the consequences for knowledge that flows from these different assumptions.

This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

In the context of musical ideologies based on either Biblical or Classical/Neoplatonic models, the introduction sets out how a study of the music produced as a response to the figure of Louis XIII might contribute to the wider discourse on ceremonial, power, and absolutism in early modern France. Although the issue of music and power is well-trodden territory for the reign of Louis XIV, there is almost no (music) scholarship exploring how the mechanism of ‘the arts’ and power might function during this earlier period. But taking Beetham’s reformulation of Weber’s famous definition of power as a starting point, it is clear that the liturgy of the Catholic Church acted as a legitimating framework, allowing the people of France to signal their approval of a conceptual system that taught that the anointed king ruled with God’s express consent. While musical sources that participate in this framework (indeed all musical sources) are relatively rare, by exploring previously overlooked fragments and incomplete works, it is possible to show how music, as ‘sounding’ liturgy, was used to highlight facets of a liturgical text that were considered significant, and how in turn it contributed to the broader framework of power.

Max Weber’s influence on currents of thought over the past century has been profound and far-reaching. This chapter surveys four main areas of impact: the philosophy of the social sciences; class, economy, and rationalization; religion, culture, and social change; and power, politics, and the nation-state. A concluding section addresses the contemporary status of Weber’s thinking regarding the “rise of the West” and its place in world history.

Austin Harrington is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. His recent publications include German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

The rise of multi-party processes in which people with quite different ties to a region, natural resource-related industry, or environmental issue work collaboratively to hammer out mutually acceptable agreements is arguably one of the biggest shifts in environmental management over the past twenty-five years. This chapter engages in some sensemaking around this diverse and evolving phenomenon in two ways. First, an approach to designing collaborative natural resource-related discourse with a particularly strong theoretical foundation (Collaborative Learning) is presented to illustrate how theory is manifest in practice. Second a recent best practices/common features list is examined through the perspectives of four social science theorists: Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann, and Muzafer Sherif. The practical recommendations that emerge from this list is largely consistent with the larger social and communicative dynamics articulated by these theorists.

Weber’s understanding of reason and cause.

Roman monetary history, like all history, is history of mind. Purposeful action, as a product of the human mind, creates history. Economic models, methods and agendas, therefore, which ignore or assume away the mind are of only limited use for historians. Historians, however, can use the tools and concepts in this book to clarify and redeem some economic theories and concepts in order to better understand the societies they study.

Roman historians are typically trained under the aegis of Classics or Classical Studies; hence, they find comfort in the world of sources – a preference manifest in a broadly empiricist outlook and an affinity for methods of induction. There are, as this chapter argues, good reasons to question the reliability of traditional empirical approaches to historical questions. Equally, however, the deductive use of formal economic theory has its own drawbacks. Emergent neoclassical and new institutional studies have produced new questions and new insights, but Roman historians’ use of economic theory has also promulgated new anachronisms and perhaps even ‘economics imperialism’. Is Roman economic history doomed to be forever caught in methodological tug-of-wars over the use of economic theory? This chapter suggests that a way forward may be found in the sociological tradition of methodological dualism – a framework which unequivocally draws upon economic theory as a tool of ‘understanding’ rather than of testing or predicting. Methodological dualism is a foundational framework for rethinking the use of economic theory for understanding Roman monetary history.

Some Roman economic historians are skeptical of an economic rationality which explicitly imposes capitalism-centric value judgements on antiquity. Should Roman historians study rationality as a phenomenon exclusively ‘locked’ inside the minds of individuals, or is it possible to study rationality as something at least influenced or even determined by collectivized social and cultural structures (or embedding contexts)? In this chapter, I argue that Collingwood’s observation that observers and subjects share the same cognitive process opens up new opportunities for understanding the thinking of ancient peoples. First, I define this cognitive process, after Weber and especially Mises, as ‘purposefulness’ and defend its a priori epistemological status. Then, using Weber’s insights on ideal types, I discuss how embedding contexts bounded purposefulness. Finally, I combine these arguments into an experimental heuristic model for understanding the purposeful actions of historical individuals by comparing these choices to both ideal-typical economic theory and unchosen counterfactual actions.