The Religious and the Political

Introduction: defining terms

Throughout his sociological work Max Weber was pre-eminently concerned with the mechanisms by which power is maintained and legitimized. More precisely, he inquired into the rule (Herrschaft) of human beings over human beings, and he saw domination as the central phenomenon of all forms of social organization. Given this obsession – to refer to the exegesis of Wilhelm Hennis (1988: 182) – it is hardly surprising that Weber is often compared to Machiavelli. He was scornful of those political philosophers and historians who wanted to see fellowship or community as the core business of political life. As a pessimistic liberal Weber believed that the main problem of German society was that the political class had failed to exercise leadership, because they had become mere functionaries. It is not surprising therefore that the opening sections of volume I of Economy and society (Weber 1978) are preoccupied with questions of power, authority and legitimacy. In these early passages he laid out his now famous definitions of authority in what he called ‘the types of legitimate domination’ in order to understand ‘the bases of legitimacy’ which I have already considered in Chapter 2 with special reference to charisma. The early forms of authority included charisma, or the extraordinary powers of personal leadership, and tradition, or the customs and conventions that routinely justify a particular order. These two – charisma and tradition – were oscillating forms of legitimacy in traditional societies. These categories were largely adopted from his friend and colleague Georg Jellinek, who had developed the idea of ‘empirical types’ to describe the ‘religious–theological’ and the ‘legal–theoretical’ modes of legitimacy. Because Weber believed that modern societies are passing through a profound period of rationalization, giving rise to the prevalence of bureaucratic authority, he saw legal rationality as the characteristic mode of contemporary legitimate domination. Weber offered an extensive definition of this type, but the core of this form of legitimacy is the hierarchical organization of offices and the downward flow of commands.