Max Weber's Liberalism for a Nietzschean World

Mark Warren

American Political Science Review, 1988, vol. 82, issue 1, 31-50

Abstract: Weber's commentators often accuse him of lacking a coherent political philosophy because his pluralist-elite theory of democracy seems indifferent to liberal-democratic values. I argue, however, that the core of Weber's political philosophy is a politicized neo-Kantian liberalism, one that produces an ethically significant and positive concept of politics. The problem is rather that Weber's pessimism about institutionalizing positive politics in bureaucratized societies left the ethical core of his political philosophy inexplicit. This introduced a conflict into his thought between his ethical commitments and his assessments of political possibilities. The conflict is compelling because it reflects the contemporary gap between the promise and performance of liberal democracies. At the same time, formulating Weber's problems in these terms helps identify democratic solutions that remain obscure in his assessment of conflicts between bureaucratization and democracy.

Date: 1988
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:82:y:1988:i:01:p:31-50_08

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().