Between Freedom and Hierarchy

In his later life, Max Weber's work focused on ideas about rule and hierarchy encapsulated in the German word Herrschaft. These ideas are unique in the canon of Western political theory in that they derive almost exclusively from social categories (agency, power, hierarchy), rather than more conventional political ones (constitutions, democracy). This produces a picture of 'political' life which is self-evident to us today, yet it is theoretically novel. Weber was passionately committed to the idea of human agency: that all people contained within them the potential for ordering their lives in ways they found meaningful. But he also accepted the presence of powerful external constraints on agency, created by the exercise of agency itself--the unequal outcomes of free competition--or impersonal forces, such as technology and bureaucracy. So free societies and polities revolve around two opposite poles: freedom and hierarchy. Weber developed these ideas in parallel with what he now began to call his 'sociology'. The foundations of his thought go back to 1904-5, but engagement with political theory made him reflect more carefully on what one could say about social life in general, and how much this differed from conditions specific to politics or any other life-sphere. He evolved an original, 'federal' model of sociology: a small general core set alongside much larger special sociologies on (for example) politics, religion, law, the economy. This is unique amongst the classical sociologists. In this way, the book covers the major novelties of Weber's final decade and presents the first comprehensive historical portrait of Weber's political ideas. Weber has an immense variety of modern readers and users, but the perspective of the historian with no other commitment than to what he himself thought, is the nearest that we can come to a detached or neutral view of him.

Peter Ghosh is Professor of the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford. Professor Ghose was a Junior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford from 1980 to 1981 and a Fellow of St Anne's from 1982 until 2023, when he retired and became a Senior Research Fellow.