“The king is everywhere primarily a warlord.” This statement can be found in (Gerth & Mills’s 1947 English translation of) Max Weber’s Essays in Sociology, and is a good example of what I’ve always seen as a bitter fault of viewpoint or approach. This bitterness is nevertheless sweetened by the valuable insights that follow on from it; this is what makes the work worthy of doing. Incidentally, this statement is also an example of self-hiding philosophy – just because Weber wrote on it and quite clearly doesn’t mean it has been focused on – but that isn’t the main point of this piece. The point here is to investigate Weber’s assertion about kingship. There are two major claims that are baked into the statement in question; but, to develop them clearly, they need to arise organically out of thinking about a signature theory of Weber’s: the tripartite classification of authority.
Weber identifies three basic types of authority, with charismatic being the least developed, traditional being more, and legal being the most. Though he does not speak in terms of “development”, he ascribes the kinds of government that we now would characterize as advanced with the rational (s/a bureaucracy) and the kinds of government which predominated in the past with the charismatic (s/a chieftaincy). What is clear to me from this division is that this model is based primarily upon the idea of sacral kingship. Legal authority does seem to buck this trend, but Weber shows that this isn’t incompatible with kingship by alluding to constitutional monarchies. The main evidence for this focus on sacral kingship comes in his elaboration of the traditional and charismatic forms, showing that Weber had insight but let his biases color his exploration to an unhelpful degree.
The key insights underneath the three types are what I call the three societal demands, which themselves come out of the three worriments (or “worry points”). These are not laid out specifically in Weber but their presence emerges as he elaborates on this classification. His charismatic form (which I will call “charismatic-exhibitant” for reasons I’ll explain later) is based on the display of “gifts of grace” to answer people’s doubts; it is fair to say that this sort of society demands proof. The traditional form is about custom and privilege, and especially on the “typical person” having faith that these will be upheld; what this society demands is assurance, also called solace. In the legal form, I largely agree with Weber’s development; the demand here is for explanation with the caveat that any typical person should be able to receive and comprehend this explanation. Before moving on, I want to make sure I say that these demands do not need to be met for every person – that is to say, not every citizen is actually required to understand every law – but it must be plausible that every person could learn any and law if they chose to.
Where Weber goes wrong is in how he proceeds from these demands (“proceeds” being a slightly in-apt term; I don’t mean to imply that he necessarily identified these worriments/demands, only that his types appear to have them as logical prerequisites). In the case of charismatic proof, he seems to assume that the only proofs that are adequate to support authority are supernatural proofs. I think this displays a presupposition that the only kind of state worth considering is a state in which a single entity, which itself deals with all worries of the people, rules over the people directly. In other words, for supernatural appeal to be the only valid type of proof, we must assume that the entity making the appeal needs this appeal to have a markedly long & broad reach. The reason why I don’t think this level is necessary will be borne out later; but, my point here is that if we don’t assume that every citizen simultaneously must have proof, the requirement for supernatural charisma evaporates.
Considering the traditional type, the main issue with Weber’s sketch is that it isn’t adequately differentiated from the charismatic and legal types. Customs are essentially unwritten laws, so this is an early kind of legal authority. An appeal to antiquity is very similar to (and often includes) a claim to divine authority; the main difference between antiquity and divinity here is that theoretically you could have met this ancient progenitor (and, with examples like King Arthur, this isn’t even always true). In my view, despite circling around the notion of assurance, the major reason that the traditional type exists for Weber is to explain what his (probably pre-existing) concepts of legal and charismatic authority could not explain; namely, the persistence of monarchy beyond the existence of a properly charismatic leader. Weber primarily envisions a move from charismatic to legal, leaving traditional as a description without a core.
I, however, will not do this. I think each of these three demands creates a specific and distinct response in society and therefore creates its own source of authority. In exploring the demands directly, I will take two notions from Weber’s method; both (somewhat unhelpfully) located in the idea of “pure types”. In the first place, I will give an example of a government that I think a represents a pure version of each source. Hopefully this will be illustrative. In the second, I agree with Weber that it must be acknowledged that, in reality, there is no example of a pure type. Every state and quasi-state group will be some combination of the three approaches. The reason for this classification isn’t to be able to sort groups into bins, it’s to help in identifying the motivations for a society’s condition at any point in time.
I’m going to approach this demand by demand, using the order I gave above but with a different assumption as to the justification; I will elaborate this later.
The first demand to deal with is proof. If this is the demand, its worriment is “proof-needing” also called uncertainty. Viewed like this, there is no need to invent a lack which can only be answered by an appeal to the extraordinary. Not having enough food is uncertainty; the proof that the authority can solve the uncertainty is the provision of food. What is clear is that Weber has misidentified what the role of charisma is. In a situation of proof-needing, what an authority needs to do is to simply provide the proof, even if this process or (especially) if it is unpleasant. This is the pragmatic source of authority.
The pure pragmatic state is a warlord state. As I’ll lay out further later on, it isn’t necessary for the authority to have the confidence of all the people it claims; it is only necessary to maintain the confidence of the constituents of the state. In a warlord state, the constituents would be the associate war leaders at minimum and the entire fighting force at maximum. In this proverbial warlord state, a warlord’s fighters are principally allied to the warlord due to the warlord passing out wealth. Classically this would be the loot of vanquished victims, but the wealth could come from other means so long as it is available when it is required.
The demand for assurance corresponds with Weber’s traditional type of authority, as I’ve said before. Having removed charisma from the need to provide proof, I see it placed here: the response to a demand for assurance. Here I will need to clarify terms somewhat, as going forward I am going to be using my own definition when I say “charisma” without a qualifier. Weber sees charisma as the presentation of goods (i.e. multiple instances of good things, not as in products generally, so I will call it “exhibitant charisma”. My concept of charisma, in contrast, is about creating the hope that something good will happen. Weber sees the gaining of charisma as the gaining of gratitude, whereas I see it as the engendering of expectation. A politically charismatic person to me is someone who invites the confidence of others and can hold onto that confidence without needing to give constant grants and rewards. This is what I’ll call “potentiate (or potentiating) charisma”, though generally I will simply say “charisma” going forward.
Charisma is the appropriate response to “assurance-needing” (also called dejection) because it is a spiritual-emotional expression on the same level as the demand. In common use, “proof” is what can give someone “assurance”; they’re related concepts. It’s important to point out that even here, the whatness of the concepts is distinct. Proof does not come out of assurance, assurance comes out of proof. Proof is an order more tangible, so to speak, than assurance is. To satisfy a need for proof, something must be produced as evidence; even the sight of a miracle counts as evidence in this understanding. Nothing must actually be produced to satisfy assurance; all that is required is that the person is assured. This is not to say that the charismatic person doesn’t need to do anything to maintain their charisma, only that action isn’t a defining part of assurance. Coincidence can be as useful to assurance as an intentional act. The exact mechanism that creates assurance is too complex and situation-based for me to untangle as yet, but this is in fact the definition of charisma-as-phenomenon: the unnamed something which can capture people’s minds without producing evidence.
For Weber, assurance comes out of a traditional structure through the promise to respect customs and established privileges. As I said before, this notion illustrates why the traditional type is incoherent: its major feature is simply where proof-providing meets explanation-providing. I’ll leave customs for the explanation section. Promise, however, is the domain of charisma. What sustains the charismatic source of authority is not respecting customs and privileges, it is the promise-without-proof. What sinks charismatic authority is the loss of faith in these promises, not failing to meet specific requests. This process takes longer than losing faith in a pragmatarch because demonstrating that the charismarch has no charisma requires not just a lack felt by the constituents, it also requires a case to be built that the charisma is false; instead of only pointing to evidence, an argument is necessary. The charismarch can break specific rules at will, even long-held customs, as long as this does not destroy the faith given by their constituents.
The pure type of charismatic authority actually matches Weber’s pure type for confronting dejection (though of course he uses “traditional” authority here). That pure type is kingship, especially sacral kingship. The trappings of kingship, a crown’s antiquity, the number and rank of people who pay homage to a crown, the great figures in the king’s ancestry, all these serve as marks and amplifiers of a king’s authority. To assert that such kings were hemmed in by custom and privilege is ahistorical; any kingdom of some longevity will experience a monarch drastically changing the rules without overturning their reign.
Customs are laws by another name. To be ruled by custom is not to be without law but to hold the oldest form of law: unwritten law. It feels a little ridiculous to believe that the Romans before the Twelve Tables were a non-legalistic society. The Weberian traditional type of authority is thus simply the point at which charisma-exhibitant loses its exhibition while law has not yet gained its complete codification. But, just as we were always talking about uncertainty and then dejection, there is a similar core to what Weber calls legal (or legal-rational) authority; this core is “explanation-needing”, otherwise called confusion.
Before explaining further, it’s worth exploring why a society would tend to have one demand rather than another. For Weber, the distinction between his three types is made by the level of personal dependence which each type displays, with legal authority as most impersonal and charismatic-exhibitant authority as the most personal. This idea of dependence is correct but it doesn’t go far enough; or, to be more accurate, it looks at the issue from the wrong vantage. Basing the types on personal dependence implies that one is simply describing social structure from the outside, but it leaves open the question of why a society would be more or less dependent. The answer is a simple inversion: a society’s dependence upon a leader is the inverse of that society’s confidence in its survival for the foreseeable future.
Actually, the idea is slightly more complex, to the point that I’ll only be able to sketch out an outline right now as I’m not sure I can form a precise answer. Societal confidence is what I said it was before – belief in the society’s continued survival – but it is also the length of time which the society sees itself continuing for. To illustrate the difference, consider the pure pragmatic warlord. Those that the warlord leads get their proof in the spoils of war. We’ll assume that this warlord has been successful and made his people rich. A great warrior in this society would feel a strong belief that this state of affairs would continue over the next several raids at least. However, if their economy is based on constantly acquiring these spoils (which would be not just valuables and money but also livestock, slaves, carts, metals, and other useful acquisitions), and if gaining spoils involves the precarious business of bloody combat, even a great warrior cannot project their sureness too far forward. For this reason, their society is unlikely to develop the demand for assurance because they are never secure enough to not need proof of their leader’s continued competence.
Now we’ll deal more fully with the demand of explanation, which Weber sees as answered by the legal type of authority. Though I agree that bureaucracy is the purest expression of an antidote to societal confusion, I feel that his definition of legal authority operates primarily as a description of bureaucracy rather than being a set of pre-existing circumstances to which bureaucracy is one solution. Rather than focus on formalized law, I think the focus in reducing confusion should be on unified abstract belief. This source of authority can be called dogmatic. The core abstract belief is that the societal system has rules which are knowable to all constituents. Weber tries to emphasize the ability of people to change the law, but the best he can do is elevate it to co-prominence with the shared belief in the dogma. It’s important to stress as well that this should not be thought of in a devotional or religious sense. The constituents of the society don’t need to agree that the system is best or even beneficial, they simply need to agree (explicitly or implicitly) that the specific current dogma is the foundation of the specific current society.
Dogma is above – or better, behind – the law (which includes custom). Dogma can be elaborated but it’s always unwritten. It is both perennial and of a single moment. Can dogma be changed? Yes, but dogma doesn’t admit that it has been changed, is changing, or has the possibility of changing. It is not, as Weber says of law, able to be changed in a formal and certain manner. Its changes are the changes in a society’s mood as it shifts around the rock that is the leadership. Law and the will of the leaders has an outsized effect on the shape of the dogma but they don’t shape it by themselves; it is a project which the whole society takes part in.
Weber seems to locate the answer to confusion (i.e. the need for explanation) in the ability to control. When laid out like this, the focus he puts on formal law and its ability to be changed is obviously absurd, to the point that I feel the need to say that I do not believe I am misrepresenting Weber by saying his legal authority is meant to answer the need for explanation.
Weber does highlight the true basis of the dogmatic authority (though in the service of elaborating bureaucracy, disguised as broad “legal authority”) and this basis is objectivity, or at least the assumed objectivity of the dogma’s existence and shape. What is important is that all those who subscribe to the dogma agree that they are subscribing to the same thing. Approval and control do not necessarily correlate even with stronger adherence to the dogma. What entrenches dogma is the successful working of the dogma; the state fulfilling its duties and responsibilities through public and dogmatic means.
To this point, I have spoken a lot about demands and worry points. This raises the obvious question of “what is the origin of these worry points?” The summarized answer is that a society’s worry point is created out of the society’s response to general and specific crises. I’ll now go ahead and unsummarize this.
Doing this writing will require some borrowing from Rawls, which I promise not to make a regular practice. His idea of the original position just happens to be incredibly useful as a theoretical starting point of society. Where I feel Rawls’s presentation fails is that it assumes people would form a society for its own sake. What’s needed is to expand from the original position without the assumption that a society will form; instead, we should think about what would cause people to choose to form a society and how that would influence the society that they form. I will not be pursuing the concept of justice in this piece but justice and authority are closely related concepts.
We’ll start from this original (or first) position in which everyone is ignorant of themselves and their surroundings. Keep in mind that this remains a thought exercise rather than a description of a known historical process. However, I do believe that this formulation can be more readily excavated from history than Rawls’s conception can. This is due to the effort I will take to add context. In fact, “context” defines the second position.
What I’m calling the move to the second position is what Rawls calls lifting the veil of ignorance. From a situation where all persons are undifferentiated and unidentified we come to a situation where people are aware of their distinctions. The difference here is that I am not simply using this process to sketch out unbiased “just laws”, which means I’m not positing these newly identified people are immediately choosing laws for themselves. Instead, we’ll simply assume that these people are now in the world and living without a coherent society. This isn’t nasty, brutish, or short; people live their decent but un-ordered lives well enough. Relationships can exist in the second position but no relationship is binding in the way that societal relations usually are.
Another difference I have with Rawls is that I don’t share his preoccupation with justifying liberalism. He emphasizes qualities that are of specific importance to late 20th century American politics: race, gender, social/wealth class, etc. These are not important for me. The key things that are revealed by this first to second move are two: ability and circumstances. These will be the main determinants in the ordering of the next position. But what is it that marks this move to a third position? To move to the second, we lift Rawls’s veil. To move to the third, we must introduce a crisis.
Earlier I briefly mentioned both general and specific crises. The third position crisis is specific; the general crisis comes later. What is this specific crisis? Here I’m talking about hellish storms, drought & famine, war, disease, and the like. Not every such event counts as a crisis, however. A storm that kills one farmer’s crops is not a reason for widespread organizing. In brief, the kind of crisis that births the third position is one which requires group organization in order to solve. To be more precise, this crisis must be such that its solution has three requirements: 1. multiple people require the crisis to be solved; 2. the solution requires uncommon knowledge; 3. the solution requires the effort of more than one person to achieve. If the crisis doesn’t affect many people, there is no compulsion to act, as I said; neighbors can give aid but that’s not an organization. If the knowledge of the crisis’s solution is widespread, no one has to take directions, so the group doesn’t need to become bound into a system of command & obedience (or persuasion & agreeance). If the crisis can be solved by one person’s effort, that person can solve the crisis without being part of a group. It’s only when these three criteria coincide that a disorganized gaggle becomes an organized group, an instance of a society.
This third position semi-society is something I will call a concord. In the same way that velocity is a succession of instances of acceleration, a society can be viewed as a succession of concords over time. The purpose of a concord is to accomplish a specific task, especially the solution of a crisis. What links the pieces of a concord together is necessity. The will of the leader is followed not through coercion but because the instructions are presumed to be useful in solving the urgent crisis.
In the light of the concord, we can see that its people are organized into three orders based on their usefulness in solving the crisis. The first order is the leader (or guider) order. Not always a single person but at most a group that is much smaller than the other orders, is considered a single entity (f/i Congress), and (most importantly) has the uncommon knowledge of solving the crisis. The second order are the contributors to the solution, the people who take orders and bring the solution to reality. In the terms of one Chinese flood myth, Yu the Great is the guider who planned the system of flood-lessening canals while the many diggers and builders who did the work are contributors. This wasn’t the formation of a society (as this pre-existed) but it illustrates the dichotomy at work here. There is then a third order: the followers, who are affected by the crisis but don’t do anything to avert it. This is not a value judgment, just a reflection of reality. A very strong person and skilled builder who happened to be in a seven year sleep when a dam was being built won’t be part of the dam-builders contributor order; at least, not the initial group. Even those who do help but only indirectly – such as by providing meals for workers or caring for their children – are generally considered followers, having to do their duties around the habits and needs of the contributor set.
The guider and contributors are bound together by the accord they have whereby the guider and contributors agree on how each side views their relationship in order to function. Remember, the guider cannot solve the crisis on their own, that’s an axiom of the crisis. The guider needs the contributors. They are deputized to the guider’s planned solution. The followers remain as part of the concord by circumstance, such as simply suffering because of the same flood that the concord was already dealing with and having relief when they complete it. Followers are essentially inherited when concords are created. This piece will only be dealing with followers indirectly but they are a key part of continued cohesion over time, so they should not be forgotten.
The third position exists for as long as the crisis exists. This is actually the situation in which societies live: a constant existential crisis. The path from concord to continuing society is not a direct one. After all, when the crisis is solved, there is no longer that specific pressure forcing the concord into its shape. Though the concord is a kind of working model of a more robust society, what is missing is a consistent impulse to continue society.
So far I have laid out three conceptually sequential positions showing a move from non-differentiation to the active confirmation of social position through the use of differentiated traits such as skills and abilities. These together can be considered the lower level of a society, or perhaps as a proto-society. From here there are two conceptual moves to make in order to go from concord to full society: the post-crisis period and the proposal to form a social contract. Stay with me, here; I haven’t just thrown Rawls into the gutter to sit down to a heaping helping of Locke or Rousseau.
First comes the post-crisis period. After the crisis has been resolved, the lives of this group return to normal (remember this is a thought experiment, I’m not saying that there are no counter-examples). The pressure is off, as I said. What remains from the third position is, to the bonds of the concord, what a pen-drawn circle is to a metal bucket: a suggestion, not a barrier. The people, from any of the orders, can now move away from the center and color outside the lines. If there is a need for some kind of order in the future, the pattern has now been laid down. It is likely that the ex-concordites would find a system they agreed on in the past to be at least the starting point in solving any future crisis. At this point, the tendency has less to do with a charisma-based faith in the guider than it does with dividing the group into recognized sets of helpers and non-helpers. When dealing with a crisis, having a known plan may be more useful than finding the strictly most-appropriate people for the situation. Though I’ve presented this process with a sort of inevitability, we have to consider that groups are not always able to organize in time to answer a crisis, and these failed groups are at least as many as those that develop.
A group of people does not have to calcify into a continuing society. Crises can continue to occur and be dealt with in the ad-hoc manner of the concord. This does have a cost, as I’ve just alluded to: both the effort of having to discover an appropriate guider as well as the unsureness that such a guider even exists. One guider cannot have the specific knowledge to deal with every crisis that life throws at the group.
This is the general crisis: how to survive in a world that can bring ruinous hardship in an instant and from any source imaginable. A group which is able to look past the next crisis and get a broad view will be able to understand that there never is a final crisis after which all things will be tranquil. This problem of vulnerability is not something which can be solved like the specific crisis; it must just be managed every day forever.
Into this need steps a chancer. Usually, the chancer will be the guider from the third position, and this is for a reason that you should see is self-evident. This chancer makes a proposition to the group, saying that they will serve as leader in a certain manner, with certain assistance, and so on. The chancer will present the group with their qualifications. The greatest qualification is obviously having been the guider of a concord that successfully passed through a specific. On the other side, the judge most likely to accept a chancer is one who was in a crisis-surpassing group which the chancer guided. Regardless, the most important part of this appeal is for the chancer to meet the group’s demand, as laid out earlier: demand for proof, for assurance, or for explanation. If the group agrees to the chancer’s terms, they have now sealed a social contract and begun a society.
My conception of the social contract is therefore very limited, unlike the continual yet undateable contract of Locke, and we do have historical examples that we can talk about; but, if I talk about the convening of the American revolutionary cadre as the signing of a new social contract, I have to be clear in who is party to this contract. Students of history will be aware that, more than anything else, the War of American Independence was fought for the interest of the Yankee landowner, not for the “common person”. I’ll have to be brief here so that I don’t add a third major topic, but it’s important to have a sense of how a concord correlates with a continuing society.
When dealing with a specific crisis, the concord has three order: the guider and the contributors (who are directly active in the solution) and then the followers (who are not). When I say that a concord makes a decision, I am saying that the guider and contributors have decided; the followers are irrelevant. In this case of a specific crisis, the essential logic of solving the crisis is what compels the followers to respect directions, given that they are dependent on the guider and contributors to survive. This pressure doesn’t exist in the general crisis. Though a society can be viewed as a succession of concords, the general crisis is not a succession of specific crises. Specific crises do happen within the general crisis, but the general crisis is not simple the need to solve these specific incidents, it is instead the problem of how to ensure a society is prepared to respond to whatever crises may emerge. Where the requirement of a concord guider is a particular expertise, a society’s ruler must have a more broadly applicable (or at least more frequently needed) set of skills.
The guider of a concord becomes the ruler of a society, in the sense of “giver of rules and commands”. The contributors become the constituents, the true body politic. The followers become the subjects in this new society. The rulership and constituents make up the state, while the followers are subjected to the state. This relation is important. A mistake that is endemic to political theory is the notion that all people in a society are constituents of it, in the sense of being truly enfranchised. It should be clear that concord contributors would be a relatively small group compared to the followers; even in a defensive war, the majority of people are not direct combatants. This continues into the state-society, as does their constituents’ hold on political power. Now, by capability and weight of numbers, a fully united subject class could assert themselves politically. In a concord, followers followed due to the threat of the crisis. In a society of the fifth position, there is no natural pressure. It must instead be created. The creation of this subjection effect is as central to the state’s purpose as solving new crises is. Remember: the state-society wants to continue under the status quo, which means subjects cannot be allowed to attain political legitimacy as this would make them constituents and therefore change that status. I’ll stop myself here but this is, in brief, the logic of a fifth-position society.
I will conclude by returning to the question I asked at the start: is Weber’s assertion that “the king is everywhere primarily a warlord” correct? This should honestly have a paper more faithfully dedicated to exploring Weber’s military ideas as he devotes significant effort to them. Since that isn’t my focus, what I’ll do instead is to use what I’ve laid out so far to elaborate why there is truth in this statement. When I began, I said that Weber’s statement had two claims baked into it, and they are these: first, the king is primarily a warlord; second, the king is everywhere a warlord.
Why would a king, or any ruler, be primarily a warlord? In a situation where there is a threat of war. What causes the threat of war? Here is an interesting shadow-play which we all go along with. The dirty secret of all political ideologies is that pretty much any ideology or state structure works, at least in detail. Monarchy is out of favor now in the west but it is undeniably still functional, at least to the standards of capitalist republics. We have to assume that subjects are, for the most part, not bothered by who or what system is in charge; the frequency of people uprooting their lives to seek opportunity elsewhere is at least small evidence of this notion. This means that if two societies come into contact, one may “lose” subjects to the other through nothing more than natural association and desire. Though subjects don’t have a political voice, they are frequently valuable to the state constituents; most often this is from the labor that the subjects give up. This is a breach of the status quo which could certainly lead to war between two societies. If a society is at special risk of this, like if they are surrounded by other societies, it makes sense that the skills of a war leader would be highly desired in a ruler. The idea of ideological interchangeability also provides another support: since most societies (at what I’ll call a basic level of sophistication) can handle most crises, the one specific crisis that can’t be managed by such reliances is military command, particularly the arts of mustering, drilling, motivation, and planning. This means that a war leader will be preferred in most circumstances because war is a known complex danger.
Now, why is the king “everywhere” a warlord? This is due to a kind of natural selection. Let’s take what I’ve just said about how likely it is for a state-society to form around a war leader. This implies not only that society is primarily organized around war but also that it is likely to solve its problems through war whenever possible. If the constituents feel short of resources, they may use war to get what they want from neighboring societies. This means that the neighbors of a war leader society are also likely to become war leader societies over time (I won’t go into how societies move from one source of authority to another in this piece). As a war leader society, the propensity to use war increases greatly, further threatening neighbors and prompting them to adopt a war leader as ruler, and so on it goes.
Weber’s instincts have merit but they also prevent an obstacle to the fullness of the concept he is looking for. He is working in the framework of “military fatalism”: the belief that all political matters boil down to military effectiveness. This comes out of a principally descriptive approach. The problem with this approach is that it’s basically trying to figure out how & why a bike works by just taking it apart and analyzing all the bits. There’s specific knowledge about physics and manufacturing that requires a deeper look than “the bike moves because it is on wheels”.
Because Weber does not consider a stable non-military state, his fatalism colors all of his observations such that they cannot even aspire to being universal, not least because the concept of a stable non-kingly society doesn’t even occur to him until his legal authority, and presidents are (in the words of David Starkey) merely monarchs by another name. What I’m trying to do with the three sources and three positions is not to invalidate Weber’s work but to generalize it. “What is” is a subset of “what could be”, and only by trying to understand the whole space of possibility can we understand why “what is” is at it is.
Referenced Works
- Essays in Sociology by Max Weber (trans. ed. Gerth & Mills 1949)
- The Three Types of Legitimate Rule by Max Weber (trans. Gerth 1958)
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