Democratization in world-historical perspective

Randall Collins

pp. 14-31

in: Ralph Schroeder (ed), Max Weber, democracy and modernization, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Max Weber's writings contain no full-scale treatment of democracy, but they bear on the question in several ways. His direct treatments of the topic, concerning the nature of the political calling and the prospects of parliamentary democracy in post-war Germany, treated parliamentary supremacy and the patterns of party machine politics and of election of notables as variants within the more central phenomenon of the development of professionalized political administration. In the end, Weber made his choice for parliamentary democracy above all as a testing ground for political charisma, and as a counterbalance to the charisma-deadening and substantively irresponsible dominance of bureaucratic routine. This conservative defence of democracy from the viewpoint of open-eyed sociological realism, original as it is, does not provide a theory of the historical conditions which brought about democracy in the first place.

Cited authors

Weber Max