Weber's realpolitik

pp. 127-163

in: Robbie Shilliam, German thought and international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

Max Weber has a nebulous presence in IR. On the one hand, he does not occupy a position in the classical canon of political thought equivalent to that of, say, Hobbes. But on the other hand, the reception of his social scientific endeavor in Anglo-CAmerican academia at large and IR in particular has informed many of the most basic typologies of the modern state apparatus and modern political rule¹ as well as some of the most prominent ways of understanding the ethico-political character of a world of territorial states (Walker 1993a; Neumann and Sending 2007). There is, however, an increasing body of literature that has sought to refute this orthodox Anglo-CAmerican reading of Weber.² In various ways these works all criticize the conflation of Weber's "positivism" with the natural-scientific meaning of "objectivity" dominant in Anglo-CAmerican social science.