But he problematizes this relationship and it’s actually quite useful. The political systems of the world changed so much in the last hundred years. Of course, we have to appreciate that in Weber’s–when Weber was writing about these issues, somewhere between 19, I mean, virtually none of the countries in the world were liberal democracies or universal suffrage. How democracy fits into the picture is rather problematic for him. It’s also interesting that Weber does not make an assumption that bureaucracy, legal-rational authority, or capitalism necessarily goes together with democracy. So we have to deal with Weber’s interesting claim that the purest type of legal-rational authority, which goes together with a market capitalist economy, is actually bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, as we will see, he will argue that–which is very counterintuitive–that the purest type of legal-rational authority is bureaucracy and this is usually what we don’t have in our mind when we are thinking about a market economy, that it is bureaucratic. Indeed, legal-rational authority is the kind of system of authority which is predictable, because there is an observable law, everybody is subordinated to, which, in fact, has the most–the clearest elective affinity with a market economy. Well Weber has a very complex argument about this. When we are saying legal-rational authority, we briefly refer to the rule of law, and we tend to associate in our mind the rule of law with liberal market economies and the liberal democracies.
This is one of those questions–those topics–Weber is probably the best known for. Now today’s topic is Weber’s theory of legal-rational authority and his theory of bureaucracy. Introduction to Weber’s Theory on Legal Rational Authority Foundations of Modern Social Theory SOCY 151 - Lecture 20 - Weber on Legal-Rational AuthorityĬhapter 1.
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