Les Ecrits politiques de Max Weber: esquisse d’une lecture sociologique

The author argues that Max Weber in his Politische Schriften (from 1906 to 1919) is using a sociological approach to the prevailing problems of Russia and Germany, grounded on categories of his political sociology. Weber’s in-depth analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and of its outcome brilliantly illustrates this approach. In the first of his memoirs, overviewing Russian society as a whole, he highlights the multiple impediments to a success of bourgeois democracy in Russia; in the second one, he points out the political factors, as symbolized by “pseudo-constitutionalism”, that caused the failure of the liberal Revolution. In his “Parliament and Government in a reorganized Germany”, Weber rests on the analysis of bureaucracy in his first “sociology of domination”, pointing out that bureaucracy is unavoidable in modern society as well as it threatens to be overpowering. It is therefore required, in Weber’s view, to build institutions assuming a counterpoising function: he first conferred this role on a strong parliament, on the model of the English Parliament. Then, after the fall of the Wilhelminian Empire, he emphasized the plebiscitary power of a Reichspräsident. As a whole, Weber’s analyses bring out the dilemma between oligarchy and democracy but also the subtle relations linking them in the context of political modernity. Oligarchy is a threat to democracy because bureaucracy’s power can, if not checked, extend into the political field and because political parties are more and more oligarchic organizations. Large-scale socialism can only worsen the situation and lead to “bureaucracy’s dictatorship”. Therefore, Weber argues for the setting up of counterweights on the societal level. There is a way out of Michels’ dilemma in the national competition between bureaucratized parties. Weber is faced again with an authoritarian danger when he emphasizes in his last political writings the plebiscitary-caesaristic component of leadership. Yet, charisma shows a new face, when the leader relies on the trust of the masses: it is “reinterpreted in an anti-authoritarian way”. Thus, in Weber’s view, charisma can adjust itself to the modern context of mass democracy