Democratic values and political realities in the thought of Max Weber

The Weber revival of the 1980's and '90's focused on Weber as a theorist of rationalization and modernity. The thesis goes beyond those debates, returning to the discussion of Weber's political writings first engaged by his contemporaries. The conventional understanding of Weber's political writings is expanded to include not only his political writings and speeches during and after WWI, but his sociology of bureaucracy and his methodological works on the meaning of the social sciences as well.;The thesis seeks to bring together parts of Weber's work that have previously been seen as disparate or thematically unrelated. We need to see Weber's various theoretical activities as those of a modern founder. This is the political theme that runs through Weber's model of democracy, his image of the political hero, and his new cultural science. His theoretical founding also has modern bureaucracy as its backdrop. For Weber, bureaucracy provides the limit and context of all modern politics. His attempt to found a new political system in Germany emerges from his own struggle against the bureaucratization of the political realm. That struggle has two parts. It emerges from the struggle over resources, or politics, but also takes place at a higher level of the political. The political consists of those fleeting moments of commonality or solidarity which are created by the heroic political actor amidst the conflict of values in modern, disenchanted western culture. The thesis asks whether those moments can be created more democratically than Weber's image of the heroic actor suggests.