In this chapter a critical analysis of Weber's understanding of domination from his sociological writings will be presented. Domination is a central component of Max Weber's sociology of politics. Controversy still surrounds the moral and political contexts, and the implications, of his views on domination. These views, however, bear upon any sociology which follows Weber's general approach to understanding social phenomena. The discussion in this chapter focuses upon Weber’s political sociology rather than on Weber's economic and religious sociologies, though the connections between these sociologies are acknowledged. The reading of Weber here is related to the specific purpose of this thesis, and is not intended to be a detailed or comprehensive exposition of Weber’s views. The chapter ends by proposing what is suggested as a more comprehensive and realistic approach to analysing domination which retains many of the strengths of Weber’s approach but develops them further.

Weber was concerned with the effects of rationalization upon his own society, and throughout his work there are glimpses of what he understood those effects to be. He clearly saw that many aspects of Western society were being undermined by rationalization, or if not being undermined were being appropriated to the purposes of rationalization. Weber was faced with a choice between analysing and explaining social processes and eschewing value judgements in the interests of sociological accuracy, or producing criticisms of social developments. He chose the former course, and in so doing, advanced many important insights. However, taken to its limits, Weber’s approach to domination contains elements which lead into nihilism. The translation of the concepts of Macht and Herrschaft is crucial to the understanding of Weber’s views of social action. To be sure, disagreements over translation and interpretation have been a feature of Weberian scholarship, but more recent translations and interpretations have settled on translating Herrschaft as domination rather than ‘authority’ or ‘imperative coordination’, with important implications for interpretation. (e.g., Bendix, 1966: 292; Aron, 1970: 240; Cohen, J., et.al 1975: 229 – 241; Parsons, 1975: 666 – 670; Roth, in Weber, 1978: 61 – 62).

Chapter one of Economy and Society is concerned with basic sociological terms, and the definitions of power (Macht) and domination (Herrschaft) occur almost at the end of this introductory chapter (Weber, 1978: 53 – 54). Chapter ten deals explicitly with ‘Domination and Legitimacy'. This comparatively short chapter, a beginning for Weber's extensive discussion of mainly economic domination, occurs in the midst of chapters dealing with political communities and bureaucracy, and it is clear that Weber believed domination to be central to economic and political action. As Weber states from the outset in Chapter Ten of Economy and Society:

Weber's most succinct and explicit statement on the importance of domination to political action occurs in his essay 'Politics as a Vocation', first delivered as a lecture to students in Munich seeking guidance about political action subsequent to the German catastrophe of 1918. This key lecture was published in German in 1919 but only translated into English by Gerth and Mills in 1948 (Weber, 1970: 77 – 128).

Weber’s sociological writings had two parallel thrusts, firstly to develop universalistic categories applicable to all societies, and secondly to indicate the differences between historical and contemporary structures to highlight the latter’s distinctiveness. What is important to note at this point is that Weber’s views on the centrality of domination to political action were consistent across his formal sociology and his more political writings, of which ‘Politics as a Vocation’ is a central example. What many commentators on Weber have failed to do is highlight the centrality of domination to Weber’s sociological and political views. David Beetham, however, argues that Weber’s political and sociological writings diverge. Weber’s political writings were concerned "... with power and the striving for power in particular societies" (Beetham, 1985: 259). Nevertheless, Weber’s political and sociological views on domination are sufficiently unified to be read together.

Despite the centrality of domination to both Weber’s political and sociological views, Beetham hardly mentions domination or Herrschaft even when discussing the centrality of legitimacy to the exercise of power (e.g., Beetham, 1985: 257 – 258). This is an oversight in interpretation. A more fundamental neglect occurs when Herrschaft is not translated as domination. Not translating Herrschaft accurately (c.f., as Parsons did his influential translation of Economy and Society), leads to a "... diminution of both the importance of power and the implication that some people exert power over others" (Cohen, et.al., 1975: 238; c.f. Parsons, 1947: 1 – 86). Parsons placed unjustifiable emphasis upon the integrative aspects of domination, understood in terms of authority, leadership, or legitimacy. In fact, however, while Weber did discuss aspects of integration, legitimacy, and authority in the context of domination, he placed at least as significant an emphasis on the "disagreeable connotation" of the concept of domination, which some commentators want to avoid (e.g., Aron, 1970: 240). This emphasis is highlighted by Freund’s summary of Weber’s understanding of politics as "... the process which ceaselessly aims at forming, developing, obstructing, shifting or overturning the relationships of domination" (Freund, 1972: 221). Commentators on Weber, such as Aron (1970), Bendix (1966), Giddens (1972), and Beetham (1985) tend to diminish the negative aspects of domination even as they acknowledge, often only in passing, that domination has negative or disagreeable aspects.

In ‘Politics as a Vocation’ Weber explicitly links three key phenomena in politics – the state, violence, and domination – together in an indissoluble nexus of crucial importance to both scholars of political action and activists struggling politically:

The original context of this lecture – to bewildered students after the German defeat of 1918 by a leading German intellectual whose political aspirations were to a certain extent thwarted – ought not be overlooked. Weber drew upon his more detailed and extensive historical and sociological work in Economy and Society to address contemporary political issues. He argued a case for political action guided by an ethic of the putative political actor taking responsibility for their actions, as opposed to an idealistic ethic of ultimate ends typified by German socialists and pacifists, in which the state was the major institution, violence the decisive means of politics, and domination the raison d'être of political action. To understand this essay, it is necessary to understand aspects of Weber's formal sociology of domination in Economy and Society as well as understand Weber's own moral vision. My discussion largely follows Weber's exposition of domination from Economy and Society through to ‘Politics as a Vocation’.

Throughout the German text of Economy and Society, the word Herrschaft is used to describe certain kinds of associative relationships involving "a structure of superordination and subordination sustained by a variety of motives and means of enforcement" (Roth, in Weber, 1978: XC). Weber's explicit interest in Herrschaft derives from his concern with administration and bureaucracy as the major phenomena of organisation in modern societies. Relations of domination are usually administered relations requiring an identifiable actor or actors to control and wield power, take decisions, implement and administer them, if need be against resistance. Even direct democracy, the most basic and direct form of social organisation, involves domination as Weber understands it (Weber, 1978: 948 – 949). But his discussion of direct democracy is primarily a preface for his central concern with more complex manifestations of domination and the phenomenon’s "universality, its stability, its profound significance for the establishment of an ordered condition" (Thomas, 1984: 225).

If Weber was concerned to examine the complexities of contemporary domination typified by legal–rational domination, he had to first posit a typology of relationships which involved a continuum from minimal domination to larger–scale and complex domination. In Weber's discussion of direct democracy in Economy and Society, for example, it is clear that he would limit the operations of direct democracy to small, relatively egalitarian groups requiring stable and simple administrative functions and equipped with some training in the objective determination of ways and means needed to achieve sought–after goals. Weber's examples of directly democratic associations include the Swiss Landesgemeinden, certain townships in the United States, or, with qualifications, the administration of universities (Weber, 1978: 948 – 951). Weber felt that modern complex societies could not be administered by directly democratic methods because they were far too large, the issues demanding decisions often too complex for non–experts to understand and decide upon in an informed manner, because decisions might have to be made rapidly, and the predicability required for regular, reliable, large–scale calculation and planning was too demanding to tolerate sometimes protracted debate and consensus–formation throughout small, localised groups or 'cells' often associated with more directly democratic decision–making. A society run along directly democratic lines contains the potential for minimal structural domination, but by no means reductions in other forms of domination. Weber sought to examine societies which contained such potential as something of a preface to his more central concern with contemporary, large–scale, domination.

Weber initially defines domination (Herrschaft) as:

He qualifies this definition by situating it in the context of defining power (Macht) as the probability of one actor in a social relationship being able to exercise their will despite resistance, and qualifying the importance of the notion of command in defining domination. There has to be the probability of an issued command being obeyed before domination can be said to operate, implying a different degrees of domination, such that its intensity might be understood as low when a low probability of obedience to a command exists, and as high when the probability of obedience is high. Intensity might be measured by counting the numbers of people who obey a command and assessing the willingness with which obedience occurs. Domination is usually, but not exclusively, operative when the issuer of the command is equipped with a habitually obedient staff or organisation to carry out orders. Weber closes discussion of his initial definition by pointing to some general examples of domination, such as domination exercised by the head of a household, or the Bedouin chief levying contributions from travellers passing through his stronghold. He adds a comment on the relationship between a ruling organisation and administrative functions which usually, but not necessarily exclusively, occur together. Weber makes this important point in the latter discussion: "If it possesses an administrative staff, an organisation is always to some degree based on domination" (Weber, 1978: 54). This leads to the first conclusion about Weber’s view of domination, which is that, on Weber’s account, domination is inescapable because, if organisation is virtually ubiquitous in human society, so too is domination.

When he examines legitimate domination in detail, Weber delimits his initial definition by indicating that domination does not include every mode of exercising 'power' or 'influence' over others. He qualifies the concept with the word 'authority', and notes that the bases of obedience can range widely from habit through to rational calculation of advantage (Weber, 1978: 212 – 216). Domination is not restricted to economic contexts but extends into virtually every situation where obedience to commands occurs. Setting aside reasons why commands are obeyed, from habit through to rational calculation of advantage, legitimacy often arises because those obeying a command usually accord the issuer of the command the right to issue it, though the degree of legitimacy accorded to the issuer and the commands issued will vary, just as the degree of willingness to obey commands will vary:

Legitimacy, as understood by Weber, incorporates components of reproduction. An actor might test the degree of legitimacy accorded to them by issuing a command. If obedience occurs, the receiver has accorded at least some degree of legitimacy to the actor and the command, and consequently, the actor is encouraged in the belief that legitimacy is accorded to them. Having succeeded with that means, the issuer of the command has increased the probability of future obedience if subsequent commands are issued in the same way. "But a certain minimum of assured power to issue commands, thus of domination, must be provided for in nearly every conceivable case" (Weber, 1978: 215).

Weber distinguishes between ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ authority relationships {Herrschaftsverhältnis}(Weber, 1978: 213). He categorises even a feudal vassal–lord relationship as a ‘voluntary’ relationship if, for whatever reason, the vassal entered freely into it. Absolutely involuntary formal authority relationships are restricted to slavery, where the slave has not the slightest choice in the situation short of suicide. The formal and apparently involuntary authority relationships in the military are at least partially open to repudiation, as are relations between workers and employers even if the employer is the state. A system of domination can exist in which rulers might feel so secure in their position and be so assured of the reliability of their staff that "... even the pretence of a claim to legitimacy..." can be dropped (Weber, 1978: 214). Weber's phrase ‘a system of domination’ implies that he understands domination as a dynamic, evolving process as much as a static phenomenon. Weber then develops his definition, though excluding situations in which power has its roots in a formerly free interplay of interested parties such as occurs in the market (see, Roth, in Weber, 1978: LXXXXVIII).

It is interesting that Von Clausewitz's succinct definition of war is similar to Weber's definition of power, from which follows Weber’s definition of domination. Von Clausewitz emphasises the violence of war, whereas Weber’s definitions of power and domination do not mention violence at all:

The point of mentioning Von Clausewitz, and warfare generally, in the context of discussing Weber’s views on domination is to emphasise the connections between warfare, rationalization, the state, and domination, an emphasis which few commentators place upon their expositions of Weber’s sociology of domination. It can be said that Von Clausewitz was one of the first commentators on a specific example of what can happen when the organisational techniques of the modern state are combined with the prosecution of a traditional human activity to do with establishing or overturning relations of domination, warfare. On War was written subsequent to Von Clausewitz’s participation in some of Napoleon’s earlier campaigns.

Much of Von Clausewitz’s discussion of war stresses the connections between politics and warfare, as indicated by later comments in Chapter One of On War:

Reinhold Bendix mentions the similarities between Von Clausewitz’s definition of war and Weber’s definition of power in a footnote, but does not develop on the implications of this similarity (Bendix, 1966: 290). Weber was certainly aware of the connections between power, domination, violence, and institutions such as the state which bind violence, domination, and power together, especially in warfare (see, e.g., Krippendorff, 1970; Young, 1984).

Weber’s often quoted statement from ‘Politics as a Vocation’ that the state is the political structure or grouping which "(successfully)... claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" clearly shows how he connects the state, domination, legitimacy, and violence into an indissoluble nexus: "Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence" (Weber, 1970: 78). Weber’s views, expounded in the essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’ place his discussion of the operations of domination in a specifically political, rather than an economic context. Weber's conception of political action is that political action must occur within a given territory which necessarily distinguishes between insiders and outsiders. Accepting territoriality implies the acceptance of obligations and responsibilities on the part of its inhabitants to and by the dominant authority in that territory; in particular the acceptance of imposed order, through coercion if required, and the requirement of national defence. Finally, the crucial role of violence in political action is always present. To be sure, political action in this scheme is not inevitably violent, and the fact that Weber’s more formal discussion of power and domination in Economy and Society does not mention violence reinforces the implicit acceptance of the view that violence and political action are not, and need not, always be connected. Nevertheless, Weber's view of political action amounts to:

Weber’s view of politics is a fairly narrow one by contemporary standards, focusing as it does on institutions such as the state, struggles among different groups in a society for control of the state, and through it, control of a given geographical territory and the people living within it, and the means whereby political actors secure their domination of that territory and its central social institutions. Other conceptions of politics obviously can be proposed, such as politics which emphasise domination on the basis of gender or ethnicity. Weber’s view of politics is still applicable to contemporary society because the state remains the central social institution, and state agencies, such as the military, have control of the contemporary means of ultimate violence, nuclear weapons, the use of which would overwhelm all other political struggles. The discussion will now turn to the crucial concept of legitimacy in the context of domination.

The notion of legitimacy is critical to the operations of domination because one of the most effective uses of power is to circumvent grievance formation among those who might otherwise find their situation intolerable. To that end, a range of devices is deployed, including convincing people that their lot is divinely ordained, natural, or that there are no viable alternatives (Lukes, 1974: 24). From the perspective of a dominating actor, it is important that this use of power be made, and be seen to be made, as legitimate, routine, and unquestionable as possible. Weber describes domination as involving predictable relations between the dominator and those being dominated:

Legitimate domination in the modern state, Weber argued, was located in the system of legal/rational domination in which the ‘right’ of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory was delegated only to specific legally authorised groups, such as the police for internal security, and the military forces for external security or national defence, with severe sanctions usually laid down for attempted or actual usurpation of that specific legitimate, legal monopoly on the use of physical force. It is not the exclusive preserve of any particular type of regime because domination is ubiquitous wherever organisation arises:

The shift from traditional and charismatic forms of domination did away with the arbitrary and traditionally–legitimated exercise of force which pertained in proto–state formations such as the feudal system in Europe prior to the rise of relatively modern nation–states. Modern legitimate violence is managed, administered, bureaucratic violence.

Most of the time most people habitually obey the laws, rules, and orders issued by the ruling regime or taken–for–granted generally throughout the society. Any sanctions visited on individuals and groups, and enforced by the legitimate regime's delegated agencies of enforcement, are generally accepted as being legitimate, just, fair and are very rarely effectively challenged in ways other than, for example, legal appeals against criminal convictions. Precisely why people habitually obey was problematical for Weber, though he did address this question momentarily. Frank Parkin suggests that Weber posited a three–part answer to the question of why people habitually obey which mirrors his three–part definition of ideal types of legitimate domination:

Weber persists in looking at strictly ideal–typical reasons for habitual obedience, is not looking at illegitimate domination, and thence, at why people might persist in obeying commands which are perceived as legitimate but which might actually be illegitimate commands.

People persist in obeying because they accept that those ordering them about have the right to do so, or because they believe it to be their duty to obey, or because they fear the consequences of not obeying, or because they cannot think of alternatives which might be better, or more effective, or make more sense, or albeit from basically selfish motives bound up with sensing and following 'the main chance' to achieve a desired, usually short–to–medium–term, personal benefit, or privilege.

Weber does not show how legitimacy might be systematically or spontaneously eroded. He is equally silent on what might be called a ‘sociology of political deviance’ and all that might follow from such a sociology. Weber is not concerned with examining praxis which would suspend belief in legitimacy and seek after the meanings which ‘politically deviant’ actors might derive from their ‘deviancy’ or invoke to explain their self–understandings of ‘deviance.’ Weber's discussion appears limited when it comes to explaining why people would resist and even revolt against their dominators. He did allow for the development of charismatic movements, but he located the rise of these movements in the perceived abilities of outstanding individuals arousing the allegiance of followers, and argued that such movements were inherently unstable because they usually avoided dealing with the economic exigencies required for a sustained existence:

Weber's theory of domination is an elite–oriented theory rather than a theory applicable to examining or explaining how ordinary people perceive domination. Weber's theory is concerned to examine domination from the perspective of those, to use his words from ‘Politics as a Vocation’, who have a ‘calling to politics’ and who satisfy the criteria he set out as indicative of that calling. This is not to argue that Weber deprecates specialised expertise, but that he believes that only certain kinds of people have a political vocation, and that such a vocation requires a suspension or even an abandonment of other kinds of moral, or religious, categories he believed retarded the acceptance of the responsibilities which came with political office.

Following Weber, aspects of the relationship between domination, legitimacy, rationalization, organised violence, and war can be seen. Rationalization pervades warfare and preparations for war. Weber explicitly recognised this process though he did not systematically examine it in any great detail (e.g., Weber, 1978: 918; 980 – 982). In the context of discussing how charismatic domination could give way to legal–rational domination, he wrote:

According to Weber, rationalization began to occur because of the need to develop more systematic and predictable business practices in late Medieval Europe. The consolidation of modern nation–states within and between which commerce would be conducted promoted the parallel development of ever more rationalised military forces under the control of the state.

It is the differentiation of factors which makes Weber's analysis of contemporary society relevant. It offers an explanation of how societies develop towards Weber's own kind of capitalist society – early twentieth century Germany – highlighting the process of rationalization as well as a range of types of rationalization. An undercurrent of implicit moral discomfort about the direction in which Weber saw his society headed is evident. Wolfgang Mommsen describes Weber as being, essentially, a ‘liberal in despair’ (Mommsen, 1974: 94 – 115). What other commentators, such as Turner and Factor (1984), and Brubaker (1984) generally interpret Weber as having done was to have approached the choice between capitulation to the status quo and responsible transformation of it, and opted for capitulation because he could not see any other possibilities aside from socialism and irrationality manifesting in religious upheaval, both of which he saw as offering worse possibilities than the status quo.

It is the combination of Weber's stress on value–freedom and an important personal or subjective element running through his work which lies at the heart of much of Weber's pessimism. Weber set himself impossible objectives by arguing for scholarly value–freedom while necessarily remaining very much an active participant in his own society. As Wilson writes:

With respect to how modern states arose, Weber presented a coercive theory of the rise of states, not necessarily through warfare as such but through a combination of struggle, directly violent and less violent, and the development of ever–more efficient administrative capabilities (Weber, 1978: 904 – 909). In his discussion of feudalism as a type of legitimate domination, Weber examines a range of ways in which a lord could extend and strengthen his power including retaining sole control over the appointment of administrative staff such as technically trained officials especially in legal and military fields. In the notes to this discussion, he examines the rationalization of common law under the influence of Roman legal precedent in Britain and states that this development of rationalised common law contributed to the modern Western state (Weber, 1978: 259). Western military organisation developed from feudal military systems into essentially capitalist–mercenary systems and thence into state–supported and legitimate military forces financed and resourced by efficient state administrative systems which did away with private armies. This leads to Weber's definition of the modern state as the entity successfully to claim the monopoly of the use of legitimate organised violence within a given geographical area:

This is by no means a complete explanation of the rise of modern states, but it is one which emphasises the combined role of domination, the state and state institutions, processes such as rationalisation and legitimacy, and developments in commercial organisation which were fairly readily appropriated by the state, coercion and violence, all of which find their extreme manifestation in the prosecution of modern warfare.

Aside from the elite–oriented focus of Weber’s approach to domination, Weber's general theory of domination is also seriously flawed by an implicit contradiction between "...the conceptualization of the forms of domination in terms of their being both an expression of a teleological principle of ranking, and parts of ‘the real world’ which must secure determinate natural and social conditions of existence" (Weights, 1978: 66). Weber cannot sustain his position on domination because he is virtually silent on precisely how or why people can be assumed to obey legitimate domination or how and why people might disobey otherwise legitimate domination. The simple explanations he offers are not wholly convincing.

Another view of Weber’s dilemma is given by Jeffrey Alexander:

Weber's implicit teleology of forms of domination is located in his sense of human society developing essentially through ‘lower’ or less rigorous forms of rationally located legitimate domination – traditional/charismatic – towards legitimate legal–rational domination characterised by high–order rationalization and purposive–rational action over against less ‘rational’ forms of social action such as affective or even instinctual. As indicated earlier, Weber's personal preference, albeit one laden with misgivings, was in favour of his own kind of society, so there is often an implicit sense of legal–rational categories of domination being endorsed as being more stable than the other forms. This implicit sense of legal–rationality leading to more stable social organisation than other forms of rationality, coupled with the implicit determinism contained by the notion of societies evolving from 'lower order' rationality towards 'higher order' rationality is contradicted by Weber's basic methodological stress on verstehen (Weber, 1978: 4 – 14). Verstehen is usually translated in English as 'understanding' but it can also be translated as ‘subjectively understandable,’ ‘interpretation in subjective terms,’ or ‘comprehension’ (in Weber, 1978: 57). Verstehen, as used and understood by Weber has two components to it, erklärendes verstehen which relates to understanding an individual’s motivation for action, and aktuelles verstehen which relates to the action an individual undertakes as against other potentially possible courses of action (Weber, 1978: 8 – 9). This dual 'why' and 'what' in verstehen is important because

But Weber goes further by striving to impute rationality to human actions even if this rationality is located in affective or substantive rationality categories over against purposive–rational or formal rationality. This probably explains the difficulty encountered when Weber's distinction between substantive and formal rationality is considered, the former seeming to cover anything which the latter does not (Eisen, 1978: 61 – 67).

There is also little evidence of any sustained ontological reflection within Weber’s scheme of social action, forms of rationality, or forms of legitimate domination. Yet his scheme demands an ontology if only to serve as a carefully established reference point to establish the telos of a system of domination and the ‘quality of being’ experienced by a social actor caught up in a system of domination. Because verstehen cannot be approached in its dual sense without an ontological component. Weber does not systematically address the problems of what it means to be ‘human’ and what being ‘human’ mean (e.g., Fitzgerald, 1978). Weber does allow for people routinely obeying legitimate forms of domination according to their self–understanding of duty, affection for a leader, habit, or economic, political or social advantages to be gained from obedience. However, he does not discuss what it means for those obeying to obey, or what they might express if asked to explain why they persist in obeying. Weber does not allow for disaffection from legitimate domination which might lead some people to rebellion or resistance because domination, in his view, is either legitimate or it does not effectively exist. Jeffrey Alexander draws a comparison between Weber and Sartre, where the latter argues for the individual to face the ambiguities of freedom, without ‘bad faith’, and Weber looks to the concept of ‘vocation’, and his preferred ‘ethic of responsibility’, most succinctly and clearly set out in his essay, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (Alexander, 1987: 200 – 203).

Having noted that Weber's view of domination amounts to an elite theory, or a view of domination from the perspective of society's privileged or more apparently powerful members, explicit mention ought be made of his moral position, briefly indicated though it may be in his work. Weber's personal moral views are clear in a letter written in 1907 rejecting an article submitted by a follower of Freud to a journal which Weber helped edit (in Runciman, 1978: 383 – 388), and in 'Politics as a Vocation', dating from 1918 (in Gerth & Mills, 1970: 77 – 128). With these comments separated by eleven years, as well as being separated by World War One with all its traumas for Western and particularly German society, they may safely be taken as being consistent. While not rejecting Freud's views on human nature outright, Weber is highly critical of what he takes to be Freud's subjective, value–laden approach to what might flow for human betterment from greater attention to the individual subconscious components of the psyche. Implicitly, Weber cannot accept Freud's alleged reliance upon some sort of ultimate source of ethical insight against which the ethical utility of an individual's actions can be judged. Weber's then explicitly states his own position on human nature:

Couple this statement with Weber's assessment of who ought to have a calling to politics in 'Politics as a Vocation', and it becomes clear that Weber worked with a contrast between the mass of ‘ordinary people’ and the followers of an ‘heroic ethic’ with a calling to politics, imbued with an ‘ethic of responsibility’; trying to act politically in a world laden with uncertainties and precariousness at both individual and societal levels (Weber, 1970: 118 – 127). The mass of people, for Weber, are condemned to an essentially meaningless, creature–like existence (Brubaker, 1984: 98). This reinforces a point made earlier with respect to Weber’s elite–orientation of his theory of domination because he saw domination necessarily being exercised only by a social elite because of their ‘calling to politics’.

While Weber could admire the moral rectitude and sincerity of the votary of an 'ethic of ultimate ends', the practical applications of that ethic foundered on the brutal exigencies of political action, violent means being the decisive means, and also with the dilemmas caused by having to justify means used by reference to ends sought. Even the strictest adherents to an 'ultimate ethic' attempting to act politically in the world would, at some point, be forced to confront the problem of ends and means, and here, Weber argued, their noble ethical values would come apart, either collapsing into irresponsible political paralysis or erupting into chiliastic violence. By dividing humanity into those heroically striving to become 'personalities' and the mass of humanity guided by the 'ethic of the mean' bounded by their baser natures, Weber reveals his own elitist, aristocratic moral position.

Given that only members of an elite can struggle for their 'true' personhoods, Rogers Brubaker concludes that both Weber and Nietzsche consign the masses to oblivion:

In many respects, the next philosophical stage beyond existentialism is nihilism, purportedly the belief in nothing other than what can be directly apprehended by one's own senses. If nothing in the cosmos makes the slightest sense, then there is no reason whatsoever to infer that human actions make any more sense than anything else. But the practical implications of nihilism, coupled with the human condition, mean that nihilism always presents in a fractured form, and not a pure form. The thorough–going nihilist would eschew even the most basic human functions because they were meaningless and pointless. One retreat from absolute nihilism can be hedonism, referring back to the basic human apprehension of pleasure and pain, the nihilist seeking after sensual pleasures and avoiding physical pain (Thielicke, 1962: 148 – 166). Another retreat from absolute nihilism tends in Weberian directions insofar as it denies any metaphysical origins for justifying morally informed action. This does not neglect the motivating, even morally legitimating power of human ethical systems in human affairs, but it denies the superiority of any given system over another and calls on the individual to believe in and attempt to live out of an ethical system, any system, and necessarily deprecates the human worth of those unable or unwilling to follow this noble path.

Leo Strauss criticised Weber's position as leading to nihilism, and noted that to follow Weber to his limits, to embrace what Strauss labels 'noble nihilism', directly refutes Weber's position: "... one cannot make a distinction between noble and base nihilism except if one has some knowledge of what is noble and what is base" (Strauss, 1953: 48). To be sure, it cannot be argued that Weber was a thorough–going nihilist in the mould of Nietzsche or Berdyaev, but it can be argued that, almost as a necessary consequence of his views on human nature and purposes, coupled with his dystopic conclusions on the workings and possible futures of his own society, and his philosophical and methodological stances, Weber's views strongly lead towards nihilism, and, at many points, equate with existentialism. As Hans Küng points out, essentially, both positions, especially the nihilistic position, are unprovable and irrefutable. Logically, it follows that nihilism cannot be justified precisely because it cannot be proven false. Therefore, "If it is possible that everything, in the last resort, is contradictory, meaningless, worthless, null, so, too, the opposite is not a priori impossible: that, in the last resort, everything is nevertheless identical, meaningful, valuable, real "(Küng, 1980: 424; emphasis in original).

Another criticism of Weber is his persistent ascription of greater positive value upon modern purposive–rationality over against other, arguably earlier or less developed forms of rationality. Implicit in Weber's discussion of modern purposive–rationality is the notion of people accommodating themselves to certain forms of required cultural conduct (Weights, 1978: 72). Unless people conform culturally to legal–rational domination, legal–rational domination cannot exist as people have to internalise categories of rationalization throughout their entire beings rather than reserve them exclusively for the workplace and behave in other ways when not formally working.

Weber cannot have it both ways. By maintaining a distinction between forms of domination ordered teleologically, and analysing them successfully, and at the same time stressing Verstehen as an essential methodological stance which necessarily implies striving to come to grips with what people experience and understand by domination and explaining what people do and why they do it, Weber must either analyse domination as experienced by people in society, thus violating his elite–orientation, or jettison his elite–orientation and discuss what domination means for those being dominated and those dominating them. On the basis of this arguably irreducible contradiction, Weights contends that a study of relations of domination along Weberian lines is impossible and cites Weber himself who, at the end of his first brief discussion of the three pure forms of legitimate domination in Economy and Society notes that "The usefulness of the above classification can only be judged by its results in promoting systematic analysis" (Weber, 1978: 216; Weights, 1978: 72 – 73).

The foregoing indicate, then, that there are some serious problems associated with Weber’s approach to domination which await the uncritical theorist if they attempt to follow Weber’s lead in analysing contemporary domination. Nevertheless, Weber has been highly influential in the development of critical theory, and thus it is worthwhile to examine Weber from another tack to establish the basis for this influence. This tack emphasises Weber’s approach to critique.

Weber rejected the idea of critique, as opposed to exposition and putative causal explanation of social action. Nevertheless, Weber's thought, in fact, contains an especially powerful, penetrating, and comprehensive indictment of modern industrial civilisation, even though the indictment is mostly implicit, cropping up in explicit form only in occasional passages such as those at the end of The Protestant Ethic (Weber, 1958: 181 – 182). The problem is that the criticism does not lead anywhere. "After having shown in detail how we are caught in an iron cage, he proceeds to show not how we can get out, but that there is [no] exit" (McIntosh, 1983: 71).

In order to overcome Weber’s imprisonment in the ‘iron cage’, McIntosh seeks to reconstruct Weber's analysis in four major ways, beginning by highlighting the major difficulties with Weber's categories of rationality, social action, and rationalization. His reconstruction of Weber begins by extending Weber's scheme to take account of action which is both instrumentally and expressively (affectually) rational, which can be practically and interpretively rational, and which allows for value rational action to be properly described as rational on its own terms.

People can and do act in accordance and with reference to ethical categories, which are not rational as such, but their actions can be correctly defined as rational when a unity of belief and action is considered. An act can be described as expressively rational to the extent to which it expresses the will of the actor without regard for its final results. Alternatively, an act can be described as instrumentally rational to the extent to which the results of action accurately reflect the intended results of the action. Instrumental action seeks to match result to intention and value expressive action strives to match conduct to action (McIntosh, 1983: 85).

The second reconstruction involves examining practical and interpretive rationality. Instrumental and expressive action are practical modes because they require the world to be moulded to the mental picture of the actor. Alternatively, one can strive for explanations of interpretive action such that one strives to form the actor's mental constructs to match the world. The former modes imply a domination of the world by the actor whereas the latter implies the harmony of actor and world, or more extreme, the actor conforming to the world and striving to make sense of it as best they can. Ritual or magical acts might be meaningless and impotent according to instrumental or effective categories because those seeking to change the world via magical or ritual action might well fail or the result achieved might be explained by rational, scientific methods. One example might be embarking on a ritual dance to bring rain because a group’s beliefs include the belief that the gods will only bring rain when called upon using certain ritual formulae. A meteorologist would regard such actions as futile and meaningless, and rather look at prevailing weather conditions and perhaps order a cloud seeding operation if weather conditions were favourable. The rain dancers and the meteorologist want the same result, rain, but are using different means rooted in different rationalities. The rain dance might be a meaningless traditional activity and a waste of time and energy from the meteorologist's perspective, but such actions are also deeply significant and meaningful to those engaging in them because the actions have their own rationality. It is axiomatic that the gods need to be propitiated if one’s rationality allows that there are gods who control the rain. Rituals also serve a social cohesion function, drawing the people together for significant activities at significant times, and reinforcing their communal solidarity and identity as a people in time and space (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1971).

What is now required is an expanded exposition of social action which accords rationality to forms of action other than instrumental action and instrumental rationality. In McIntosh's scheme, instrumental action and instrumental rationality are preserved exactly as formulated by Weber. The categories of ethically expressive action and rationality owe their main inspiration to Weber's ‘value rationality’, but are worked out in a more adequate fashion, according to Weber's own standards for ideal typical categories: that they be clear, coherent, and consistent (adequate at the level of meaning), and that they accurately reflect the meaning of the action to the actors (adequate at the level of understanding). The categories of ceremonial and magical action derive from Weber's ‘traditional’ action, but have been developed into full fledged types, capable of being rationalised in their own right, rather than being relegated to the ‘borderline’ of goal rational or value rational action (McIntosh, 1983: 88).

McIntosh's third reconstruction grapples with Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality. Weber's distinction is not wholly convincing, because he tends to blur the meaning of substantive rationality in a number of ways (McIntosh, 1983: 76 – 79; 88 – 89). Almost any act can be explained by reference to formal rationality once the parameters of and goals sought by the action are established. Rain–making by rain dances could fall within Weber’s category of formal rationality because the procedures or rules for rain dances are usually carefully laid down and followed to achieve a specific result, even if that specific result is not achieved, the skies remain clear and the ground parched. The maintenance of social solidarity, an unintended but equally significant result, can be achieved, even if it is only coincidental that rain falls after a rain dance. On the other hand, the premises upon which rain dances are believed to bring rain are irrational because modern science has shown that certain weather conditions cause rain and not the actions of sufficiently propitiated gods. Weber discusses this distinction in the context of the development of substantive law, and here his confusion of formal and substantial rationality becomes clear:

Bearing in mind the reconstructions of instrumental and expressive rationality, and practical and interpretive rationality, McIntosh suggests that substantive rationality occurs in Weber as both instrumental and expressive rationality, depending on the context. In Weber's discussion of substantive legal rationality, for example, this issue is clarified. As noted earlier, formal rationality is the stronger part of Weber's discussion of formal and substantive rationality. McIntosh would retain this part of Weber's scheme. Formal rationality involves the regulation of conduct by a set of systematically organised general rules.

To schematise McIntosh's reconstruction thus far:

McIntosh’s fourth reconstruction involves a differentiation of action into forms of rationality. This issue has already been examined in the context of the difficulties encountered in verstehen where, while the sociologist might be able to differentiate between forms of rationality operative in an action, the actors might be incapable of such differentiation and interpret their action as a unity or might even propose a quite different dualistic explanation of their action. What Weber tends to suggest is that rationalization develops along one thread in a society's development which thus enables analysis to differentiate between forms of rationality. The resulting overly rationalised sector cannot be readily incorporated into the wider society which might not be so highly rationalised.

The central point is that as action is differentiated and then rationalised in one of the modalities, it becomes more difficult to integrate this dominant modality with the others. The meaning of action tends to disintegrate into conflicting components with the growing rationalization in the one mode accompanied by increasing irrationality in the others. Since increasing differentiation has been an overall trend of world history, the problem of the integration of social action into a coherent whole has in turn become increasingly difficult (McIntosh, 1983: 90).

In summary, McIntosh argues that while our excessively rationalised society is very technically effective, it neglects the ethical and interpretive significance of social action. Purely technical action cannot provide a sufficient motivational basis for human action, which requires that action be not only technical, but meaningful. Both ethical or interpretive meaning and purely instrumental rationality cannot easily coexist because one pole will weaken the other. In this sense, McIntosh contends that Weber is at least partly a critical theorist because he sets up a tension between ever–expanding rationalization and categories of instrumental and formal rationality versus the demand of people for subjective meaning for their actions outside of purposive–rational, formal, and instrumental categories. Without this successful combination of elements, an order of domination would fail to secure the obedience of its thralls. This points to a view of domination as fragile, subject to continual challenge, and even towards ways in which domination can be overturned. But gaining such a view from Weber requires fundamental reexaminations of several of his key concepts.

On the one hand, Weber’s view of rationalization overtaking the world tended towards meaninglessness. The telos of this position is nihilism. This nihilism is a fractured nihilism because a pure form of nihilism would render all human actions utterly meaningless. Weber’s position was that it was important for political actors to hold to an ethical system, and any system would do. Rationalization would eventually render any action which did not accord with its astringent standards of rationality meaningless. But on the other hand, humans can be expected to accord interpretative significance to actions. As has been argued, even rain dances retain their significance as rituals to enhance social solidarity; the fact that rain may not fall as a result of the dance having little to do with the importance of the ritual drawing the community together for actions of interpretive, substantively rational, significance. There would, however, come a point at which some people might wonder why they were doing rain dances when rain rarely came afterwards, and thus come to question the traditional belief system which legitimated such activity. Similarly, in a rationalised society,

Weber is not a critical theorist. One of the major reasons for this lies in Weber's refusal to accord any legitimacy to alternative ways of organising human society, such as socialism. Weber is forced to settle for a bureaucratic society, and a sociology, which exemplifies the process of rationalization and gives this process some status as an historical and social phenomenon rather than simply a personal vision, value, or view. Rationalization thus becomes, among many other things, a ‘compromise’ between his ideal and that of his opponents (Wilson, 1976: 309 – 310).

For the purposes of this thesis, the major flaw in Weber's approach are the constraints of his own call for value–freedom on the part of the sociologist, and his failure to recognise that accurate sociological analysis can be pursued along lines sensitive to the actual effects of domination on individuals rather than to the uses of domination by elites. Weber’s perspective inhibits any challenging of relations of domination which negatively constrain human behaviour. To address these problems, an extended understanding of domination needs to be developed which incorporates but goes beyond the strengths of Weber. Weber’s strength lies in his stress upon the structural aspects of domination and the importance of legitimacy to increasingly rationalised, legal–rational domination. Couple this with a sense of critique, and an extended approach to understanding domination may be possible. Critique in this sense:

An interest in a critique of domination would make both domination, and relations of domination, problematical. Weber almost never raises this possibility except by the remotest imputation, witness his neglect of the possible reasons why people might not routinely obey the commands of their dominators. Weber’s elite–oriented, one–sided, nihilistic approach to domination violates his own argument for verstehen, which can be reinterpreted as the need to balance a structural approach to domination with an existential approach to domination which would be more realistic, as well as give insights into what it means, or what it is like from the actor’s perspective, to be dominated and to dominate.

According to Knights and Willmott, when seeking to grapple with domination:

Most critiques of domination do not adequately take account of why people generally persist in obeying and do not adequately account for the fact that people can and do actively defend the relations of domination in which affect their lives and which arguably distort their possibilities for liberation. This is partly the problem of resistance by a theory’s target audience to that theory because it might reveal aspects of their own situations which they may find intolerable (Fay, 1975: 97 – 102; 1987: 98 – 108). The dominated personality, having internalised required beliefs, traits, and behaviours, and dutifully reproducing them through mimesis, may undergo a crisis of identity when confronted with an alternative, disturbing view of themselves and their situation, and refuse to consider changing their circumstances or challenging their dominators. Many existing theories of domination tend to be disembodied, even dehumanised, neglecting the fact that if domination can be shown to distort or constrain people's existences, and their potentialities for liberation, then it hurts and damages them.

Part of the problem with Marxian and Weberian theories of domination, Knights and Willmott suggest, lies in a fundamental dualism operative in both theoretical traditions (Knights & Willmott, 1983). For Marx dualism sets the individual apart from society to the extent to which reconciliation can only occur through a more equitable distribution of power and wealth in a socialist society. For Weber dualism surfaces with the proposition that the individual’s best interests would be served by accommodation to the domination of the rational market–place and rationalised complex organisations, bringing unintended consequences for the individual in a rationalised society because the individual's security of purpose and meaning was bound up with accommodating to purposive–rational domination. The Marxian perspective sought to overcome dualism through the dialectic of individual and society struggling for emancipation in politics and history. Weber's ‘two ethics’, or the distinction between value–free rational sociological inquiry and private ethically informed behaviour, represents a closure of the separation between individual and society such that the individual would be able to manage any necessary accommodations to the requirements of society.

Both perspectives neglect the reciprocal relationship, or the dualism, between identity and experience, thus producing astringently disembodied theories of domination devoid of the experiential dimensions of being dominated. These experiential dimensions of domination are crucial because they help indicate how and why people internalise and reproduce categories of domination within themselves, and thence why they might be expected to reject alternative views of their situations based upon a critical theory of domination.

Libratory action is flawed if it does not take account of the reasons why people will cling to domination because their very identity is bound up with it. The existential perspective on domination being proposed here stresses a duality between self and experience over against a separatist dualism of self versus experience. Self's identity is affirmed by reflection over experience and thus self becomes a lived–through flow of experience:

Duality necessarily means that self and society are interpreted as complementary parts of a unity. If cognitive control was carefully bracketed out of an analysis of social action, one's own action would be seen to be taking place alongside the action of others, one's action and the other's action usually having much more in common than having differences. Only through cognitive reflection is meaning attached to action and objectification occurs such that action is interpreted to involve self and objectified others. Given the a priori existential assumption that the cosmos, and thence human existence in it, is inherently precarious, a refusal to come to terms with that precariousness results in a desire on the part of self to secure meaning and certainty over against the threatening or anxiety–causing other. Because the meaning and certainty so secured can never approach the completeness demanded by anxious self, a range of arguably pathological coping strategies such as denial, transference or displacement, habituation or desensitisation, or violence against one’s peers rather than against one’s tormentors can operate as attempts to secure greater certainty and freedom from threats.

An exclusively existential perspective on domination would tend to neglect structural aspects of institutionalised, routinised domination. The issue of liberation from domination has to be approached dualistically, i.e., simultaneously structurally and existentially. When these dimensions are examined as if they are independent of one another, emancipation from dualism and domination is impeded by the disembodied or self–indulgent character of their respective theories.

This raises a fundamental issue in sociological methodology. If sociology is to be critical and actively contribute to liberation rather than 'unfreedom' (Baumann, 1976), then it has to look to itself as much as look outward. Formal sociology does not especially address. "...the continuous, almost institutionalised, separation of theory and practice within social science, especially that professing to be critical and radical" (Knights & Willmott, 1983: 47).

In summary, domination for Weber was the "... probability of a command with a specific content [being] obeyed by a given group of persons" (Weber, 1978: 53). Domination was understood as involving political actors in a relationship in which one side issued orders which the other side perceived as legitimate, implying that one side accorded the other side the right to issue orders, and upon which the dominated actors acted. Domination was almost always expressed in the context of administration, because power had to reside somewhere (Weber, 1978: 948). Legitimacy was accorded to individuals or social agencies on the basis of tradition, charisma, or, especially in modern situations, by reference to a system of laws and the institutions, such as parliaments, courts, and the police, in place to create and administer those laws. This legal–rational domination operated irrespective of the individuals occupying positions of power within those institutions. Undergirding the operations of these institutions and this system of legal–rational domination, was violence as the decisive means to be used by those with a calling to politics. As Weber wrote in ‘Politics as a Vocation’:

The first of a series of weaknesses in that theory were detected. This was the fact that domination was viewed as inescapable, most particularly in situations in which complex organisations or bureaucracies are needed to administer the affairs of modern societies. Second, Weber has a one–sided approach to the problem of obedience, or why people obeyed the commands of those who dominated them, especially when there seemed no objective or rational reasons for them to do so. Indeed, he neglects the sociologically important fact that history is laden with instances of people disobeying their dominators. This neglect led directly into a third problem. Weber's theory of domination is in key respects an elite theory of domination which seriously deprecates the view of domination which may be held by the dominated, and which would necessarily lead to quite a different theory of domination. Weber's own views about the prospects for the development of Western civilisation intruded into his sociological analysis. He was forced to make a choice between a continuation of rationalization and intrusions of formal rationality into areas of social action hitherto informed by traditional or substantive rationality, and what he held to be essentially irrational forces manifesting in socialism or pacifism. He chose the former.

In philosophical terms, Weber's approach to domination falters because he cannot sustain the tension between a teleology of forms of domination (developing from what he implicitly sees as 'primitive' forms rooted in traditional or charismatic categories of rationality towards more 'developed' forms typified by legal–rational domination) and his stress on verstehen or ‘understanding’ as a methodological imperative for the sociologist. This latter approach also requires attention to ontological categories, which would shed light on the self–understandings of actors in various social contexts, the meanings which they attach to their actions, and the sense they make of their experiences of being dominated. Weber also shares many points in common with existentialism, with even some potentially nihilistic moments: once these philosophical tendencies are appreciated, both Weber's own theoretical difficulties and his moral and political views can be better understood.

Behind many of Weber's difficulties there lies a fundamental dualism between self and society which requires self to be put outside, as it were, of society to create a disembodied view of domination which necessarily neglects the interconnections between individual and society. The major strength of Weber, which lies in his attention to processes of rationalization spreading throughout society and transforming social institutions to create a bureaucratized form of rational–legal legitimate domination. But this strength is eroded by his relative neglect of attention to what individuals in that society might believe or feel as they try to make sense of their situations for themselves. Reconstructions of Weber's sociology of domination cannot easily overcome this dualism while remaining true to Weber's overall scheme. In this sense, Weber's theory of domination, while insightful on its own terms, leads nowhere when applied to theorising with a view to enhancing human self–understanding and human projects oriented to challenging relations of domination. He cannot finally allow for this without violating his own rigorous adherence to the ethic of responsibility in the context of escalating rationalised, legitimate legal–rational domination.

To finally summarise the major difficulties with Weber’s approach to domination, he firstly makes the negative aspects of existing social life the conditions of possible social live, thereby limiting his consideration of possible alternatives to existing social life. Secondly, he does not have a clear basis on which to distinguish between a necessary contingency and a contingent necessity, which is to say that he offers little, if any, grounds to distinguish between social relations which are essential for the functioning of society, and those which can be done away with as social development progresses. Thirdly, because of his methodological individualism, Weber cannot explain those social ontological factors which leave domination in place. Finally, while distinguishing between fact and value in ways which eliminate idealistic wish–fulfilment (Weber’s ‘iron cage’), because of his Nietzschian decisionism (polytheism of values), Weber fails to provide an ethical perspective on human action which is independent of both science or rationality. On the contrary, where science and rationality end, Weber’s moral force falters.. On the specific issue of possible action against domination, Weber fails to recognise the significance of nonviolence because he assimilates vocative ethical contexts into charismatic contexts, where charisma’s role in social life is declining under the conditions of modernity. These themes will return in Part two of this thesis.

Weber’s work has been built upon by critical theorists, although they have rejected important aspects of his approaches to rationalization and domination. Most notably; his ethical scheme and his capitulation to rationalization. They thematise the relationships between modern technology, rationalization, and domination. They also propose alternatives to Weber’s philosophical approaches to understanding social reality. I will now turn to a discussion of aspects of domination in the work of some critical theorists.