Weber's Works (II) -- Types of Economic and Historical Domination: Types of Economic and Historical Domination

Author: Weber
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: In the mid-to-late 1980s, China's reform and opening-up were in full swing, achieving significant successes while also giving rise to many social issues. The situation faced by China's intellectual circles bore some resemblance to the context Weber confronted in the late 19th century with the German nation-state. Weber described himself as an "economic nationalist" in terms of national interest and acted according to the ethics of responsibility. Weber's unconventional insights, along with his discussion of modern capitalism as a rational labor organization, may offer some inspiration for Chinese thinkers. "The entire economy is nothing but the history of economic rationalism." With the "quantification" as the warp and social action and groups as the weft, Weber wove his vision of history in Economy and Society. "Any institution we can imagine cannot function without power to issue commands, hence there is domination." This is the starting point of Weber's study in political sociology. Through Types of Legitimate Domination, Weber summarized three "ideal types of domination" from the historical experience of humanity: charismatic domination, traditional domination, and legal domination. He analyzed the foundations of legitimacy, the mechanisms of operation, and the impacts of these three forms of domination, focusing on different types of domination and management and their substantive effects on a society's formation and rationalization. Through this approach, Weber's study of domination types became integrated with his research on religious, legal, and economic history into a complete system.