Between Freedom and Hierarchy: Max Weber's Social Politics

In his later life, Max Weber's work focused on ideas about rule and hierarchy encapsulated in the German word Herrschaft.These ideas are unique in the canon of Western political theory in that they derive almost exclusively from social categories (agency, power, hierarchy), rather than more conventional political ones (constitutions, democracy).This produces a picture of 'political' life which is self-evident to us today, yet it is theoretically novel.Weber was passionately committed to the idea of human agency: that all people contained within them the potential for ordering their lives in ways they found meaningful.But he also accepted the presence of powerful external constraints on agency, created by the exercise of agency itself--the unequal outcomes of free competition--or impersonal forces, such as technology and bureaucracy.So free societies and polities revolve around two opposite poles: freedom and hierarchy. Weber developed these ideas in parallel with what he now began to c