'The Big Four' - Weber

The four great sceptics -

Weber - power, legitimacy, domination - "disillusion " 

Marx - class, ideology, economics - Bonapartism, Stagnation 

Nietzsche - morality, culture - God is dead (said 1880)

Freud - sexuality, irrationality, sub-conscious - depression, 'ordinary miser' psychopathology, repression

All experience "from a certain perspective"

Max Weber

After Karl Marx there was no revolution and there was a rise of the German state and social democracy. This new state needed bureaucracy which created ranks and social status - rise of the middle class and problems of militarism.

-modern banking system

-state intervetion in the economy (regulation)

-bourgoise values spread downwards

-property ownership dispersed

-imperialism

-WW1 

Weber - everything is accidental.

He is a Kantian and believed humans cannot know the objects in themselves, there is no absolute reality; only a mental picture of reality. There is no truth just honest beliefs of a person or a group of people.

So Weber found four fundamental types of social action

1. instrumental - rational action   (an action carried out  we want to do)
2. value - rational action   (an action carried out because it is good practice)
3. affectual - emotional affirmation/disaffirmation   (an action carried out for an emotional reason)
4. traditional orientation  (an action carried out because society has always done it)

this followed on with three types of domination

1. tradtional
2. charismatic
3. legal - rational (bureaucratic)

Weber says...

Humanity has lost the skills that we used to have - architecture and music - because of bureaucracy. People in bureaucratic societies are are just a very small cog inside an extremely large wheel. We can't get away from bureaucracy, we live and die in a this world - fuelled by bureaucracy.