A Political Style of Thinking: Essay on Max Weber by Kari Palonen (review)

Abstract

[MWS 19.1 (2019) 116-134] ISSN 1470-8078 doi: 10.15543/maxweberstudies.19.1.116© Max Weber Studies 2019, Global Policy Institute, University House, Coventry University London, 109 Middlesex Street, London E1 7JF. Book Reviews Kari Palonen, A Political Style of Thinking: Essay on Max Weber (Colchester : ECPR Press, 2017), 227pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-785522-65-9.£52.00. Kari Palonen’s A Political Style of Theorizing collects in one place the many articles and essays he has published over the last 20 years, all devoted to aspects of Weber’s style of theorizing. Forging his own style of interpretation out of Weber’s style, Palonen provides a running commentary that pulls all aspects of Weber’s corpus back to a distinctive interpretation of Weber’s theory of politics, an interpretation that he himself claims ‘applies the principle of one-sided accentuation to Weber’s own work’ (2, 167). This interpretation has many moving parts, but at its core are three key arguments: first, a recurrent emphasis on the role of ‘Chancen’ (chance or chances) as central to Weber’s concepts of power and politics over and against a determinate notion of purposive reason; second, a fierce defense of Weber’s account of parliamentary politics and the professional politician against its critics; and lastly, the attempt to draw an analogy between the for-and-against nature of parliamentary debate and Weber’s revision of ‘objectivity’ in the social sciences as requiring a self-renewing process of competing interpretations and explanations. In contrast to most interpreters of Weber, Palonen puts special emphasis on the word ‘Chancen’ in all of its potential meanings— chance, probability, possibility, opportunity, contingency, likelihood —in Weber’s work. This allows him to emphasize that Weber’s concepts of, say, professional politicians, parties, or states could always have developed differently and that their conceptualization assumes ‘a radical contingency’ (5, 123) that renders their existence always only as a realized possibility. Although he does not quote this passage, one might understand Palonen’s approach to Weber under the stricture from Economy and Society that the ‘additional achievement of explanation by interpretive understanding, as distinguished [by understanding] through external observation , is of course attained only at the price of the more hypothetical and fragmentary character of its interpretively achieved results Book Reviews 117© Max Weber Studies 2019. [my emphasis]’.1 Weber’s concepts of politics, power, domination/ rule, nation, party, or state are always tentative and partial; therefore when we explain why they have come about and what the consequences might be of acting under them, we should always be aware of the hypothetical nature of our explanation. Things could be otherwise. It is this aspect of Weber’s account of explanatoryunderstanding that informs Palonen’s emphasis on ‘chance’, opportunity , and probability, and possibility in his interpretations of the core concepts of Weber’s political theorizing. Or as he puts it, they are ‘a phenomenon of the possible’ because ‘they appeal to the human agents’ everyday understanding’ (132). Palonen derives his claim that Weber is less about predictable action based on purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität) and more about chances to act from Weber’s famous definitions of power (Macht) and ‘Herrschaft’ (rule or domination). He supports this approach by reference to the student notes of Weber’s very last lectures in 1920 on Staatssoziologie, in which the ‘Herrschaft’ exercised by a state—whatever its form—rests on the probability (Chance) of having its rule or commands accepted (‘Wann besteht der Staat: wenn er die Chance hat, daß man ihm gehorcht!’) (125-26). Thus in Weber’s well-known definition of power as ‘the probability [jede Chancen] that one actor in a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability [diese Chance] rests’,2 Palonen chooses to focus on the ‘Chancen’, the possibility or, under certain circumstances the probability, of imposing one’s will over resistance rather than on the actual act of imposing one’s will, the resistance to it, or the resources necessary to carry out this imposition. Likewise in Weber’s equally well-known definition of ‘Herrschaft’ (rule or domination), ‘the probability...