Making Sense of Eurasia: Reflections on Max Weber and Jack Goody

Abstract

The concept of is a muddle. In this article it is argued, following British social anthropologist Jack Goody, that landmass exhibits important commanalities, which date back to agrarian empires and urban cultures of Bronze Europe is better understood as macro-region Western Eurasia than as a continent, equivalent to whole of Asia. This recognition is occluded by scholarship shot through with Eurocentric and Euro-American bias. One of most influential figures in social theory, German sociologist Max Weber, epitomises these distortions (fruitful though many of his contributions have been). It is instructive, in age of Presidents Putin and Trump, to revisit Weber's thesis concerning affinity between the Protestant ethic and spirit of as well as his notions of a value-free social science. Rejecting Russian nationalist visions of as a zone of Muscovite hegemony, article proposes instead that entire landmass has been characterized by a longterm dialectic of market exchange and redistribution. Ideals of responsible government and social-democratic inclusion reached a peak in twentieth-century welfare states; but in era of neoliberalism, populist reactions to domination of market capitalism are reversing this consolidation. It is proposed that accelerating planetary crisis can only be addressed through a renewal of Eurasian unity: a second Eurasian Age.