Weber, Max (1864—1920)

The German sociologist and political economist Max Weber provided the definition of power that is most often cited in the social sciences: the probability that one actor within a relationship will be able to carry out its own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests. As Talc-ott Parsons noted, this is a distributive notion of power, the power of A over B, which therefore also entails a sociology that focuses on conflict or asymmetrical power relations. It is thus appropriate that the German word for power that Weber used, Macht, has a somewhat menacing connotation, and Weber's discussion of power reflects the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on his thought.

Weber's notion of power in society is most often contrasted with that of Karl Marx, who saw social change as being determined by economic forces. In Weber's work, on the other hand, both political power and ideological power can be autonomous. Whether this contrast does the two thinkers justice will continue to be debated. In Weber's case, it is difficult to settle the question of which type of power is most important because there are many places where he discusses the concept in different ways, and there is no single definitive statement about the relative importance of the types of power in his writings. Still, it is possible to identify three types of power that are important in his sociology: stratification, political power, and the power of ideas or culture.

Weber has a tripartite model of stratification—class, status, and party. This way of subsuming power under stratification shows that Weber has a multidimensional view of power whereby class is economic power, status is cultural power, and party is political power. Class and status allow Weber to provide many insightful accounts of how classes and status groups relate to one another in different historical settings. So, for example, he argues that the possession of different kinds of skills, and not just ownership of the means of production as with Marx, are responsible for the life chances of classes in modern capitalist economies. Or again, literati have often wielded power on the basis of what Pierre Bourdieu has called cultural capital, or Weber describes as their monopoly hold on the means of salvation.

Still, although Weber's various concepts are often used, there is no place in his writings where he gives an account of economic or cultural stratification that provides a central theoretical thrust to his analysis of modern capitalism. (For Marx, there are several such places and a clear argument [Page 708]about the dominance of economic power.) Weber's ideas about political power have fared much better, although his notion of party has played only a small part in his own political sociology and subsequent uses of his work. The key concept in his political sociology is his definition of the modern state: the entity that possesses the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within its boundaries. This definition is still widely used and underpins any conception of the state that focuses on force, especially policing and military force, across a particular territory.

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