Tag Archives: Max Weber

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The...

Robert Paul Wolff is largely correct here, but "the deep state" cannot be equated with bureaucracy as a political factor ensuring constancy and stability, as Max Weber described. He apparently did not so a search on the term "deep state," which seems to have originated with respect to Turkish state and intelligence services and senior administration under Kemal Ataturk. In Russia is this is known as the siloviki (senior career intelligence and military) and nomenklatura (senior...

The state is the form a human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a given territory. --- Max Weber, "Politics as Vocation," (33), translated Rodney Livingstone. In context, Weber claims that the monopoly is a consequence of a historical process in which intermediary powers and institutions lose their capability for independent use of physical violence. He leaves it a bit ambiguous if it is appropriate to call earlier...