Max Weber’s concept of power
Stefano Guzzini contributed to the 10th year anniversary issue of the Madrid-based open access journal Relaciones Internacionales. His article takes a stance in the Weber reception which tries to see him mainly as a forerunner of an empirical social science and a causal conception of power as in the Dahlian tradition. It will argue and confirm Raymond Aron’s take that, to the contrary, his social science is profoundly imbued by philosophical aims: ‘This interpretation of the relation between science and politics leads to a certain philosophy which at the time was not yet called “existential[ist]”, but which belongs to this current so named today.’ Hence, rather than only seeing his sociology as a way to demarcate the specificity of the social investigation from both normative theory and the natural sciences – which it certainly did – the following article follows those who see his methodological and sociological decisions as part of a political and ethical endeavour.
