Introduction

Abstract

Very little preoccupies the political thought of modernity as much as the State. Even Max Weber puts the state above all else in his writing, describing it as “the most important constitutive element of all cultural life.”¹ He notes that the “prime” task of his science is the analysis of “political actions and forms”, the most important of which he again identifies “above all” with the State.² The question “What is a ‘state’?” opens his programmatic speech, “Politics as a Vocation,”³ and the definition of the state closes his “Basic Sociological Concepts.”⁴ The broad significance that Weber attributes to the state is apparent in the way that his writing repeatedly turns to theoretical reflection on the nature of the state. But nowhere does he develop at any length the questions and issues that such reflection raises. It is well-known that he never developed a systematic doctrine of the state, nor a theory of the state or a sociology of the state; instead, he always deals with the state in passing, with remarks that are seldom pursued beyond a few sentences. They are scattered throughout his work and can be found in the most diverse contexts: in his early agrarian writings, in his methodological essays, in the special sociologies and in the political writings.