Page 23 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Changing Definitions of Politics and Power 9

“ counter - intuitive, ” where ideology is “ closed, ” and that it draws its
problems from politics and practice rather than from critical theory
(Benton, 1994 : 45 – 9). This is problematic since Marxism has invariably
seemed extremely dogmatic to non - believers, and at the same time, it has

been riven by factional disputes. Furthermore, it is difficult to draw a
distinction between science and ideology according to the “ openness ” of
science given that, following Thomas Kuhn ’ s (1970) very infl uential work
on science; it is generally acknowledged that even the natural sciences are
less concerned with genuinely testing theories than with confi rming them.

1.2 The Weberian Tradition of Political Sociology

The autonomy of the political at the level of the state is central to Weber ’ s
political sociology. In fact, Weber ’ s work stands at the beginning of a
tradition of thought that is explicitly anti - Marxist on just this issue of
the autonomy of the state and the importance of liberal democratic
politics. As a liberal committed to the defense of individual freedom,
which he saw threatened in modernity, Weber opposed his work to
Marx ’ s economic determinism. He took the concentration of the means
of administration in the nation - state to be as important as the concentra-
tion of the means of production in capitalism theorized by Marx
(Bottomore, 1993 : 1011).

As we saw above, Weber defined power in such a way as to suggest
that it may be present in all social relations, so that politics need not be

seen as confined to the single arena of the state. In fact, his defi nition of
politics is also very broad: “ [it] comprises any kind of independent leader-
ship in action ” (Weber, 1948a : 77). Despite these defi nitions, however,
Weber immediately narrowed the field of his analysis to the power and

politics of the nation - state. He saw the state as the most powerful institu-
tion in modern society since it has gained the legitimate monopoly of force
over a given territory, and, therefore, took politics to involve “ striving to

share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either
among states or among groups within a state ” (Weber, 1948a : 78). As
David Held points out, Weber ’ s emphasis on territoriality is crucial; the
modern state is a nation - state in competitive relation to other nation -
states, rather than with armed segments of its own population (Held,
1987 : 150). Weberian sociology, therefore, explicitly shares the propen-
sity of sociology in general, and included Marxism in the ways we have
discussed, for taking total societies organized around nation - states as the
object of its analysis.