Max Weber: Social Action and types, Power and Authority, Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, Bureaucracy

Every government order you will ever cite in an exam — a notification, a circular, an administrative rule — is issued through exactly the impersonal, rule-bound machinery Max Weber called bureaucracy, and it is obeyed, when it is obeyed, because of the kind of authority Weber said modern states rely on. He is the classical thinker whose vocabulary you will use, often without noticing it, throughout your career.

In two minutes

Max Weber studied society through the meaning individuals attach to their own action, distinguished power from legitimate authority and identified its three ideal types, argued that Protestant religious values helped produce the disciplined ethic modern capitalism required, and described bureaucracy as the characteristic rational-legal organisational form of the modern state.

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